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Mondragon as the new city-state

elysian.press

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Re: Mondragon as the new city-state

#141

Post by WalterBright »

greenie_beans wrote: post #110
RHSeeger wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There is no value without labor. While this is generally true, it's also not the entire equation. For example, there's no gain without risk. - When I work for someone else, I am offloading some of the risk to that person/owner. When someone starts a company and hires other people... if the company goes belly up, the founder loses their investment; the workers find another job. - When I rent from someone else, I am…

there is a risk for the worker and renter, too. and opportunity costs. my shelter not being destroyed is extremely more important to me and my life than my landlord who has insurance for such things, especially in a place with a housing vacancy less than 1% (aka very very hard to find housing). if i leave, they will have no problem finding a tenant to take my place. any repairs and maintenance are essentially paid fo…

Places with 1% vacancy rates only exist when the government prevents more housing from being built, or makes it unprofitable to be a landlord.

Re: Mondragon as the new city-state

#142

Post by harwoodjp »

WalterBright wrote: post #125
harwoodjp wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why don't workers unite to democratically manage production? The police, propaganda, wage slavery.

There have been over 20,000 communes set up in the US. They are not illegal. Pick one and join it. Or set your own up.

Socialism is seizing the workplace from the capitalist.

Re: Mondragon as the new city-state

#143

Post by harwoodjp »

nyokodo wrote: post #114
harwoodjp wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why don't workers unite to democratically manage production? The police, propaganda, wage slavery.

> Why don't workers unite to democratically manage production? Because the majority of workers are doing the minimum amount of work to get by, because ~50% of workers are below average intelligence, because those with the entrepreneurial skill and/or business management competence necessary to make this happen benefit more from the current system and have less motivation to mess with it.

[flagged]

Re: Mondragon as the new city-state

#144

Post by WalterBright »

jmyeet wrote: post #47
RHSeeger wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There is no value without labor. While this is generally true, it's also not the entire equation. For example, there's no gain without risk. - When I work for someone else, I am offloading some of the risk to that person/owner. When someone starts a company and hires other people... if the company goes belly up, the founder loses their investment; the workers find another job. - When I rent from someone else, I am…

> When I work for someone else, I am offloading some of the risk to that person/owner. Workers generally risk their lives or simply injury. Owners "risk" capital. I put that in quotes because our government is typically set up to rescue failing businesses and by that I mean bailing out the owners. If the business fails, the owner simply has less money or they have to become a worker. So who is really taking a risk he…

Companies go bankrupt all the time.

> Our economic system is predicated on withholding basic needs for profit.

An economic system based on "to each according to his need" has been tried many times. It fails to deliver.

Re: Mondragon as the new city-state

#145

Post by SamWhited »

ericd wrote: post #137
jonnybgood wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the OP: “Lorenzo estimates that the president of Mondragon is the highest-paid position (level 6) with a salary of around €200,000. Managers and directors earn between €80,000 and €120,000.”

So the president makes less than a middle manager in a Fortune 500 company. I hope there are some other benefits…

The article talks about this extensively; both the benefits, and the difficulty hiring American workers because of our (I'm assuming "our", but I suppose I don't know, there are plenty of other countries with similar cultural norms) more individual, selfish, culture.

Re: Mondragon as the new city-state

#146

Post by WalterBright »

toyg wrote: post #69
bboygravity wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What are you suggesting as a better system? To withold basic needs for profit, you need to be able to provide basic needs in the first place. All of the alternatives I know of can't even reach that point.

After some initial mistakes, the Soviet system did provide basic needs. It was inefficient, badly led, conservative, repressive, ultimately undemocratic, and often produced very mediocre output (crappy houses, etc), but it ensured that everyone had food, shelter, work, healthcare, and education. Neither full-collectivism nor full-capitalism are the final answer.

The Soviet system only was able to provide basic needs when it decided to overlook the black market. It also allowed farmers to farm owned plots of land and sell their produce as they saw fit. This was the only way to stop the mass starvation.

Re: Mondragon as the new city-state

#147

Post by WalterBright »

shafoshaf wrote: post #13
jmyeet wrote: post #4

There is no value without labor. This was recognized by everyone from Karl Marx to Abraham Lincoln to Adam Smith. Smith even conceded that profit was impossible if workers retain their surplus value, which is exactly the point. I bring this up because that's what capitalism is: draining the surplus labor value from workers to the capital-owning class. In feudalism, the artistocracy and th emonarchy extracted that val…

I'm pretty sure your economic terms are not what the consensus of professionally trained economists would say. >>>Locally-owned businesses. That's socialism. There is definitely nothing in the definition of socialism that says everything is locally-owned. Moreover, that can be a way to end up with things like Redlining and other institutional racial issues. >>>There is no value without labor. The great thing Marx did…

> our current implementation of Capitalism is clearly wreaking havoc on our environment

Communist countries are the most polluted ones.

Re: Mondragon as the new city-state

#148

Post by Aloisius »

cylinder714 wrote: post #133
Aloisius wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There is no value without labor. Yet wine is higher valued than grape juice. Value can clearly exist without labor.

Winemaking requires far more resources, labor, skill and time than simple grape juice production.

Resources and time are, obviously, not labor.

Turning commodity grape juice into commodity wine requires no appreciable extra labor compared to the required labor to prevent fermentation.

The grape juice vs. wine is a rather classic counterexample, but it's hardly difficult to come up with any number of other examples of value absent labor.

Re: Mondragon as the new city-state

#149

Post by SamWhited »

m_ke wrote: post #29

It's a shame there's not a YC like incubator for tech worker coops, cut out the VCs and have milestone based funding in exchange for a percentage of future profits that would be reinvested in future projects.

Start.coop (https://www.start.coop/) comes to mind, but I know I've read about others as well. I don't recall what their exact model is, so it likely doesn't match perfectly with what you're describing.

Re: Mondragon as the new city-state

#150

Post by lishzen »

abeppu wrote: post #104
max_hoffmann wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cooperatives guarantee that only people working in the company benefit from the profit of their own work. If one can stop working and still take a share from the profits, everyone else would have to not just work for themselves and lose part of their profit to an increasing amount of people, who are not taking part in creating that profit. Cooperative guarantee that profit is owned by the people who create it.

I think you may be too committed to dogmatic stances to constructively discuss other possibilities. I think this is no better when it's from the collectivist side than when it's from the capitalist fundamentalists. > Cooperative guarantee that profit is owned by the people who create it. I don't think all the value created by workers is realized as profit immediately. Workers can create value which only shows up in c…

I understood from the article that workers remain working for the coop (possibly in different companies) until they retire, and then, the coop provides them with pensions; so they continue to receive value after retirement.
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