Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Mondragon as the new city-state

elysian.press

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

201–210 of 372 posts

Re: Mondragon as the new city-state

#201

Post by disqard »

qrush wrote: post #92

Just wanted to flag that there are areas in the US that co-operative enterprises do flourish and have knock-on effects. This is biased by my food co-operative experience but just to show that there is an alternative to unfettered capitalism where businesses help each other thrive. - The Minneapolis/St. Paul region has so many food co-ops that there's a co-operative warehouse dedicated to serving them (and other busin…

Are there any resources for learning about tech co-operatives in the USA?

Do you happen to know any (specifically in tech), that you would recommend?

Thanks!

Re: Mondragon as the new city-state

#202

Post by chongli »

lishzen wrote: post #150
abeppu wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

What if they pass away? I assume their shares are sold immediately and the money paid out to their estate.

Now suppose that all the work they did was in the R&D phase (and fundamental to the project) but the final product had not been released at the time of death of the contributor — so the profits had not been realized — thus the payout on those shares would be a small fraction of their true valuation.

Imagine if a novelist died just after submitting their final draft to their editor but prior to the book’s publication. Forcing the estate to sell off the book before it had a chance to hit the shelves — and become a bestseller — would be an outrage, yet the rigid nature of worker co-ops (cessation of work forces the sale of shares) guarantees this.

Re: Mondragon as the new city-state

#203

Post by throwaway48540 »

kragen wrote: post #196
thinkingtoilet wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you misunderstood. I said if someone has heard the term "anarcho-syndicalist", there is a very high chance it's from the Holy Grial. Not 99% of people in the world are familiar with the term.

you're still overestimating how much you know about the world, by a lot. in the spanish-speaking world, for example, anarcho-syndicalism is much better known than monty python (though, not among programmers, because they speak english and write python). and i'm guessing that monty python isn't that widely known among arabic speakers, russian speakers, and chinese speakers, while anarcho-syndicalism is a significant h…

Monty Python is well known in Eastern Europe, much more than anarcho syndicalism.

Re: Mondragon as the new city-state

#204

Post by chongli »

harwoodjp wrote: post #157
ertian wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The claim that work is inherently coercive is crazy to me. In order to live, we need food, clothing, shelter, comforts. Those take labor to produce. We've abstracted labor using money, allowing for specialization, so you can perform some specialized labor to provide for all your needs. The needs aren't forced upon you . They're inherent. Labor is required to meet the needs you must meet in order to live (and live in…

Automation makes jobs unnecessary. We should build social infrastructure that allows people to pursue their passions with basic necessities guaranteed. This has been possible for awhile now.

Nonsense. You can’t feed people with machines. You need raw materials and you need land to produce those materials from. That productive land is already owned by a bunch of people who currently use it to grow food and sell at market for profit.

Are you proposing we seize their land? That’s what the Soviets did. Millions died. With the weaponry we have today it could be hundreds of millions or billions. All for what? So people don’t have to work?

Now suppose we do collectivize all the farms, this time miraculously without killing everyone, and we successfully set up the automation to feed everyone (despite the fact that a lot of crops still need to be picked by hand due to a lack of robot technology). We still don’t eliminate the need for work. There’s tons of other stuff to be done. Building houses, computers, trains, planes, automobiles, and new factory robots. There’s still tons of research going into all this stuff, maintenance and repair. People still need to do all this work. Who is going to pay them? Who is going to own what they produce?

If I build a robot in my garage to automate harvesting the peppers I grow in my backyard, do I own it?

Re: Mondragon as the new city-state

#205

Post by WalterBright »

fragmede wrote: post #199
WalterBright wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think they've changed the way free markets work. If anything, it makes them more productive because of the efficiency of having better information.

Summarizing the past twenty-thirty years as "slightly more productive markets due to efficiency thanks to better information" might be oversimplifying things a bit, don't you think?

I can be much more productive these days because I have the information resources on the internet. In the early days, for example, I'd mail order books and wait weeks for them to arrive, and hope they had what I needed in them.

I also collaborate with people all over the world. That simply wasn't possible in the 1980s. I'd mail floppy disks internationally, and would use the fax machine for communication (at a dollar a page!).

Re: Mondragon as the new city-state

#206

Post by kragen »

throwaway48540 wrote: post #203
kragen wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

you're still overestimating how much you know about the world, by a lot. in the spanish-speaking world, for example, anarcho-syndicalism is much better known than monty python (though, not among programmers, because they speak english and write python). and i'm guessing that monty python isn't that widely known among arabic speakers, russian speakers, and chinese speakers, while anarcho-syndicalism is a significant h…

Monty Python is well known in Eastern Europe, much more than anarcho syndicalism.

i appreciate the additional information! are they funny in romanian?

Re: Mondragon as the new city-state

#207

Post by cies »

Gaessaki wrote: post #123
jszymborski wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Especially in Canada, where capital is tight and productivity is low, I think incentivizing co-ops is a great idea. The Canadian gov't offers some grants for co-ops, but they are a pittance. Making debt cheaper for co-ops relative to corps (maybe via additional tax breaks on interest?) is, I think super important.

Quebec probably has the single best cooperative financing ecosystem in the world (1B+$). There’s a need for more risk-driven investment instruments in the sector however to seed early stage ventures. Most of the funds end up getting reinvested in existing cooperatives who can already access traditional funding.

What do you mean by trad funding? Loans? Bonds? Equity investments?

Re: Mondragon as the new city-state

#208

Post by max_hoffmann »

fragmede wrote: post #155
max_hoffmann wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Profits belong to the people who create them, not to people who used to work at the same company in the past. Expecting future employees of a company to work for ex-employees in the future is unfair. Having worked for a company, doesn’t entitle anyone to remain on the paycheck until death, despite not working there anymore.

> Having worked for a company, doesn’t entitle anyone to remain on the paycheck until death, despite not working there anymore This arrangement is called a pension, and is still quite popular in areas of the world with strong workers rights.

Living in a country with strong workers rights, this is not how pensions work. The pensions people receive every month are literally paid by the taxes which are collected from everybody and every company during that month. Pensions are not saved money from companies you worked for, but money coming from the economy at the time of your retirement. It’s a common misconception that the state has a big pile of pension money sitting somewhere that you then get your pension from. That’s just not how it works in reality. Another difference from pensions to receiving money from a company just by owning parts of it, is also that you don’t continue to be on a company’s paycheck when you quit. You need to reach a certain age to receive money and you get that money from the state, not the companies you worked for. That’s how pensions work.

Re: Mondragon as the new city-state

#209

Post by defrost »

max_hoffmann wrote: post #208
fragmede wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Having worked for a company, doesn’t entitle anyone to remain on the paycheck until death, despite not working there anymore This arrangement is called a pension, and is still quite popular in areas of the world with strong workers rights.

Living in a country with strong workers rights, this is not how pensions work. The pensions people receive every month are literally paid by the taxes which are collected from everybody and every company during that month. Pensions are not saved money from companies you worked for, but money coming from the economy at the time of your retirement. It’s a common misconception that the state has a big pile of pension mo…

> The pensions people receive every month are literally paid by the taxes which are collected from everybody and every company during that month.

That might be how your pension works.

Other pension schemes; eg Singapores and some other former and current commonwealth countries pay pension from the returns from 60 odd years of compulsary investment and additional supplementary investment.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Central_Provident_Fund

https://www.expatica.com/sg/finance/retirement/singapore-pen...

"Returns from an investment fund" are not the same as "taxes collected monthly", money, being fungible, can make it seem that way.

Re: Mondragon as the new city-state

#210

Post by immibis »

trhway wrote: post #129
immibis wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe because they are farms and not rocket makers

Why they are farms and not rocket makers? Because collective.

By this logic capitalism is the thing holding back capitalist farms from being rocket makers too? Or do you only apply it when you get to use the word "collective"?
Post reply on HN