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Mondragon as the new city-state

elysian.press

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Re: Mondragon as the new city-state

#211

Post by max_hoffmann »

chongli wrote: post #202
lishzen wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Where’s the cooperative in your example? Either you are a freelance author who has a contract with a publishing cooperative. In this case you have a contract with that cooperative and during the negotation process both sides decide together what happens in case of death before publication. Or you are an author inside a publishing cooperative, so you own part of that cooperative and decide together with the other authors, publishers etc. what will happen, if somebody dies before the publication of their book. In both cases the author is part of the decision of what should happen in case of an early death.

Re: Mondragon as the new city-state

#212

Post by max_hoffmann »

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 don't think all the value created by workers is realized as profit immediately.

And as the worker creating that future profit you are very well aware of that, plus everyone else working on the design and manufacturing is in the same situation as yourself. The good news is: all of you are also owners of the company. So together you can decide how an exit package should look like for people deciding to leave before the design reaches the market and generates profit.

The same situation in a non-cooperative is a lot worse, because you have no stake in the company. The owner might be willing to negotiate an exit package before you even start working there, but they also might not. Plus before working at the company, you have no idea what the profit margins look like and what you might be working on. It’s the worst time for you to agree on an exit pacakge. Also during employment you are in a worse position, because the owner(s) can just let you go, if you are the only one asking for your fair share of future profits. You don’t have a say in the company. Most often they see your current salary as your share of the profit, no matter how much profit your design might create in the future.

Re: Mondragon as the new city-state

#213

Post by max_hoffmann »

defrost wrote: post #209
max_hoffmann wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

That doesn’t change the fact that every month there are people putting money into that fund and people getting money out of that fund. The money you put in, is not the same money you get out of it. It’s still money that people working at that time, put into that fund. Nobody has their own personal savings account inside that fund. You only have a legal claim to a share of that fund once you retire, but that’s not the money from your paychecks and it’s not saved somewhere for you. A pension fund is not a collection of private pensions and it’s better that way. Because with inflation, your pension can increase, even though you didn’t "put in" that amount of money when you were still working. The government is able to increase pensions by shifting money from other parts of its balance sheet or by increasing debts or taxes to meet the pension demand. I’m sorry for Singapore if their state system works more like a private pension, because you don’t know how long you’ll live past retirement age, so you either take too much or too little out of that fund once you have retired and there is no adjustment for inflation. Yes, there are bad private pension systems. That doesn’t change the fact that you benefit more working in a worker-owned compay than in a solely-owned company.

Re: Mondragon as the new city-state

#214

Post by Nasrudith »

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…

Surplus-value as a notion is frankly completely barking mad, and bred from a mix of multiple different fallacies mixed together including the labor theory of value.

In what universe does water by the river cost the same as water in the middle of the Saharra desert? A plant worth the same whether it is local or highly exotic? Where buying lumber at $300 a cord to burn fair, but buying it for the same $300 a cord but operating a warehouse selling it for as so much as $301 a cord retroactively somehow robbing the lumberjack? The madhouse world of surplus-labor-value! Boy, if Lewis Carroll had a field day with imaginary numbers then he missed truly golden opportunities of exploring an utterly mental system which demands fixed globally perfect valuations to avoid exploitation!

Re: Mondragon as the new city-state

#215

Post by qrush »

disqard wrote: post #201
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!

I still need to finish reading it, but this was published last year on the topic: https://www.versobooks.com/products/2839-own-this

Re: Mondragon as the new city-state

#216

Post by ladyanita22 »

nextos wrote: post #37
ladyanita22 wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm from Spain, so I'm quite sure of what I'm talking about. Spain might be a highly developed country, but its gdp per capita is not too high compared to the likes of Germany, UK, France, Denmark, US, et al. Basque country is, again, rich because it has an special tax treatment and could be considered a tax heaven to some extent.

The Basque Country has a GDP (PPP) of 108 [1]. Higher than France (101), as an average, or Italy (97). I'd say its a well developed region comparable to Northern Italy. Both were badly hit by the Euro. Had they kept their own currencies, they'd be closer to Sweden or Southern Germany. [1] https://www.eustat.eus/elementos/tbl0012365_i.html

Oh, I agree on that. I'm sure had we kept our currency, we would have suffered much less.

Re: Mondragon as the new city-state

#217

Post by trhway »

immibis wrote: post #210
trhway wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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"?

Of course it is the logic of collective. In capitalism you decide how you'd want to spend your resources, on a farm or on a rocket. In collective it is collective who decides.

Re: Mondragon as the new city-state

#218

Post by thinkingtoilet »

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…

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Re: Mondragon as the new city-state

#219

Post by immibis »

trhway wrote: post #217
immibis wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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"?

Of course it is the logic of collective. In capitalism you decide how you'd want to spend your resources, on a farm or on a rocket. In collective it is collective who decides.

Capitalist farms - why are they farms and not rocket makers? Is capitalism holding them back?

Re: Mondragon as the new city-state

#220

Post by bboygravity »

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.

"some initial mistakes" is quite something to describe 9+ million people dying from hunger in Ukraine during the great famine.
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