221–230 of 372 posts
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Socialism is seizing the workplace from the capitalist.
The problem with a system based on taking is that one runs out of things to take. Better to have a system based on creating things.
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>It seems a bit premature to speak so generally about collectivism 2B people spent better part of 20th century doing the experiments, killing tens of millions of those who didn’t completely shared the ideas of the collective, and you think it is premature? General theory is in the Das Kapital. So far the things have worked as described. People by mistake ascribe happiness to the outcomes calculated there while there…
Wasn't the USSR quite open about not being communist and at best working towards "socialism" as a pathway towards communism? Surely the USSR is an example of the pigs pulling a bait and switch rather than communism. The failure of the USSR to achieve communism is a side show to all the variations on worker | producer collectives that didn't fall to Stalinism.
Its interesting that Rojava wasn't mentioned here. After driving out Islamic State, they founded their own country in north east Syria, not widely internationally recognised yet but functioning much better than the rest of Syria. They are still a developing country and by no means wealthy, but the average income in this area is double what it is in the rest of the country. Their economy is built almost entirely on co…
>If the model is a good one, detractors say it can’t be replicated outside of the Basque Country, and there’s some truth to that. The author doesn't speculate why, but I'd guess it's partly due to Basque ethnic solidarity. Mondragon sounds a lot like the kind of late 1800s / early 1900s syndicalism that later evolved into Italian fascism and German National Socialism. Of course, another big "collectivist capitalism"…
Sure, if you dishonestly use their slogans rather than policy decisions as your barometer. What actually happened is that fascists co-opted the language of the left and deployed it in service of entirely different ends.
Its interesting that Rojava wasn't mentioned here. After driving out Islamic State, they founded their own country in north east Syria, not widely internationally recognised yet but functioning much better than the rest of Syria. They are still a developing country and by no means wealthy, but the average income in this area is double what it is in the rest of the country. Their economy is built almost entirely on co…
Might be because since 2019 and the withdrawal of the US military presence in NE Syria, the relative prosperity of Rojava has plummeted. This draws into question exactly how 'autonomous' said autonomous zone was.
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Why aren’t there more of these if they work well?
The paradox of worker-coops is that workers capable of successfully running businesses together are also capable of running businesses independently, so there's no need to form a co-op. It's those incapable of running a business individually or collectively that then form co-ops. Mondragon is the exception, not the rule.
And the more difficult project you have, the more extreme this gets. If it is something that most people could do, it is easy for the cooperative people to find each other. It if it something that only one person in a thousand can do, the one-in-a-thousand cooperative person will have a huge problem finding the rest of the team.
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I can’t speak to op’s emotional well being, but he is spot on with his reasoning. In the rarified air that most of us here inhabit, it’s easy to forget that for every college professor there is someone for whom tying their shoes is a significant cognitive challenge. For every really smart person, there is someone who lacks the cognition to participate meaningfully in society. For every brilliant individual, there is…
Some businesses only require simple work, so you could argue that they have one smart boss and many stupid employees. But there are many businesses that require highly qualified professionals. And those professionals have mostly been taught that their proper place in life is working for someone else. This is practically what school trains you to do for decades -- there is the teacher who gives commands, and the students who obey. And then you transition to a job where it is the boss who gives commands, and the employees who obey. I wonder whether a different kind of education would result in a different kind of a society.
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> Your view is called Social Darwinism The only thing either response to your original reply have done is provide uncontroversial and non-conspiratorial reasons why Mondragons are extremely rare. Calling that Social Darwinism is like calling you a Stalinist, a slander based entirely on a superficial similarity of your rhetoric.
You guys are both discussing intelligence hierarchies (wtf?) without regard to actual history of popular labor movements being violently squashed.
If you're so smart, why are you beaten up by my thugs?
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You obviously never been to a collective farm. Despite government support to the extent much larger than that for SpaceX collective farms have nothing to show for it.
Maybe because they are farms and not rocket makers
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JZD_Slu%C5%A1ovice#TNS_Compute...
I love how this article about a co-op that values workers opens with a clearly AI-generated image that is indirectly derived from the effort of many unpaid artists.
If you make a picture and someone steals it, okay that's not fair. If you make a picture and someone makes a copy, also not fair. But if you and million others make pictures, and someone else looks at them and learns how to make their own pictures... that's basically how people were doing it since ever. Except now this process can also be automated.
Every artist who never studied the art of others, and invented their own style from scratch, has a right to complain, of course.