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Mondragon as the new city-state

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Re: Mondragon as the new city-state

#231

Post by aguaviva »

bboygravity wrote: post #220
toyg wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

More careful historians, such as Snyder, put the figure at around 3.5 million.

Doesn't detract from your overall point though, which is quite valid.

Re: Mondragon as the new city-state

#232

Post by [deleted] »

ertian wrote: post #152
harwoodjp wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's true that, in those groups, a shared ethnic identity enables economic cooperation. But the lack of solidarity you observe is the result of a regime of coercion. The official policy: leave your neighborhood, family, friends, and passions for 40+ hours a week to build a capitalist's business. You have to do it to survive. And the police are there to make sure revolts don't break out.

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…

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Re: Mondragon as the new city-state

#233

Post by __MatrixMan__ »

dbingham wrote: post #81
trhway wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They don’t allow genuine innovation in any shape or form, and that in particular leads to highjacking by bureaucrats and degradation. So they may work in short term (work for some at the price of oppressing the ones who don’t fit well into the collective) - I’m from USSR for example - yet the result is predetermined.

That is flatly false. Worker cooperatives are every bit as innovative as any other form of private corporation. These are owned by workers not a centralized government. There are quite a few of them and you may well have purchased their products with it even realizing it. Two additional examples you may have encountered are Equal Exchange and King Arthur Flour. There aren't more of them because they have a hell of a…

You've just changed my brand of flour, thanks.

Re: Mondragon as the new city-state

#234

Post by harwoodjp »

chongli wrote: post #204
harwoodjp wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?…

> Are you proposing we seize their land?

Not necessarily, but I think the workers should operate their farm democratically.

> That’s what the Soviets did

The USSR was state capitalist. Workers' councils (or soviets) stopped being considered very early on.

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

Yes, it's your personal property. Private property is something else.

Re: Mondragon as the new city-state

#235

Post by harwoodjp »

WalterBright wrote: post #194
harwoodjp wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well actually socialism has been historically concerned with maximizing human creativity. Fourier’s utopian vision was “libidinal” work that aligns passions with labor. Marcuse has a similar view in Eros and Civilization. Chomsky views creativity as axiomatic for humans, and syndicalism the appropriate system for harnessing it.

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> Socialists are always concerned with distributing production equally.

Not really. Socialism (the project of the labor movement) is concerned with workers being in control of their own work, not vessels for capitalist exploitation. Syndicalism is a form of socialism that emphasizes decentralization and federation, as opposed to command control. How resources are allocated under conditions of such federated governance is up for debate.

> "From each according to his ability, to each according to his need."

Socialism is older than Marxism and shouldn't be conflated with it.

> Where are all the creative products the Soviets made?

The USSR was a state capitalist/authoritarian regime, nothing like socialism.

Re: Mondragon as the new city-state

#236

Post by nickpinkston »

I've studied and visited Mondragon before, and hosted their students at my company. It's very cool, but I'm unsure how replicable the model really is.

My conclusion is that it emerged out of the unique environment of already high Basque solidarity, but even more so under Franco's oppression. After a few generations, they admit that the hardcore spirit is gone and made initiatives to try to restore it, but still some of the biggest co-ops have died or been sold off (ie Fagor).

My friends from there told me: "It's where your dumb cousin works", as it's very political with a lot of patronage kinds of networks that democratic elections at that scale tend to produce. They made a startup community there, but it seemed like most of the kids were trying to get out, not stay to reform the coop.

I think the Italian Emilia Romagna region cooperatives [1] may be a less centralized model that could be better, as it does away with the big organization that eventually rots, like any big old org.

[1] https://www.yesmagazine.org/economy/2016/07/05/the-italian-p...

Re: Mondragon as the new city-state

#237

Post by rglullis »

jszymborski wrote: post #105

If: 1 - Cooperatives excite you and 2 - You use social media you might want to look at the social.coop Mastodon instance (or cosocial.ca if you're Canadian). Not only has the community on both those sites been a breath of total fresh air for me, I am not worried about the server I'm on having decide between disappearing and selling ads, and I feel like I'm partaking in a social enterprise. Just recently social.coop h…

Beware of social washing to justify higher costs.

cosocial.ca charges CA$50 for its annual membership. Omg.lol charges $20/year for Mastodon and a bunch of services and for $29/year, I can offer Mastodon, Lemmy, Matrix and Funkwhale, with 250GB of storage.

Re: Mondragon as the new city-state

#238

Post by kaibee »

defrost wrote: post #101
trhway wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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.

I think we can also say that the former USSR has also failed to achieve capitalism despite having 30 years to do it. So maybe there's some other factors at play.

Re: Mondragon as the new city-state

#239

Post by kaibee »

chongli wrote: post #204
harwoodjp wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?…

> Are you proposing we seize their land?

And how did they come to own their land? You trace the claims back enough and it'll resolve to "some ancestor took it from someone else at the point of a spear". But we don't need to seize the land. A land value tax achieves the same goals while leaving in place all the nice free-market stuff you're talking about.

Re: Mondragon as the new city-state

#240

Post by kragen »

thinkingtoilet wrote: post #218
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…

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