241–250 of 372 posts
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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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Why aren’t there more of these if they work well?
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.
If anything the current situation stands to worsen that situation with smart young people who might contribute to a better future dying or fleeing.
The difference between Mondragon, the kibbutzim, and other successful examples of collective labor, and the Soviet system, is precisely that the former are not governments, and operate in a capitalist system of property rights and free markets (in a practical rather than spherical cow sense of that term). I'm all for more cooperatives, it's a good model. Operating in a system which doesn't compel that form of organiz…
This difference in profit is invested back into the company in terms of capital investment and lower prices allowing more capitalist exploitive corporations to out compete and ultimately buy or destroy coops.
Coops that exist in very small not very profitable niches may survive in the form of small businesses that make enough to survive but not to thrive its hard to see how this has any effect on the other 99.99% of the economy where most people are obligated to live.
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…
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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?
The anarchist culture of the 1800s and 1900s in Spain, especially the emergence of anarcho-syndicalist structures [0], is certainly one of the reasons for Mondagon's existence. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anarcho-syndicalism
Why aren’t there more of these if they work well?
Maybe nationalism can do that, but keep in mind that when this was combined with nationalism we got Nazism (Nazism took lots of inspiration from Austrian corporatism which was similarly influenced by Catholic social teaching here). I'm not sure it's either safe or advisable to do this aside from religion
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…
> 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…
Workers take risk not only of the financial kind (choosing to take a job at company A instead of B is a bet), as well as physical risk most times.
If we believe shareholder of a oil company is taking more risk than the worker in a platform, we value capital more than labour.
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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.
Pretty damning critique of capitalists there, comrade.
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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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This doesn't reflect the most well-known socialist axiom on the distribution of production...
> "From each according to his ability, to each according to his need."
...which you appear to be aware of. The entire point of idealizing "to each according to his need" is that different people have different needs.
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.
It seems like you're conflating sovereignty with economic dependence, which are two distinct concepts—being entirely economic independent seems highly geographically dependent. Few regions in the world are lucky enough to even have this option. For instance, you can be economically dependent on neighbors but still locally determine who runs the local courts. So it's not great evidence of how their society is run, particularly when other states—say, Afghanistan, where the current government has clearly exercised local sovereignty—have similarly been affected by the withdrawal of US troops and the seizing of assets.