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

261–270 of 372 posts

Re: Mondragon as the new city-state

#261

Post by WalterBright »

harwoodjp wrote: post #235
WalterBright wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

> 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 governanc…

> nothing like socialism

That happens every time. Socialism gets implemented with high hopes, falls flat on its face, and gets declared to be not really socialism at all.

How many times does it need to fail before one realizes it is never going to work?

Re: Mondragon as the new city-state

#262

Post by WalterBright »

max_hoffmann wrote: post #221
WalterBright wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That’s why cooperatism is superior to socialism and capitalism. It’s a free market of worker-owned companies, creating things by running their businesses together.

It's not a free market if you do not allow capitalism to exist.

Note that capitalism does not exclude worker-owned companies at all. You're free to start one.

Re: Mondragon as the new city-state

#263

Post by chongli »

kaibee wrote: post #239
chongli wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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".

Yes, this falls under the same umbrella of theories that Nozick's rectification [1] falls under, where the same critiques and remedies apply.

A land value tax achieves the same goals while leaving in place all the nice free-market stuff you're talking about.

Now you're speaking my language. I'm fully on board with land value tax, as it purports to achieve many other goals that I value, such as fixing up a lot of dysfunctional city planning and development.

[1] https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/nozick-political/#RecHisI...

Re: Mondragon as the new city-state

#264

Post by Apocryphon »

WalterBright wrote: post #191
kylestlb wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"communist" countries are simply countries that are still operating within Global Capitalism that happen to be run by parties that are made up of communists. They would also freely admit that. There are no communist countries because communism isn't here yet.

I know. Every failure of communism is because it wasn't really communist! I wonder where the tipping point of "true" communism is? Because the closer one gets to communism, the worse the results. Free markets, on the other hand, work even if they aren't perfect. The more free they are, the better they work.

On the other hand, countries with more regulated markets such as European nations, the U.K. and Commonwealth nations, and Japan and some of the East Asian Tigers might have less pollution than the United States. You get Americans importing EU baby formula because they are more restrictive about what chemical additives can go into them.

Couldn't it just be argued that free market extremism is as much folly as a pro-central planning position?

Re: Mondragon as the new city-state

#265

Post by harwoodjp »

WalterBright wrote: post #261
harwoodjp wrote: post #235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 governanc…

> nothing like socialism That happens every time. Socialism gets implemented with high hopes, falls flat on its face, and gets declared to be not really socialism at all. How many times does it need to fail before one realizes it is never going to work?

If you read the literature around the Bolshevik revolution, Lenin's coup was highly criticized as un-socialist: Luxemburg, Goldman, etc.

Simple litmus test for socialism: do workers manage production completely, through direct democratic processes?

Re: Mondragon as the new city-state

#266

Post by Apocryphon »

WalterBright wrote: post #192
kylestlb wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Marx wrote a gigantic book called Capital and it provides a thorough analysis of investment and risk. He wrote a great deal of words describing how investment relates to surplus value (hint: investment is simply a capitalist's way of generating surplus value - profit, which is then used to generate more surplus value, which is... you understand the systemic contradiction here, I hope). You should probably read it if…

I enjoyed reading Toliken's fantasy LODR very much, but my attempts at reading Marx's fantasies felt like hammering a nail into my skull. The attempts at implementing Marxism all ended in misery and famine. What more would anyone need to know about it? BTW, a capitalist investing money also entails risk. How it works is the more risk, the more potential reward. Does Marx account for risk? I ask that because the Marxi…

I haven’t read Marx, nor do I particularly care to, but this seems like an endorsement for intellectual incuriosity.

Re: Mondragon as the new city-state

#267

Post by calf »

nickpinkston wrote: post #236

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…

Based on what I've heard I'd love to visit there and even have a chance to intern there. I'd like to see for myself firsthand what life would be like. Would it be boring? Would it be bureaucratic or unmeritocratic? Would that bother me personally? I don't speak Spanish, unfortunately.

Obviously this article gives a rosy picture. However, the renewed interest in alternatives is precisely due to the new forms of arbitrary oppression that 21st century capitalism inflicts on many people, so maybe that would be one pathway for Mondragon and other meta-coops to flourish. Who knows.

Moreover, it's not like actually-existing capitalism doesn't tend to produce its own forms of inequality. Maybe a sociologist or economist could show that the "patronage networks" in something like Mondragon are an effect of their structure but the overall negative outcomes are lessened/mitigated compared to the negative social outcomes of Western capitalism. A proper comparison would be an open research question.

That's too bad about Fagor, 10 years ago I ordered a pressure cooker from them but had it returned immediately due to an improper lid fit. That would've been around the time of its decline and eventual closing off. I ended up buying a 2x more expensive pot from a Swiss company, it's lasted me 10 years so far.

Re: Mondragon as the new city-state

#268

Post by chongli »

max_hoffmann wrote: post #211
chongli wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 auth…

The example way above was NVIDIA. Suppose the person who passed away was one of the founding researchers at the NVIDIA worker coop. They developed most of the key technologies that go into a graphics card, but they died during the later stages of production ramp up, before the first GPUs are able to hit the market.

The issue is that the deceased researcher's contribution to the project may be so central and foundational that they may be entitled to a large plurality (or even majority) stake, but forcing the other worker-owners to buy out that stake to pay the estate would bankrupt the coop at this critical pre-production stage. Since only active workers are allowed to maintain ownership, allowing the estate to retain those shares and later receive dividends on future profits is off the table. This issue seems to tie everyone's hands and sound the death knell for the coop.

The novelist case was meant to show an extreme non-coop situation. I don't see any compelling reason for writers of books to join coops, since the writing of the book is the only hard part these days (and countless ways to self-publish exist).

Re: Mondragon as the new city-state

#269

Post by Apocryphon »

WalterBright wrote: post #259
KingMob wrote: post #248

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The problem with a system based on taking is that one runs out of things to take. Pretty damning critique of capitalists there, comrade.

What was America like before capitalists? and after? Where did all that wealth come from, comrade?

Did you know there used to be people who lived on that land

Re: Mondragon as the new city-state

#270

Post by soulofmischief »

Viliam1234 wrote: post #229
immibis wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe because they are farms and not rocket makers

That's not an excuse. In socialist Czechoslovakia, a coop farm produced computers. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JZD_Slu%C5%A1ovice#TNS_Compute...

It looks like this system was created out of necessity; there was no viable product for what they needed. Necessity is the mother of innovation after all, and we find this sorts of innovation frequently in non-collectivized entrepreneurships as well. Still, very cool!
Post reply on HN