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Mondragon as the new city-state

elysian.press

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Re: Mondragon as the new city-state

#161

Post by harwoodjp »

K0balt wrote: post #151
harwoodjp wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

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…

Your view is called Social Darwinism and it’s really dangerous/dystopian. Also collapses under scrutiny.

Re: Mondragon as the new city-state

#162

Post by waldothedog »

orthecreedence wrote: post #55
cies wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's inherent to the way a coop works that it's not possible to follow the same path. There is no 7% equity to be given, only the repayment of a loan. The coop model does not promote taking risk and hence have many fail, yet a few grow very quick. Another problem is law. At this point it favors the common ownership forms of business. Starting a coop is hence much harder than it should be. This is what i think where t…

A possible model is to divide your shares into ownership/control class shares (reserved only for workers) and profit shares which can be bought/sold by third parties. This gives workers ultimate control over the venture while allowing third-party investment. I don't know if this has been implemented anywhere, but it's a possibility. It's not going to fuel explosive growth like VC funds do, but TBH I'm finding as I ge…

This is possible. I work at a worker owned cooperative with roughly this model.

Re: Mondragon as the new city-state

#163

Post by Aloisius »

greenie_beans wrote: post #122
jujube3 wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He's a Marxist and believes in Marx's labor theory of value. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Labor_theory_of_value As wikipedia says, "modern mainstream economics rejects the LTV" (for very good reasons). It leads to some pretty obvious absurdities if you take it seriously. For example, 10,000 people digging holes should be more "valuable" than one guy designing a microchip, because hey! The holes take more labor.

This is a common misinterpretation of the labor theory of value. I understand it like this: I am a capitalist and my money goes to pay labor to create a thing that I sell in a market. The workers create thing in the production process. I have captured a portion of the labor's true value based on the market, bringing me profit - what Marx called "surplus value." I turn around and reinvest that profit into another busi…

That seems awfully.. tautological.

Re: Mondragon as the new city-state

#164

Post by fragmede »

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…

Only the poors need to. If you chose the right parents, you got a trust fund when you turned 18, and don't need to labor to afford life's necessities. There's just this spigot that gives you $5,000 a month, and you don't have to labor, ever. If rich kids get to live like that, why can't more people?

If we oversimplify a human's needs into clothing, food, and a dwelling, and ignore the concept of money, the industrial revolution has made it so that humanity is able to produce enough of those for everybody. It then becomes a distribution and coordination problem rather than a problem of there not being enough for everybody. Of course, if we abolished money there would be other problems, so it's still delusional, but if 100 people can make enough food and shelter and clothing for 1000 people using machines, why do the other 900 need to sit in an an office making spreadsheets five days a week?

It's not that simple, of course (because those machines have to come from somewhere), and homesteading is a thing, but it's food for thought.

Re: Mondragon as the new city-state

#165

Post by gradschoolfail »

api wrote: post #71
conaclos wrote: post #67

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?

A comment below suggests that they have a hard time recruiting engineers, but I believe also experts and talent in general..

There’s then also something deeper about making the trade-off between growth(rate) and stability..

OTOH photographer coops are quite common, here is a famous one https://en.wikipedia.com/wiki/Magnum_Photos

Re: Mondragon as the new city-state

#166

Post by calvinmorrison »

tecleandor wrote: post #112
calvinmorrison wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Probably more influenced by the Falange driving against classic capital and communist analogs. This was setup under Franco's Spain.

But not BY Franco. Note in the article how the government removes social security support from the coops and they have to set up healthcare themselves. Arizmendiarrieta wasn't a Franco follower at all. He fought with the Republicans and went to jail during the war. After that stopped writing in Basque, as that wasn't seen with good eyes in Franco times.

Frankly, people fight on all sides during wars. 20 years later, life goes on. Franco's government was in favor of co-ops and they flourished under his government.

Work syndicates, cooperatives are absolutely in line with the Falange. Straight out of the 26 points

"We seek redistributing arable land in such a way as to revive family farms and give energetic encouragement to the syndicalization of farm laborers"

Re: Mondragon as the new city-state

#167

Post by fragmede »

WalterBright wrote: post #144
jmyeet wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> When I work for someone else, I am offloading some of the risk to that person/owner. Workers generally risk their lives or simply injury. Owners "risk" capital. I put that in quotes because our government is typically set up to rescue failing businesses and by that I mean bailing out the owners. If the business fails, the owner simply has less money or they have to become a worker. So who is really taking a risk he…

Companies go bankrupt all the time. > Our economic system is predicated on withholding basic needs for profit. An economic system based on "to each according to his need" has been tried many times. It fails to deliver.

> An economic system based on "to each according to his need" has been tried many times.

Have there been any attempts since the rise of the smartphone and the Internet? I'm only aware of attempts that predate them and those two things have changed capitalistic societies dramatically, for better or worse.

Re: Mondragon as the new city-state

#168

Post by brendoelfrendo »

Dalewyn wrote: post #128
nataliste wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Put another way: Singers who aren't good enough to make it on their own form large idol groups (eg: AKB 48) to sell themselves, while those who are become stars on their own or form small bands with others of similar success. Or to put it another way: Ground meat is great, but the components thereof by themselves are generally regarded as waste.

This whole train of metaphors is just bizarre and wrong. Singers who aren't good enough to make it on their own are never heard of or discussed. Ground meat made from poor quality meat is poor quality ground meat, and people do, in fact, grind the good stuff to make good stuff.

And I'm sure that plenty of people who could start a business on their own could start a business with the help and support of like-minded partners, and might even be better off for it. I'm not sure where we get the idea that founders must be lone-wolf savants.

Re: Mondragon as the new city-state

#169

Post by positr0n »

sgu999 wrote: post #27
RHSeeger wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> the founder loses their investment So does the bank, and the state that (more often than not) subsidised said investment through diverse vehicles. If the bank goes belly up, we've seen what happens, we collectively contribute to save them... because we're collectively sharing all the risk of investment in our financialized economies. I agree that some people don't want risk and others do, but as soon as you start s…

We don't collectively contribute to save shareholders. When a bank goes under the depositors are made whole through government insurance programs. Shareholders get nothing.

In 2008 I believe bailouts did go to companies to keep them afloat (and thus helped shareholders). However, TARP returned a small profit for the government, so it didn't end up being a gift of free money overall imo. (reasonable people can say that the bailouts were excessive and introduced moral hazard for sure).

Re: Mondragon as the new city-state

#170

Post by fragmede »

cylinder714 wrote: post #133
Aloisius wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There is no value without labor. Yet wine is higher valued than grape juice. Value can clearly exist without labor.

Winemaking requires far more resources, labor, skill and time than simple grape juice production.

Winemaking uses far more, but does it really have to? Does the $10,000 bottle of wine really that much more labor in it to justify that price? or are value and labor only loosely related? If I get lucky and find some diamonds on the ground, have I labored a lot for the value of those diamonds on my patch of dirt compared to your patch of dirt. There's no value with absolutely zero labor, sure, but there's clearly a difference between a carpenter making 100 chairs, and a programmer making 100 copies of a program they wrote.
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