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Is the alternative 100% top-down central-managed solution to ensure no externalization happens ever? In theory that's appealing (especial from the view from Cho

• tsimionescu 7y ago
  Chomsky is anti-centralization, he is an anarchist (anarcho-syndicalist). In general, his ideal end-goal world would include smaller states with more direct control by the populace, with worker-owned and worker-managed corporations, with free markets of goods and services between different corporations and different states, and of course freedom of movement. Strong environmental control would be almost implied if the people doing an economic activity were in charge of decisions and were also directly impacted by the effects of those decisions. Localizing and letting corporations be small would also put a natural cap on inequality, though democratically run states could impose additional safeguards where needed (minimum wages, estate taxes, non-discrimination clauses etc.)
  • zepto 7y ago
    Surely you would need a lot of rules and enforcement to prevent things simply aggregating?
    • golemotron 7y ago
      That's where it falls apart. Systems tend to aggregate to seek efficiencies of scale.
      • leto_ii 7y ago
        I tend to not agree with this line of thinking. This may be the case when you subject a company to financial market pressures by listing it on the stock exchange, but I don't think it's a natural imperative. Many companies do just fine without growing to enormous proportions, being acquired, acquiring others etc.
        • zepto 7y ago
          It has nothing to do with stock exchanges. There have been plenty of giant growth oriented corporations that are private. How do you account for that?
          • leto_ii 7y ago
            Well, there's nothing to say that private corporations can't behave in the same way. I'm just saying that once you list these pressures are almost guaranteed to appear. I also strongly suspect that they're less present, on average, in unlisted companies.
            • zepto 7y ago
              Sure - but how does that matter? It only takes a few percent to be this way to create the ultra-competitive aggregating behavior we see in practice.
        • TremendousJudge 7y ago
          Nations don't just aggregate like free market corporations. If there are many large bellicose empires in history, it's because taking things by force of arms is a successful strategy. In a world of many micro states, it only takes one to begin expanding aggressively for everything to fall apart
        • shadowgovt 7y ago
          In a world of low-friction exchange of information and goods, small firms are competing with every large firm that can touch their market. What you're describing (companies doing just fine without growing to enormous proportions) is the status quo until a Wal-Mart rolls into their market, in which case they tend to be consumed by the mega-firm that leverages economies of scale (and occasionally monopoly) to drive prices down. A free market, lacking counter-pressure to maximizing firm size, favors large firms, and large firms becoming larger is a positive feedback loop. Note that this is an idealized model and there's plenty of room for counter-pressure in reality (can the large firm actually pull demand away from the smaller firm, or does the smaller firm have a leg-up in e.g. customer relations that the larger firm can't compete with?).
  • cies 7y ago
    I thought the workers in Mondragon could vote to have the CEO removed. Hence mgmt being under worker's control, ultimately. I understand that workers also, at times, vote to externalize some costs, as their jobs may depend on it.
  • CountSessine 7y ago
    I do wonder sometimes how different Chomsky's career and his academic work would have been if he'd been required to take a course in game theory while he was an undergraduate.
    • danharaj 7y ago
      I guarantee you Chomsky knows more about game theory than you.
      • fdsfssgs 7y ago
        And on what is that guarantee founded? Edit: I appreciate the flag, but I'd much rather have an answer.
    • allworknoplay 7y ago
      what is your point?
      • shadowgovt 7y ago
        That Chomsky's ideal end-goal is unrealistic because it is inherently dynamically unstable. Small worker-owned cooperatives plus a free market is an ecosystem ripe for larger worker-owned cooperatives to create incentive structures that let them dominate the market, which lets them grow, which is a positive feedback loop in that incentive structure.
        • monadic2 7y ago
          Tbh I do not think Chomsky has written on his ideals the way others have, much of his positions are extrapolated from his critiques on other states (please correct me if I am wrong). However he has positively identified himself as an anarchy-syndicalist. There are multiple ways an anarchist society might respond to a corporation growing too large: convincing its workers to split or find work elsewhere to avoid economic collapse, seizing its assets and forcibly splitting or shuttering its operations, denying it use of supply chains, of debt if the market has currency, etc. a critical aspect of anarchist societies is lack of private property and capital. Trade unions can hold much of the power; I can’t speak to the concepts of anarchist states. In fact the idea of anarchist currency (anarchy-capitalism or market socialism, I guess?) is something I am unfamiliar with, in part because it obscures the cost in man time and effort it takes to produce a good or service—rather easy too, just consider subscription services where you pay a flat rate, or the labor it takes to get you chocolate or coffee vs how much it is valued in terms of your wages (presumably in a post-industrialization service economy if you’re on this forum). Similarly I do not know what an anarchist state is. Regardless, the idea is founded in large part on the concept of mutual aid. There is certainly plenty of research into how mutual aid tends towards or away from stability. A quick google search turns up this, for instance: https://halshs.archives-ouvertes.fr/halshs-00275386/document https://halshs.archives-ouvertes.fr/halshs-00275386/document
  • EGreg 7y ago
    I know Chomsky. I went to meet him in MIT several years ago, when I was looking for advisors to Qbix. (Also met Tim Berners-Lee and his team at what was then known as Solid - a similar project to Qbix). The guy responds to email at 2am btw, quite cool for an 85 year old. As I see it, open source technology IS the great decentralized of power. We just need people to build Good open source software. My personal passion (which I poured a lot of money into) was qbix.com and intercoin.org . That’s also why I reached out to Andrew Yang back in early 2018 when he announced running and met him in May 2018. We agreed my company would build https://yang2020.app https://yang2020.app to support his campaign, and he would help introduce us to mayors of cities that want UBI locally (he knew a few dozen, like Michael Tubbs of Stockton, although since then Michael has not been a fan of Yang’s approach for various reasons). I believe in UBI + Gift Economies / Collaboration as the best system, better than socialism or capitalism. But we have a while to get there. Yang is trying to boil the ocean by going for UBI on a national level. I believe the future is in decentralization, and I talk about it extensively. I think UBI can be done via cryptocurrency on a local level. We can also do voting this way. I’m writing a piece about this at the moment, very apropos of the recent fiascos. Printers, Email, Blogs, the Internet have replaced large corporate and state gatekeepers we used to have (newspapers, cable channels, telephone companies, printing presses etc) and costs went down to near zero. Technology decentralizes power. We can have towns and cities run decentralized: Solar power networks (resilient to EMPs and carrington events) Mesh networks (better than cellphone networks) Social networks (chat, events, appointments, everything that fb does but w local servers) I’m trying to build the software to run on these networks (https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=pZ1O_gmPneI https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=pZ1O_gmPneI) PS: sorry for all the links but honestly I am passionate about this stuff and need to illustrate it instead of talking. A video is worth a thousand words. To mitigate the shilling I will say that TimBL’s solid and MaidSAFE * IPFS and others are also working on decentralizing power
    • mindcrime 7y ago
      Technology decentralizes power. I would have agreed with that statement at one time. Now I'd qualify it to read "Technology can decentralize power." Unfortunately, it can also do the opposite. I'm at a point now where I'm torn on the question of whether or not technology inherently tends one way or the other. But in either case, I'm now convinced that human nature is much more a factor in the centralization / decentralization of power than technology.
  • einpoklum 7y ago
    > In general, his ideal end-goal world would include smaller states with more direct control by the populace That's certainly not Anarchism, in which there are no states and no commercial corporations. And of course - no markets. Now, as for what Chomsky supports personally - that's more difficult to say, since he's been known to support Democrats in US politics, to support a two-state arrangement in Palestine etc.
• dbingham 7y ago
  No, that's not the alternative. The alternative is a system that isn't profit driven, where all the companies are worker cooperatives. In that system, there are no stock holders demanding ever greater returns, those doing the work are always completely in control. They can choose to do "just enough" to live a good life. Or they can choose to focus on the more fulfilling aspects of their work, and not on the profit. In that system, it's easier to pass regulations that prevent the worker cooperatives from externalizing, because the survival pressures aren't nearly as intense. But it's not top-down centrally managed.
  • jp555 7y ago
    Forcing no profits is central management at it's very worst - Setting prices causes many downstream derangements to markets. A complex interconnected system will adapt in unforeseeable ways, causing novel externalities for which we have no built up immunity. Ask a soviet.
    • spamizbad 7y ago
      Forcing profits is bad too. Just look at Boeing to see where the naked pursuit of profits can lead. It literally kills people.
      • whatshisface 7y ago
        If they had pursued profits harder and more effectively, they would not have had the accidents whose effect was to reduce their profits. Although there are some examples of outright malice or criminality out there, Boeing is closer to an example of an ineffective management culture than an evilly effective one.
        • leto_ii 7y ago
          > If they had pursued profits harder and more effectively, they would not have had the accidents I think this is a bit simplistic or at least too optimistic. The pressures of being listed on the stock market are such that management is more or less compelled to pursue short-term goals. Indeed in the very long run a lot of corporations are harming themselves by harming the environment, impeding innovation etc. but in the short run firing people, cutting R&D budgets, digging up more coal, oil etc. can be very effective. And shareholders really only care about what your profits are gonna be in the next few quarters, not so much about what's gonna happen decades down the line.
• antsoul 7y ago
  Wait a minute, you state something that Chomsky never said (the "alternative 100% top-down central-managed solution") , and then call him "not very useful" for this fake statement? He's not saying Mondragon is bad, just that within capitalism, these solutions are still fucked on the long term. If you really want to judge him on his real-world solutions, then take at look at Michael Albert's Participatory economics that he's been supporting for a while : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Participatory_economics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Participatory_economics But according to me, what Chomsky lacks in his analysis is some hegelian stuff, so I'd recommend to go further and dig some Slavoj Zizek and Deleuze and so on..
  • jp555 7y ago
    I questioned, not stated. I mean that I find him too theoretical - His thinking is all very smart and appealing but useless in practice.
    • eeZah7Ux 7y ago
      "Why are you being so dense?" is an example of a question that includes a statement.
    • antsoul 7y ago
      Considering that no solution exist anywhere to the global problem we face, I'd reconsider the value of "useful/useless". Fake easy-solutions are good to make you feel better before work, but it prevents you from going into deep thinking from which real solutions may emerge.
• nickbauman 7y ago
  Have you ever noticed that once you pierce the walls of "big corp", you find a command economy that's driven dictatorially from the c-suite? Capitalism and "free" markets are great for everyone else. Dictatorship is de rigueur inside the company.
  • andreilys 7y ago
    Thankfully dictators of a company are less likely to use violence to coerce me to buy their products/services. Governments on the other hand have a monopoly on violence, so I am more wary of handing them power over the choices I can make in my life.
    • Ericson2314 7y ago
      No, Corporations absolutely do do violance to their employees. Contrariwise, dictators seldom use violence outside their borders unless they are powerful enough. In both cases, borders matter.
    • WBrad 7y ago
      They are less likely but that does not mean it hasn't happened. The first air strike on united states ground was the national guard striking miners at the behest of the company. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Blair_Mountain#Battle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Blair_Mountain#Battl... If you're in another country working for a U.S. corp you're in much worse shape. Coca-Cola can murder you for forming a union in another country and get away with it! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sinaltrainal_v._Coca-Cola_Co https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sinaltrainal_v._Coca-Cola_Co.
  • rayiner 7y ago
    That's not a novel observation. Ronald Coase addressed this more than 80 years ago in the context of neo-liberal economics: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_the_firm https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_the_firm
• dls2016 7y ago
  Is the alternative to bank robbing a top-down central-managed solution? No, we simply penalize the behavior. We could do the same and penalize exploitation by corporations. Hold individuals accountable. Extreme fines. You may argue this would be complicated, but so is a lot of existing legislation surrounding international trade.
  • jp555 7y ago
    Doesn't Tort do that already?
    • dls2016 7y ago
      I actually don't know. This is based off my own observation of the set of things for which one can end up in jail. Once you really think about the things in that set (shoplifting vs. wage theft) it's impossible to believe the system isn't rigged. To be fair, governments and militaries have always been used to protect the interests of the wealthy. But evidence suggests things have changed radically for the worse since the 70s (in my US-centric view).
  • naravara 7y ago
    >Is the alternative to bank robbing a top-down central-managed solution? No, we simply penalize the behavior. Penalizing the behavior sounds like a top-down solution to me. Government decides it's bad, then government sends the police to come get you if you do it.
    • paulmd 7y ago
      Then that describes all regulation and "top down" is a meaningless standard. I dump some chromium waste on my property, pretty soon this "government" is saying it's bad and sending police to come get me saying that "the green goo is making people sick". I hate that top-down big gubmint telling me what I can and can't do! I refuse to employ black people, pretty soon there's a top-down big gubmint telling me that's "discriminatory" and "violates labor laws"! What's next, telling a man what he can and can't do with his own business!?
• jancsika 7y ago
  > especial from the view from Chomsky's academic ivory tower "I don't like Erik Satie or any of that stuffy, high falutin' classical stuff." In both cases, the writer is unwittingly saying very little about the subject and very much about their ignorance.