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okay so if nobody can have personal control over $100M how do $5B infrastructure investments (tens of thousands of which you personally benefit from, like chip

okay so if nobody can have personal control over $100M how do $5B infrastructure investments (tens of thousands of which you personally benefit from, like chip foundries or joint city infrastructure and pharmaceutical ventures) or billion dollar company investments (again you depend on many ... apartments, factories, agriculture)

TaylorAlexander 5y ago
It's kind of a funny question, because there probably has never been any $5B infrastructure investment which came from a rich person's pocketbook. They money comes from governments, which are institutions run by many people who don't personally control that money. Anyway let's say you have a society where all the firms are worker self directed. It makes sense for firms to form broader organizations that represent different interests. So for example lets say you have an industrial zone on the edge of a geographic region. There's a shipping port, some bridges, electrical infrastructure, etc. All the firms in the area depend on this infrastructure to operate. And because they share this common interest, they have formed a regional cooperative made up of delegates from each firm in the region. When they need to make a decision about when to perform major infrastructure work, it is decided at one of their regular meetings. The delegates are not their to make their own decisions but to bring with them decisions made at their firm's meeting on the matter. If the delegate agrees to something their firm's people actually do not like, their people can recall them. So the regional cooperative holds a regular meeting and there they decide they are going to build a bigger bridge and then decommission the old one. All the firms in this regional cooperative keep their money at a credit union which was set up specifically to represent these firms. They need to rustle up $500m to pay for this. They discuss how to raise the funds. There is a particularly big firm that will benefit substantially from the new bridge. They put up $50m on the condition that the bridge will have tolls and they will expect to be paid back $30m over 30 years. The rest of the firms together put in another $50m. The industrial zone regional cooperative takes their $100m to the broader regional cooperative which represents a large geographic region including several major cities which benefit from the industrial zone. The broader cooperative agrees to stake the other $400m for the bridge improvements with the agreement that the industrial zone regional cooperative will pay it back over 40 years. So yeah. That's generally how you manage that. You can look up Murray Bookchin, David Harvey, and Richard Wolff if you want to know more. Also look up Zoe Baker on youtube. If you don't like my made up scenario, maybe look up how ITER or LHC get their funding. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ITER#Funding https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ITER#Funding https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Large_Hadron_Collider#Cost https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Large_Hadron_Collider#Cost EDIT: Of course ITER and LHC are not workers cooperatives, just examples of how people delegating funds could make decisions.
- grapist420 5y ago
  just google the phrase “five billion dollar joint venture”. They don’t come from rich peoples’ pocketbooks, but they do from other areas and are important. And don’t come from governments. They come from the businesses lol. Similarly, early and late stage venture funding and other forms of funding different companies would also take a haircut, probably (not much with a 10% tax above 100M, yes with a 100% above 100M). Which would suck for people who like medicine and electricity > ITER and LCH Yeah governments absolutely can fund things. The question is should they fund everything. And you should note that they weren’t funded by “workers councils”. dude we have regional workers councils it’s called state legislatures and they absolutely do fund stuff. We even have decentralized hierarchical councils - city and county govt! And they do make infrastructure decisions! What they don’t do is fund chip development or factory scaling. And even the things they do fund they offload the decision work to experts (not workers).
  - TaylorAlexander 5y ago
    Yes I added an edit after your comment to clarify that the point about ITER and LHC was just about how people could allocate funds for big projects, but of course there are innumerable examples for that. My point is not that The State should fund everything. It is that groups of people can elect delegates and those delegates can make decisions for us. I don't want them to be made by a centralized state but instead by voluntary collectives. Basically I advocate for worker owned collectives to manage the production that those same workers depend upon. This would I think lead to more freedom with less exploitation. Those workers would have dominion over the profits they generate, rather than the current arrangement where that control is traded for a wage. I believe this could lead to a world where all people accumulate enough wealth that they no longer need to work to survive. But that can never happen if an elite class siphons off all the workers' profit to spend billions on pet projects for amusement.
- grapist420 5y ago
  okay my issue wasn’t that worker controlled firms would be legally incapable of joint ventures for profit. My issue was - who makes the decision? Do the workers understand finance and supply chain management and commodity prices and political risks? No, so why should they make the decisions

TaylorAlexander 5y ago

It's kind of a funny question, because there probably has never been any $5B infrastructure investment which came from a rich person's pocketbook. They money comes from governments, which are institutions run by many people who don't personally control that money. Anyway let's say you have a society where all the firms are worker self directed. It makes sense for firms to form broader organizations that represent different interests. So for example lets say you have an industrial zone on the edge of a geographic region. There's a shipping port, some bridges, electrical infrastructure, etc. All the firms in the area depend on this infrastructure to operate. And because they share this common interest, they have formed a regional cooperative made up of delegates from each firm in the region. When they need to make a decision about when to perform major infrastructure work, it is decided at one of their regular meetings. The delegates are not their to make their own decisions but to bring with them decisions made at their firm's meeting on the matter. If the delegate agrees to something their firm's people actually do not like, their people can recall them. So the regional cooperative holds a regular meeting and there they decide they are going to build a bigger bridge and then decommission the old one. All the firms in this regional cooperative keep their money at a credit union which was set up specifically to represent these firms. They need to rustle up $500m to pay for this. They discuss how to raise the funds. There is a particularly big firm that will benefit substantially from the new bridge. They put up $50m on the condition that the bridge will have tolls and they will expect to be paid back $30m over 30 years. The rest of the firms together put in another $50m. The industrial zone regional cooperative takes their $100m to the broader regional cooperative which represents a large geographic region including several major cities which benefit from the industrial zone. The broader cooperative agrees to stake the other $400m for the bridge improvements with the agreement that the industrial zone regional cooperative will pay it back over 40 years. So yeah. That's generally how you manage that. You can look up Murray Bookchin, David Harvey, and Richard Wolff if you want to know more. Also look up Zoe Baker on youtube. If you don't like my made up scenario, maybe look up how ITER or LHC get their funding. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ITER#Funding https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ITER#Funding https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Large_Hadron_Collider#Cost https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Large_Hadron_Collider#Cost EDIT: Of course ITER and LHC are not workers cooperatives, just examples of how people delegating funds could make decisions.

grapist420 5y ago
just google the phrase “five billion dollar joint venture”. They don’t come from rich peoples’ pocketbooks, but they do from other areas and are important. And don’t come from governments. They come from the businesses lol. Similarly, early and late stage venture funding and other forms of funding different companies would also take a haircut, probably (not much with a 10% tax above 100M, yes with a 100% above 100M). Which would suck for people who like medicine and electricity > ITER and LCH Yeah governments absolutely can fund things. The question is should they fund everything. And you should note that they weren’t funded by “workers councils”. dude we have regional workers councils it’s called state legislatures and they absolutely do fund stuff. We even have decentralized hierarchical councils - city and county govt! And they do make infrastructure decisions! What they don’t do is fund chip development or factory scaling. And even the things they do fund they offload the decision work to experts (not workers).
- TaylorAlexander 5y ago
  Yes I added an edit after your comment to clarify that the point about ITER and LHC was just about how people could allocate funds for big projects, but of course there are innumerable examples for that. My point is not that The State should fund everything. It is that groups of people can elect delegates and those delegates can make decisions for us. I don't want them to be made by a centralized state but instead by voluntary collectives. Basically I advocate for worker owned collectives to manage the production that those same workers depend upon. This would I think lead to more freedom with less exploitation. Those workers would have dominion over the profits they generate, rather than the current arrangement where that control is traded for a wage. I believe this could lead to a world where all people accumulate enough wealth that they no longer need to work to survive. But that can never happen if an elite class siphons off all the workers' profit to spend billions on pet projects for amusement.
grapist420 5y ago
okay my issue wasn’t that worker controlled firms would be legally incapable of joint ventures for profit. My issue was - who makes the decision? Do the workers understand finance and supply chain management and commodity prices and political risks? No, so why should they make the decisions