6 ms·

For all the fearmongering of the Red Scare, this is what socialism looks like. Socialism is an industrial co-op like this where workers are fairly paid for thei

by jmyeet 3y ago

For all the fearmongering of the Red Scare, this is what socialism looks like. Socialism is an industrial co-op like this where workers are fairly paid for their labor. Capitalism is Walmart where all profits are captured by a handful of shareholders and executives, being subsidized by the Federal government through food stamps to employees and decimating local economies to the point where they're left with dollar stores. There's a Tiktoker who is having the Amish build a barn on the land she bought in upstate New York and she keeps calling them "capitalist". The Amish in question are entrepreneurial for sure but that's not capitalism. The Amish keep their surplus labor value. It saddens me to see how fundamentally people misunderstand what capitalism actually is. All we've done is replace the divine right of kings and landed aristocracy with the capital-owning class of the likes of Jeff Bezos. It's sad to see how many people champion their own serfdom when examples like Mondragon show it doesn't have to be that way.

mgaunard 3y ago
In my experience, people would rather be employees paid in cash whose amount is agreed ahead of time than partners where they're paid depending on the company's profits.
- teaearlgraycold 3y ago
  I have been wondering if you could make it work in Silicon Valley for a small firm. Take 2-10 people that could be founders and give them the alternative of being the Nth partner. They’d need to bring in 1/N of the profit to earn their keep. I think it’s doable.
  - monknomo 3y ago
    I have long suspected a model like this, borrowing from lawyer shops and worker co-ops, could be pretty good for software. Since software is sort of inherently project based, could have a mix of product and contracting, and could have wins both on the co-op side and whoever the co-op is doing work for/selling product to
  - s1artibartfast 3y ago
    They already exist, but aren't especially common. As you point out, the challenge is always around revenue sharing. From what I have seen, they last maybe 5 years and then break up when people feel like they are putting in more than they are getting out. The productive difference between the top and bottom half of the N needs to be less than the extra efficiency the coop provides the top half of N. This isn't easy. Eg top performer brings in 150k revenue, receives 100k salary, but can only make <100k without the coop.
    - teaearlgraycold 3y ago
      Others have brought up this issue when I’ve discussed it with them. I wonder if there’s a solution. Perhaps something in game theory? When productivity is more easily measured then there’s little debate - like making commission on sales.
      - s1artibartfast 3y ago
        There are a lot of solutions, each with different tradeoffs. By far the most common solution seen is limited Partnerships, where those individuals with enough Revenue and Leverage become the co-owners, and those that are replaceable are not co-owners but receives the salary based on Market rates. I'm sure commission works well in companies where individual basically Works in isolation, but it is notoriously difficult to quantify productivity in teams and larger organizations. How much value does a engineer at Google create? Does a janitor at Google create? Of course you can divide the company profit by headcount, but that number is largely meaningless. Some people will be far higher some people will provide negative value. For a co-ops, I think the game theory solution quickly converges on something that looks like a traditional company. You pay employees a market salary, and then split the corporate dividend proportional to salary. To account for differences in performance, the employees hire management too fire workers and give out raises. This works well for large co-ops, but obviously can lead to a lot of drama for a 10-person company
- harimau777 3y ago
  I think that could change if the workers are not living paycheck to paycheck. It would also probably be possible to develop some sort of middle ground. For example, workers could be paid a conservative salary and then profits could be distributed as a bonus at the end of the year.
  - Nasrudith 3y ago
    It could with hierarchy of needs, but what would the gain really be of doing so? Mostly ideological. And that is putting aside any of the other 'competitive balance issues' vs other business structures.
- RetroTechie 3y ago
  Depends on how much say they have. If employees have no say in how the company is run, CEO & board could easily run it into the ground (but jump ship with a gold parachute), then: yeah, most people will prefer a fixed paycheck. But if regular employees are at the helm, company is more likely to do what's in the (long-term!) interest of employees. Surely that'll make employees more willing to share in financial risks (+rewards!) of the organization. They're more personally invested in it - literally. Let's hope this model gains more traction.
- InitialLastName 3y ago
  Doesn't that depend on how profitable the company usually is? I know plenty of people in the finance world who, if paid only their salary, would be searching for a different job.
  - mgaunard 3y ago
    The upside is larger, but is longer-term and uncertain. You don't get the offer in the first place if it is certain.
lanfeust6 3y ago
Socialism is a big tent, by definition that's only one possible manifestation. Incidentally co-ops are not mutually exclusive with Capitalism (private property + market economy), for the same reason mixed-market economy (as practiced by most liberal democracies) represents not purely one thing or another. Co-ops are nothing new. > The Amish keep their surplus labor value. People don't want to live like the Amish. > It saddens me to see how fundamentally people misunderstand what capitalism actually is. The right to private property + market economy.
- bumby 3y ago
  >People don't want to live like the Amish. To the OP's point, do you think living like the Amish is necessary to keeping surplus labor value?
  - slothtrop 3y ago
    Labor theory of value is bunk.
    - bumby 3y ago
      Gotcha. That makes your above point somewhat confusing, since it makes it a moot point whether people want to live like the Amish or not.
- jmyeet 3y ago
  > Incidentally co-ops are not mutually exclusive with Capitalism (private property + market economy), As I just explained, that's not what capitalism is. Capitalism is a relatively new invention (~500 years) that arose from the ashes of feudalism. Exact same economic structure. Different exploiters. Consider this: markets exist in supposedly non-capitalist countries. They existed in the Communist bloc. We've got cuneiform tablets describing markets going back 5000+ years. Capitalism didn't create markets or a market economy. This is what I mean when I say that not only do people not know what scoaialism is, they don't know what capitalism is either. Yet the instinct to defend it is so strong, particularly in Americans. That too is relatively new. Abraham Lincoln was a Marxist, for example. > People don't want to live like the Amish. Who says they have to? We can point to an example of people living co-operatively in, oh I don't know, the article of this submission? > The right to private property + market economy. Then why did market economies exist before and outside capitalism? Private property is a core tenet of liberalism (which really means "neoliberalism" today). Private property in capitalism can be more accurately traced back to enclosures, which are really an evolution of land grants under feudalism.
anon291 3y ago
Socialism as practiced also implies heavy centralized planning to mandate these arrangements and then set price floors and ceilings to set production capacity. The Amish tend to reject social ownership of land so they are not socialist or communist by any means. Distributist would probably be the best description with any mention in the literature.
- harimau777 3y ago
  Centralized planning is only a feature of certain forms of socialism. It's generally not a feature of democratic socialism or the various anarchist forms of socialism.
- piva00 3y ago
  Heavily centralised economic planning is a feature of Marxism-Leninism, not of Socialism.
  - monknomo 3y ago
    well, also the modern corporation. I think the centralized planning aspect is actual orthogonal to the resource distribution/means of production aspect
    - anon291 3y ago
      The modern corporation is in no way able to mandate the corporate structure of other corporations.
- FrustratedMonky 3y ago
  What large corporation doesn't have central planning? Do you think every factory just makes up their own schedule and makes what they want?
  - anon291 3y ago
    To be clear, I'm usually against large corporations as well, because of this very point. Especially, when they -- as in America and many other non-socialist states -- use their lobbying power to capture the market via regulation. However, there still is a fundamental difference between centralized corporate planning and centralized planning by the monetary authority. Corporations have to deal with market supply/demand, and we've seen enough examples of large companies simply going bankrupt to rest assured that large corporations are not invincible.
_mlbt 3y ago
The problem is that socialism doesn't scale without force. Eventually you'll run out of people who willingly go along with doing things for the greater good. Looking at history, once you get larger than a commune or coop it all falls apart. You need force to seize the means of production, and the leaders of this force never give up their "temporary" powers. You also need force to get people to do the necessary but undesirable jobs, usually resulting in a centrally planned economy, which history again tells us results in misery, famine, and failure. It is also human nature that most of us want someone that tells us what to do. Humans consistently organize into social structures where there is a leader in charge, whether it is a patriarchal or matriarchal extended family structure, a tribe, a club, a company, or a government entity a leader always emerges. Capitalism is very much like Democracy. It's the worst system other than all the others that have been tried.
- harimau777 3y ago
  > Capitalism is very much like Democracy. It's the worst system other than all the others that have been tried. There are other systems that we've tried which work much better than the corporate Capitalism that we have in the United States. Most notably democratic socialism/social democracy/mixed economies (with the exact dividing lines between those three depending a lot on who you ask).
  - _mlbt 3y ago
    I completely agree that capitalism as we know it is highly flawed, but history has proven that socialism is not the answer.
    - FrustratedMonky 3y ago
      Think you are mixing up Communism and Socialism. Socialism is alive and well and working. Every major capitalist society today (including US) has a percentage of Socialism sprinkled in to keep it functioning. Pure capitalism leads to a brutish tragic world, so some socialism is added to at least keep people from outright starving and rising up in revolution.
xhkkffbf 3y ago
Is this really socialism? It seems more like a company with lots of owners. I can imagine that the local residents who must buy from this cooperative may feel pretty excluded, especially if the cooperative overcharges. The insiders can still screw over the outsiders. It's just the proportions are a bit different.
adolph 3y ago
> The Amish in question are entrepreneurial for sure but that's not capitalism. The semantic challenge is that unlike the claimed differences between communism and socialism, Capitalism and capitalism share the same word, similar to Liberalism and liberalism.
Workaccount2 3y ago
Socialism (communism?) is usually framed as "workers earning their full worth" but the dirty truth is that it is more "workers earning their preset cut of the pie, which is independent of the work they put in". So while the shelf-stocker might be earning $24/hr, their actual hard economic output is much less than this - $19/hr. The difference is made up by the salesperson making $26/hr, instead of $31/hr. Many sales people might be fine with this sacrifice, but even more likely will not, and will tire of being the ones who need to sacrifice.
- OkayPhysicist 3y ago
  In a real company, it would be the shelf stocker making $13/hr vs their output of $19/hr, the sales guy making $26/hr vs their output of $31/hr, and some jackass who inherited an oil fortune making the surplus $11/hr from their economic value of $0/hr.
greenie_beans 3y ago
> The Amish in question are entrepreneurial for sure but that's not capitalism. The Amish keep their surplus labor value. It saddens me to see how fundamentally people misunderstand what capitalism actually is. wish more people understood the historical roots of the word "entrepreneur". americans conflate business/enterprise/entrepreneurship with capitalism. i think most people would be more open to these ideas if it weren't from the misinformation dating back to the red scare.
mamonster 3y ago
This reminds me of the yearly complaint in French politics that CAC40 companies are paying monstrous dividends, to which the answer is always: If they are so monstrous then surely you should simply buy the shares yourself? You could just be an Amazon or a Walmart shareholder by logging into your Robinhood account, unlike the feudal regime where to become an aristocrat you would need to be some sort of famous knight, which seems much harder.
- Scoundreller 3y ago
  Do the CAC40 companies have fixed-percentage-of-profit dividend yields? Dividends (can be) just writing cheques to yourself with your own money.
  - mamonster 3y ago
    I mean depends on if they are mature or not, but the complaints in France are about the absolute amounts in euro, not the %s paid out(for example this year the complaints are about Total making a lot of money from oil and banks making a lot of money from higher interest rates, the proximal causes of both being completely outside their control). >Dividends (can be) just writing cheques to yourself with your own money. Well, yes, since as a shareholder you technically "are" the company.
- jmyeet 3y ago
  First, intended or not there is an incredible amount of privilege in the idea that “everyone can be a shareholder”. An awful lot of Americans live paycheck-to-paycheck and struggle to afford housing and food. Increasing homelessness is, first and foremost, a consequence of housing unaffordability. Second, owning 10 shares of Amazon doesn’t make you a capital owner. If you still need your paycheck to survive, you’re a worker, subject to the whims of your employer. The really damaging thing about retirement accounts, for example, is that it has convinced people that they are current or future capital owners. It makes workers advocate against their own best interests.
  - mamonster 3y ago
losvedir 3y ago
Correct me if I'm wrong, but there's nothing actually legally preventing a Mondragon-type industrial co-op like this from existing in the US, right? That it's not so common is an interesting question: does it get outcompeted by your standard corporation? Would people rather generally work as employees than take on risk as owners? Something else? I think in a co-op like this, employees would still be eligible for food stamps, and there's nothing preventing them from "decimating" a local economy, either. I think this is "socialist", and it seems to be working, and everyone is happy, so more power to them. But my understanding is since there's nothing preventing people from setting this up, the "Red Scare" was not a bunch of people going, "hey, change the laws so me and my buddies can set up a co-op". Like, what's the actual policy change desired? "Let folks who want to run corporations and work for them do so, and let folks who want to operate in a co-op do so?" No, because that's our current situation.
- namlem 3y ago
  There are some large co-ops in the US. The largest iirc is CHS, a tier 2 co-op (co-op made of smaller co-ops).
- FrustratedMonky 3y ago
  The Barrier to entry is probably capital costs. Probably difficult at this point for enough lowly workers to pull their money and form a company, open stores, and compete with a Whole Foods. The mega corps already dominate and can undercut anything that is starting up. Amazon is kind of like a fiefdom where if they see someone building a castle in the distance, they can send some knights out to attack before it gets too big.
- jmyeet 3y ago
  Every part of our economy and government is dedicated to wiping out any form of socialism. A developing nation even thinks about nationalizing their resource extraction? Suddenly there’s a coup with the CIA’s fingerprints all over it. NATO is a foreign policy arm of the United States dedicated to crushing any leftist momentum. Hell, we recruited Nazis to run it. We constantly back totalitarian regimes to crush leftists. At a more local level we do things like make municipal broadband illegal. Our government uses eminent domain to seize property for corporate interests. The only non-terrorist domestic law enforcement the FBI does seems to be union busting. We’ve started wars over communism. We had private organizations like the Pinkertons crush collective action. Look up Homestead. It was rumored that when the UK wanted a post-Brexit trade deal, one of our conditions was privatizing the NHS. Every level of our society is devoted to crushing collective action.
SSJPython 3y ago
> Socialism is an industrial co-op like this where workers are fairly paid for their labor. What is "fair pay" for labor in your eyes? Is it the entire surplus being generated? Why is that considered fair?
- jmyeet 3y ago
  > Is it the entire surplus being generated? Yes. > Why is that considered fair? Because there is no value without labor.
  - yakshaving_jgt 3y ago
    When the company takes a loss, do you agree that all of the workers should go hungry?
namlem 3y ago
This is not socialism, it is syndicalism. Some argue that syndicalism is a type of socialism, but in practice, it behaves more like a type of capitalism.
asdasdsddd 3y ago
[flagged]
larsiusprime 3y ago
Mondragon was founded by a Catholic priest and IMHO is more accurately described as Distributist than classically Socialist: https://distributistreview.com/archive/mondragon-revisited?format=amp https://distributistreview.com/archive/mondragon-revisited?f...

by jmyeet 3y ago

mgaunard 3y ago

In my experience, people would rather be employees paid in cash whose amount is agreed ahead of time than partners where they're paid depending on the company's profits.

teaearlgraycold 3y ago
I have been wondering if you could make it work in Silicon Valley for a small firm. Take 2-10 people that could be founders and give them the alternative of being the Nth partner. They’d need to bring in 1/N of the profit to earn their keep. I think it’s doable.
- monknomo 3y ago
  I have long suspected a model like this, borrowing from lawyer shops and worker co-ops, could be pretty good for software. Since software is sort of inherently project based, could have a mix of product and contracting, and could have wins both on the co-op side and whoever the co-op is doing work for/selling product to
- s1artibartfast 3y ago
  They already exist, but aren't especially common. As you point out, the challenge is always around revenue sharing. From what I have seen, they last maybe 5 years and then break up when people feel like they are putting in more than they are getting out. The productive difference between the top and bottom half of the N needs to be less than the extra efficiency the coop provides the top half of N. This isn't easy. Eg top performer brings in 150k revenue, receives 100k salary, but can only make <100k without the coop.
  - teaearlgraycold 3y ago
    Others have brought up this issue when I’ve discussed it with them. I wonder if there’s a solution. Perhaps something in game theory? When productivity is more easily measured then there’s little debate - like making commission on sales.
    - s1artibartfast 3y ago
      There are a lot of solutions, each with different tradeoffs. By far the most common solution seen is limited Partnerships, where those individuals with enough Revenue and Leverage become the co-owners, and those that are replaceable are not co-owners but receives the salary based on Market rates. I'm sure commission works well in companies where individual basically Works in isolation, but it is notoriously difficult to quantify productivity in teams and larger organizations. How much value does a engineer at Google create? Does a janitor at Google create? Of course you can divide the company profit by headcount, but that number is largely meaningless. Some people will be far higher some people will provide negative value. For a co-ops, I think the game theory solution quickly converges on something that looks like a traditional company. You pay employees a market salary, and then split the corporate dividend proportional to salary. To account for differences in performance, the employees hire management too fire workers and give out raises. This works well for large co-ops, but obviously can lead to a lot of drama for a 10-person company
harimau777 3y ago
I think that could change if the workers are not living paycheck to paycheck. It would also probably be possible to develop some sort of middle ground. For example, workers could be paid a conservative salary and then profits could be distributed as a bonus at the end of the year.
- Nasrudith 3y ago
  It could with hierarchy of needs, but what would the gain really be of doing so? Mostly ideological. And that is putting aside any of the other 'competitive balance issues' vs other business structures.
RetroTechie 3y ago
Depends on how much say they have. If employees have no say in how the company is run, CEO & board could easily run it into the ground (but jump ship with a gold parachute), then: yeah, most people will prefer a fixed paycheck. But if regular employees are at the helm, company is more likely to do what's in the (long-term!) interest of employees. Surely that'll make employees more willing to share in financial risks (+rewards!) of the organization. They're more personally invested in it - literally. Let's hope this model gains more traction.
InitialLastName 3y ago
Doesn't that depend on how profitable the company usually is? I know plenty of people in the finance world who, if paid only their salary, would be searching for a different job.
- mgaunard 3y ago
  The upside is larger, but is longer-term and uncertain. You don't get the offer in the first place if it is certain.

lanfeust6 3y ago

Socialism is a big tent, by definition that's only one possible manifestation. Incidentally co-ops are not mutually exclusive with Capitalism (private property + market economy), for the same reason mixed-market economy (as practiced by most liberal democracies) represents not purely one thing or another. Co-ops are nothing new. > The Amish keep their surplus labor value. People don't want to live like the Amish. > It saddens me to see how fundamentally people misunderstand what capitalism actually is. The right to private property + market economy.

bumby 3y ago
>People don't want to live like the Amish. To the OP's point, do you think living like the Amish is necessary to keeping surplus labor value?
- slothtrop 3y ago
  Labor theory of value is bunk.
  - bumby 3y ago
    Gotcha. That makes your above point somewhat confusing, since it makes it a moot point whether people want to live like the Amish or not.
jmyeet 3y ago
> Incidentally co-ops are not mutually exclusive with Capitalism (private property + market economy), As I just explained, that's not what capitalism is. Capitalism is a relatively new invention (~500 years) that arose from the ashes of feudalism. Exact same economic structure. Different exploiters. Consider this: markets exist in supposedly non-capitalist countries. They existed in the Communist bloc. We've got cuneiform tablets describing markets going back 5000+ years. Capitalism didn't create markets or a market economy. This is what I mean when I say that not only do people not know what scoaialism is, they don't know what capitalism is either. Yet the instinct to defend it is so strong, particularly in Americans. That too is relatively new. Abraham Lincoln was a Marxist, for example. > People don't want to live like the Amish. Who says they have to? We can point to an example of people living co-operatively in, oh I don't know, the article of this submission? > The right to private property + market economy. Then why did market economies exist before and outside capitalism? Private property is a core tenet of liberalism (which really means "neoliberalism" today). Private property in capitalism can be more accurately traced back to enclosures, which are really an evolution of land grants under feudalism.

anon291 3y ago

Socialism as practiced also implies heavy centralized planning to mandate these arrangements and then set price floors and ceilings to set production capacity. The Amish tend to reject social ownership of land so they are not socialist or communist by any means. Distributist would probably be the best description with any mention in the literature.

harimau777 3y ago
Centralized planning is only a feature of certain forms of socialism. It's generally not a feature of democratic socialism or the various anarchist forms of socialism.
piva00 3y ago
Heavily centralised economic planning is a feature of Marxism-Leninism, not of Socialism.
- monknomo 3y ago
  well, also the modern corporation. I think the centralized planning aspect is actual orthogonal to the resource distribution/means of production aspect
  - anon291 3y ago
    The modern corporation is in no way able to mandate the corporate structure of other corporations.
FrustratedMonky 3y ago
What large corporation doesn't have central planning? Do you think every factory just makes up their own schedule and makes what they want?
- anon291 3y ago
  To be clear, I'm usually against large corporations as well, because of this very point. Especially, when they -- as in America and many other non-socialist states -- use their lobbying power to capture the market via regulation. However, there still is a fundamental difference between centralized corporate planning and centralized planning by the monetary authority. Corporations have to deal with market supply/demand, and we've seen enough examples of large companies simply going bankrupt to rest assured that large corporations are not invincible.

_mlbt 3y ago

The problem is that socialism doesn't scale without force. Eventually you'll run out of people who willingly go along with doing things for the greater good. Looking at history, once you get larger than a commune or coop it all falls apart. You need force to seize the means of production, and the leaders of this force never give up their "temporary" powers. You also need force to get people to do the necessary but undesirable jobs, usually resulting in a centrally planned economy, which history again tells us results in misery, famine, and failure. It is also human nature that most of us want someone that tells us what to do. Humans consistently organize into social structures where there is a leader in charge, whether it is a patriarchal or matriarchal extended family structure, a tribe, a club, a company, or a government entity a leader always emerges. Capitalism is very much like Democracy. It's the worst system other than all the others that have been tried.

harimau777 3y ago
> Capitalism is very much like Democracy. It's the worst system other than all the others that have been tried. There are other systems that we've tried which work much better than the corporate Capitalism that we have in the United States. Most notably democratic socialism/social democracy/mixed economies (with the exact dividing lines between those three depending a lot on who you ask).
- _mlbt 3y ago
  I completely agree that capitalism as we know it is highly flawed, but history has proven that socialism is not the answer.
  - FrustratedMonky 3y ago
    Think you are mixing up Communism and Socialism. Socialism is alive and well and working. Every major capitalist society today (including US) has a percentage of Socialism sprinkled in to keep it functioning. Pure capitalism leads to a brutish tragic world, so some socialism is added to at least keep people from outright starving and rising up in revolution.

xhkkffbf 3y ago

Is this really socialism? It seems more like a company with lots of owners. I can imagine that the local residents who must buy from this cooperative may feel pretty excluded, especially if the cooperative overcharges. The insiders can still screw over the outsiders. It's just the proportions are a bit different.

adolph 3y ago

> The Amish in question are entrepreneurial for sure but that's not capitalism. The semantic challenge is that unlike the claimed differences between communism and socialism, Capitalism and capitalism share the same word, similar to Liberalism and liberalism.

Workaccount2 3y ago

Socialism (communism?) is usually framed as "workers earning their full worth" but the dirty truth is that it is more "workers earning their preset cut of the pie, which is independent of the work they put in". So while the shelf-stocker might be earning $24/hr, their actual hard economic output is much less than this - $19/hr. The difference is made up by the salesperson making $26/hr, instead of $31/hr. Many sales people might be fine with this sacrifice, but even more likely will not, and will tire of being the ones who need to sacrifice.

OkayPhysicist 3y ago
In a real company, it would be the shelf stocker making $13/hr vs their output of $19/hr, the sales guy making $26/hr vs their output of $31/hr, and some jackass who inherited an oil fortune making the surplus $11/hr from their economic value of $0/hr.

greenie_beans 3y ago

> The Amish in question are entrepreneurial for sure but that's not capitalism. The Amish keep their surplus labor value. It saddens me to see how fundamentally people misunderstand what capitalism actually is. wish more people understood the historical roots of the word "entrepreneur". americans conflate business/enterprise/entrepreneurship with capitalism. i think most people would be more open to these ideas if it weren't from the misinformation dating back to the red scare.

mamonster 3y ago

This reminds me of the yearly complaint in French politics that CAC40 companies are paying monstrous dividends, to which the answer is always: If they are so monstrous then surely you should simply buy the shares yourself? You could just be an Amazon or a Walmart shareholder by logging into your Robinhood account, unlike the feudal regime where to become an aristocrat you would need to be some sort of famous knight, which seems much harder.

Scoundreller 3y ago
Do the CAC40 companies have fixed-percentage-of-profit dividend yields? Dividends (can be) just writing cheques to yourself with your own money.
- mamonster 3y ago
  I mean depends on if they are mature or not, but the complaints in France are about the absolute amounts in euro, not the %s paid out(for example this year the complaints are about Total making a lot of money from oil and banks making a lot of money from higher interest rates, the proximal causes of both being completely outside their control). >Dividends (can be) just writing cheques to yourself with your own money. Well, yes, since as a shareholder you technically "are" the company.
jmyeet 3y ago
First, intended or not there is an incredible amount of privilege in the idea that “everyone can be a shareholder”. An awful lot of Americans live paycheck-to-paycheck and struggle to afford housing and food. Increasing homelessness is, first and foremost, a consequence of housing unaffordability. Second, owning 10 shares of Amazon doesn’t make you a capital owner. If you still need your paycheck to survive, you’re a worker, subject to the whims of your employer. The really damaging thing about retirement accounts, for example, is that it has convinced people that they are current or future capital owners. It makes workers advocate against their own best interests.
- mamonster 3y ago

losvedir 3y ago

Correct me if I'm wrong, but there's nothing actually legally preventing a Mondragon-type industrial co-op like this from existing in the US, right? That it's not so common is an interesting question: does it get outcompeted by your standard corporation? Would people rather generally work as employees than take on risk as owners? Something else? I think in a co-op like this, employees would still be eligible for food stamps, and there's nothing preventing them from "decimating" a local economy, either. I think this is "socialist", and it seems to be working, and everyone is happy, so more power to them. But my understanding is since there's nothing preventing people from setting this up, the "Red Scare" was not a bunch of people going, "hey, change the laws so me and my buddies can set up a co-op". Like, what's the actual policy change desired? "Let folks who want to run corporations and work for them do so, and let folks who want to operate in a co-op do so?" No, because that's our current situation.

namlem 3y ago
There are some large co-ops in the US. The largest iirc is CHS, a tier 2 co-op (co-op made of smaller co-ops).
FrustratedMonky 3y ago
The Barrier to entry is probably capital costs. Probably difficult at this point for enough lowly workers to pull their money and form a company, open stores, and compete with a Whole Foods. The mega corps already dominate and can undercut anything that is starting up. Amazon is kind of like a fiefdom where if they see someone building a castle in the distance, they can send some knights out to attack before it gets too big.
jmyeet 3y ago
Every part of our economy and government is dedicated to wiping out any form of socialism. A developing nation even thinks about nationalizing their resource extraction? Suddenly there’s a coup with the CIA’s fingerprints all over it. NATO is a foreign policy arm of the United States dedicated to crushing any leftist momentum. Hell, we recruited Nazis to run it. We constantly back totalitarian regimes to crush leftists. At a more local level we do things like make municipal broadband illegal. Our government uses eminent domain to seize property for corporate interests. The only non-terrorist domestic law enforcement the FBI does seems to be union busting. We’ve started wars over communism. We had private organizations like the Pinkertons crush collective action. Look up Homestead. It was rumored that when the UK wanted a post-Brexit trade deal, one of our conditions was privatizing the NHS. Every level of our society is devoted to crushing collective action.

SSJPython 3y ago

> Socialism is an industrial co-op like this where workers are fairly paid for their labor. What is "fair pay" for labor in your eyes? Is it the entire surplus being generated? Why is that considered fair?

jmyeet 3y ago
> Is it the entire surplus being generated? Yes. > Why is that considered fair? Because there is no value without labor.
- yakshaving_jgt 3y ago
  When the company takes a loss, do you agree that all of the workers should go hungry?

namlem 3y ago

This is not socialism, it is syndicalism. Some argue that syndicalism is a type of socialism, but in practice, it behaves more like a type of capitalism.

asdasdsddd 3y ago

[flagged]

larsiusprime 3y ago

Mondragon was founded by a Catholic priest and IMHO is more accurately described as Distributist than classically Socialist: https://distributistreview.com/archive/mondragon-revisited?format=amp https://distributistreview.com/archive/mondragon-revisited?f...