4 ms·

> It depends on what kind of socialist you're talking about, and at what scale. For example, the Mondragon corporation is a form of socialism http://en.wikiped

> It depends on what kind of socialist you're talking about, and at what scale. For example, the Mondragon corporation is a form of socialism http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mondragon_corporation http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mondragon_corporation At the smaller scale; Intriguing stuff, but from reading this it sounds a whole lot like just another company with an interesting incentive scheme for employees and shareholders? From reading through that it seems to be just another market participant rather than some top down re-organisation of the entire market system itself. On the subject of revolutionary catalonia, it sure does sound more like what my initial perception of socialism really is, people being forcibly compelled to toe the communist party line with threats of death, ad et al. Against that backdrop I suppose it is unsurprising that the anarchists and communists were squabbling, and this is what I was aiming at with my initial criticism of socialism as a necessarily "political" entity rather than just another voluntary participant subject to the same market forces as all the other voluntary participants. And thus vulnerable to both poor market performance relative to the competition and also the negative externalities of being focused on politics rather than actual material results. > workers run things rather than capitalists. Doesn't that once again reduce to "workers control the means of production" and then you're left with workers councils figuring out what's personal vs private property and all the political nonsense that goes along with that, munging the entire thing once again at scale into a necessarily authoritarian and political entity?

steveklabnik 13y ago
> From reading through that it seems to be just another market participant This is absolutely true. It's a socialist entity acting within a broader capitalist economy. That's how it starts. By the way, with your focus on markets, you might enjoy Kevin Carson and mutualism. > And thus vulnerable to both poor market performance relative to the competition Ehhh, the USSR went from a backwards farm country to being the first country to putting someone in space in the span of 80 years. Don't forget that imperialism played a huge factor, and has in other cases as well. > with workers councils figuring out what's personal vs private property There isn't really a need for anyone to 'figure out' what's personal vs. private property. It's not as if you must stand before a worker's council to defend your right to keep your toothbrush. It's simply that without an organization (the police) upholding private property law, absentee ownership is impossible.
- etherael 13y ago
  re mutualism, of all the variants of leftist anarchism I am familiar with, this one does indeed appeal to me the most. The problem I have with it is only the idea that as soon as anyone who has invested labor into real estate vacates the property, it is supposed to be perfectly ethical / justifiable to simply appropriate it. This puts all kinds of peculiar incentives in play for owners of real estate to avoid losing their property by maintaining "occupancy" of it, which is in itself kind of a nebulous and strange definition. If we build a server farm and use it for staging and then push that environment to production and we're not actively using staging for the next month, is it OK to appropriate that? If you spend many years of labour constructing your own home and all associated facilities, is it acceptable that when you go on holiday to some remote location, it should instantly be up for grabs? If it's just a case of being unable to enforce absentee ownership for any given interval, I think this is both a terrible failure of imagination on the part of mutualists as well as an undeserved tip of the hat to that old "might makes right" chestnut. We can take your property, therefore it is not yours anymore. I'll admit there are problems with the concept of ancap homesteading also; the mutualist criticism of "rearranging a few twigs on a parcel of land not entitling the arranger to title in perpetuity" is not without basis, natural resources and real property are quite thorny and difficult to disentangle concepts by nature. This is why the original suggestion of a thousand competing political systems flourishing is even more appealing to me then just every space on earth appropriating the ancap model as laid out in "the machinery of freedom". Through competition and the market, we can see how things play out in the real world and what people end up preferring. I have no problem with any political philosophy insofar as they keep to themselves and do not attempt to enforce their ideas on those that are unable to choose an alternative, which unfortunately as the status quo stands is almost no place on the planet.

steveklabnik 13y ago

> From reading through that it seems to be just another market participant This is absolutely true. It's a socialist entity acting within a broader capitalist economy. That's how it starts. By the way, with your focus on markets, you might enjoy Kevin Carson and mutualism. > And thus vulnerable to both poor market performance relative to the competition Ehhh, the USSR went from a backwards farm country to being the first country to putting someone in space in the span of 80 years. Don't forget that imperialism played a huge factor, and has in other cases as well. > with workers councils figuring out what's personal vs private property There isn't really a need for anyone to 'figure out' what's personal vs. private property. It's not as if you must stand before a worker's council to defend your right to keep your toothbrush. It's simply that without an organization (the police) upholding private property law, absentee ownership is impossible.

etherael 13y ago
re mutualism, of all the variants of leftist anarchism I am familiar with, this one does indeed appeal to me the most. The problem I have with it is only the idea that as soon as anyone who has invested labor into real estate vacates the property, it is supposed to be perfectly ethical / justifiable to simply appropriate it. This puts all kinds of peculiar incentives in play for owners of real estate to avoid losing their property by maintaining "occupancy" of it, which is in itself kind of a nebulous and strange definition. If we build a server farm and use it for staging and then push that environment to production and we're not actively using staging for the next month, is it OK to appropriate that? If you spend many years of labour constructing your own home and all associated facilities, is it acceptable that when you go on holiday to some remote location, it should instantly be up for grabs? If it's just a case of being unable to enforce absentee ownership for any given interval, I think this is both a terrible failure of imagination on the part of mutualists as well as an undeserved tip of the hat to that old "might makes right" chestnut. We can take your property, therefore it is not yours anymore. I'll admit there are problems with the concept of ancap homesteading also; the mutualist criticism of "rearranging a few twigs on a parcel of land not entitling the arranger to title in perpetuity" is not without basis, natural resources and real property are quite thorny and difficult to disentangle concepts by nature. This is why the original suggestion of a thousand competing political systems flourishing is even more appealing to me then just every space on earth appropriating the ancap model as laid out in "the machinery of freedom". Through competition and the market, we can see how things play out in the real world and what people end up preferring. I have no problem with any political philosophy insofar as they keep to themselves and do not attempt to enforce their ideas on those that are unable to choose an alternative, which unfortunately as the status quo stands is almost no place on the planet.