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stevholt

Just make the employees shareholders

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If they are not majority shareholders, losing their job will probably have more impact than the share gains.

Well, that's the idea of Lenin.

Rochdale Pioneers Actually :-)

Yes I do know there where precursors to worker coops in Italy prior to that.

I've followed the up and downs of Mondragon for the last decades. Raiffeisen is known in Germany.

Mondragon has a bit of a rep amongst other coops

Could you elaborate?

Have taken over other coops and made some members redundant - this is from when I worked in coop in the early 2000's

They also have the problem of rising non-coop employees I think.

Most public companies offer employee stock benefits. That matters for short-term stock price, as much as possible. But ultimately the employees are only minority shareholders, so don't have enough to actually increase value. (The main shareholders are institutional investors, who have a lot of clout.) For private companies, of course, it's a different story and the founders/board/investors often have more clout. Private companies are also less likely to grant (non-liquid) equity, but rather offer it as options, which is more like a lotto ticket.

Well, that's the idea of Marx.

Marx had a lot of ideas; some of them were probably good. Involving workers in the ownership of companies seems like a good idea even if Marx supported it.

Marxism as practiced in places like, eg, Russia fell down because they disrupted the ability of the market to send and receive accurate price signals and over time that led to catastrophically misallocated resources. Many of the people who want socialism seem to support disabling said price signals, because they are unfair, which is why socialism is so dangerous - those price signals are very important. However, as long as they face the same risk of bankruptcy as everyone else, workers co-ops with the ability for outsiders to invest are probably a superior model of ownership.

> Russia fell down because they disrupted the ability of the market to send and receive accurate price signals and over time that led to catastrophically misallocated resources.

This is extremely ahistorical. The fall of the USSR was due to Gorbachev's decision to introduce "western" markets into Russia and Yeltsin's opportunism. Growth and stability weren't flagging in the Soviet Union until they attempted to privatize.

Economic growth was actually even worse before glasnost: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_of_the_Soviet_Union#/m...

And if the US had been the one to capitulate to communism we'd be quoting stats about the lack of income growth of their workers in contrast to the wealthy.

Viewing the health of a nation on the growth of their income isn't necessarily telling the story. Soviet inflation was almost unheard of save for hyperinflation shortly after the revolution, and hyper inflation after the collapse. Also as investment wasn't as much of a driving force since the economy wasn't private, so infinite growth isn't necessarily a good indicator of the state of things.

Did people risk death to escape the US?

No, they just escaped it to avoid death (e.g. during the Vietnam draft).

They were slowly decaying like Cuba is doing now. Same for East Germany. There wasn’t much growth going on. Stability only in the sense of stagnation.

Infinite growth isn't necessarily the best way to measure success unless you're an investor. When we frame the world in that way a lot of "good" economies are harsh to live under, and "decaying" economies aren't bad from a quality of life standpoint.

The Soviet-era economies were generally horrible to live under from everything I've read and heard, even from people who actually lived under them. Did you? There's a reason they wouldn't let people leave East Germany, and actually shot them if they tried, and why those people risked their lives regardless to get out, and also why almost no one from the West ever tried to "escape" to Soviet-bloc countries.

Decaying economies are bad if they don't maintain their equipment and live off what previous generations created. You could see that in East Germany. They created a lot of stuff in the 50s and 60s and then they kept using that equipment until it fell apart. Same for buildings.You can do that for a while but eventually things will fall apart. You could argue that public infrastructure in the US is following the same path to some degree.

Cuba is doing better than most other Caribbean countries despite an embargo by one of the biggest economies in the world.

As implemented in the current US economy, those price signals are also suppressed through collusion, cronyism, and near monopolies so it's not an exclusive issue of socialism implementations.

Many markets are stagnant and do not offer healthy competition. There's a fair share of markets that still offer healthy competition, but from my perspective, it seems like the end goal of market optimization almost inevitably leads to monopolization which always leads to stagnation.

True competition and an informed/economically conscious consumer market are key requirements to this signaling process. We don't have a lot of either in many markets.

One of the great things about capitalism is that it has some redundancy and resiliency. Competition may also lead to new features (markets), etc. On the other hand, this is duplicative and wasteful. Contrast the duplication (redundancy) of the capitalist system to the one producer model of communism. Less duplication but less resiliency and less ability to find new features (market). I think when a market is young and returns are high that it makes sense for many producers. However as a market matures, we can shed some of the duplication and allocate it to other new markets. If the monopolist restricts quantity sold? Easy, it increases the tears for a new entrant. The system manages itself in this way (in reality no system at all, it's decentralized coordination).

The problem with this idea of "duplication" is that, in reality, it's never been shown that monopolies are actually highly efficient. Humans just aren't very good at being efficient when they aren't forced to, and competition does that. The places where we do have monopolies that work out OK are where there's heavy government regulation, and even there the results are never as good as an industry where there's highly competitive private industry; it's just that, for some things, having a regulated monopoly is better than the alternative: we see this for utilities, subways, etc. where competition doesn't really make any sense or just isn't feasible (you can't really have 5 different subway lines going between the same 2 points in a dense city).

In reality, humans are frequently lazy, corrupt, incompetent, etc., and so in a market where there's healthy competition, the presence of competition provides a check against these problems, giving consumers an alternative when one player screws up too much. With a monopoly, there is no alternative, and no incentive to do better, unless it's being heavily controlled by the government which has to respond to voters.

>Marx had a lot of ideas; some of them were probably good. Involving workers in the ownership of companies seems like a good idea even if Marx supported it.

I'm not saying otherwise. In fact, a lot of Marx ideas were good. He also famously said "I'm not a marxist".

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