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Comment by toasterlovin | Hacker News Reader

The problem with this vision is that economies of scale exist. I have been involved in a manufacturing business for a while. Scale solves lots of problems. It spreads overhead over more units. It incentivizes spending resources to hyper optimize material and labor usage. Etc.

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That's what makes cooperation an important aspect of these types of ideologies. In Humanizing The Economy[0], the author describes successful cooperative movements from around the world that are based on localized democratic principles but leverage large-scale cooperation to organize at scale.

[0]: https://www.newsociety.com/Books/H/Humanizing-the-Economy

Thank you for this tip. I'm eager to read this book.

While I'm a big fan of Richard D Wolff's efforts, he fails to examine the governance models of co-ops. What works, what doesn't. Models of incorporation. Case studies.

Governance is key.

Some years ago, I joined a non-profit OSS team, part of the Kuali Consortium, with the primary intent to see how it worked first hand.

Sadly, it didn't.

Even more sadly, I still have little clue what could work, what to advocate.

I am inspired by Pieter Hintjens' Social Architecture as model for successful OSS:

http://hintjens.com/books

But have yet to practice it myself.

Sorry, I always conflate ideas. My end goal is to figure out how to make useful, meaningful software while still paying my mortgage and feeding my family.

Agree with your critique of Wolff. I’m on a similar quest and have some resources you might find interesting. Feel free to reach out on gmail–same handle.

In the software world, we solved economies of scale without centralization with open source. Everyone contributes a little bit to Linux, which soundly beat all the commercial Unixes without putting power in the hands of a few.

It's an interesting question whether this can be generalized, especially to industries with physical products. Can you have a group of several independent farmers work together on farming technology and avoid having to join a large corporate farming company? Can you have a collaboration between independent coffee shops so they get all the benefits of being Starbucks franchisees while remaining independent?

There are also downsides to economies of scale, besides those seen in capitalism. For example: monoculturalism (all products are the same; little variation; products target only the greatest common denominator); and negative externalities as seen in the bioindustry.

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