Hacker News Reader

Comment by js8 | Hacker News Reader

That's why I am a fan of democracy, even in economic sphere (aka socialism or cooperatives). Giving everybody the same single vote (same power) about the organization (and making it into an unchangeable fact) removes lots of these incentives that prevent improving the organization. But lot of people are blindly accepting capitalism, because.. well it's incidentally also explained in the article, why.

View on HN

It's interesting then how cooperatives aren't more popular or more successful. You'd think that if they were significantly more efficient than the typical dictatorship companies then they'd outcompete them, but as far as I'm aware that doesn't happen.

It’s harder to get finance as a co-operative, so it’s hardly a fair competition.

Also, in most studies, co-ops and employee ownership models do actually end up being more profitable and sustainable in the long term [0, 1].

[0] Page 23+ in this UK government review on employee ownership: https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/...

[1] ONS report showing the rate of survival of cooperatives in the UK after five years was 80 percent compared with only 41 percent for all other enterprises https://www.uk.coop/sites/default/files/2020-10/co-operative...

Skimmed the first report and it seems like employee-owned companies perform better up until around 75 employees, after which there's no benefit? That would explain why they aren't outcompeting the larger companies - their advantage disappears when they grow.

I’d wager that’s more to do with raising finance than organisational productivity, but I’m not aware of any actual research on something of that scale or even how to accurately study those effects without it turning into more of a qualitative theory.

Still, it’s quite an interesting possibility worth pursuing in my opinion. (Full disclosure, I work for a small nominally employee-owned company, and have mixed thoughts about how it works in practice).

I think there's often an issue of how you measure success. Co-ops seem to have much lower tendency to try and take over the world than corporations inevitably seem to display at scale - quite content to return comfortable salaries year-after-year to their employee-owners, rather than reap profits at all costs.

As a concrete example, Mondragon has been operating very successfully for ~70 years, but barely anyone from outside the region registers its existence.

Right, and if this was the enforced model there would be a lot better spread of risk and a lot more competition. But it's Socialism!!!!

Instead we are almost down to one or two grocery chains and the government is left with the impossible task of regulating the consolidation to mitigate risk and screwed prices.

Corporations from the perspective of most employees are communists dictatorships.

Think about it: you use a communal means of production, distribute profits centrally, and you don’t get to vote for who gets to be your manager.

I guess misconceptions like these are why theorists abandoned the term 'communism' in favor of 'communalism' to explain what they meant.

This isn't even a no-true-scotsman argument, but if all that comes to mind when communism comes up is Soviet dictatorship, the cold war propaganda worked.

For what it's worth, I understood the parent post to specifically be referring to instances like Stalinism, Maoism, etc. since it says specifically "communist dictatorship".

I suspect there was a sneaky edit between the time of my reply and the time you read it.

Just read your sibling comment, talking about gulags or it is not communism...

What should come to mind when communism comes up then?

Something along the lines of: A socioeconomic order centered around common ownership of the means of production, distribution, and exchange that allocates products to everyone in the society based on need.

I guess the point of the poster above is that the word communism just confuses things in the initial statement — it’s just a dictatorship. Socialists and communists fairly uniquely believe in workplace democracy.

A rule of thumb that makes sense to me is that communism generally differs from socialism in that it advocates one or more of the following:

- People actually living and working in communes.

- Abolition of private property (note: this is not the same as personal property).

- Extreme redistribution and/or equality in wealth/income.

I'm sure that this isn't a perfect heuristic; however, I think it's often useful for detecting when someone is trying to describe something as communism in order to make it look bad.

Communism builds walls to prevent you from leaving and put you in labor camps if you refuse to do the work assigned to you. So they are not very comparable at all, consent makes a huge difference.

Leaving is often quite difficult because it means losing benefits and there are often not better alternatives.

Playing devils advocate here - how this is inherent to communism? I would rather guess that this is emerged behaviour of any human system that is facing collapse and has no preventions build in.

I could probably find a few not so great capitalistic systems results (even American flavoured ones) that had tendencies dangerously close to those you describe (ever heard about company stores ? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Company_store).

Walls like health insurance and references?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com