Mondragon as the new city-state
elysian.press
elysian.press
I'm all for more cooperatives, it's a good model. Operating in a system which doesn't compel that form of organization is what keeps them honest. Mondragon is a profitable company, emphasis on profitable.
The article talks a bit about how, while Mondragon is a pretty good deal for basic labor, they have trouble attracting high-demand talent like engineers, which they also need. In a free-market system, a worker's collective can solve a problem like that, by offering more perks, raising the 'level' for new engineering hires, waiving some amount of the up-front investment, or just getting by through, in effect, paying some of the salary in a nonmaterial reward of belonging to something which better meets some people's sense of ethics and fairness.
That's not how it works when the company you work for is also the police and the military. It's also not how it works when every company is compelled to organize itself this way. That compulsion leads to dysfunction, corruption, cheating, and at the extreme end, gulags.
So let's pass on all that. If you believe that worker cooperatives are a social good, as I do, buy stuff from them. Work for one, found one. It's working so far.
I've heard it put as "Socialism works great, as long as the socialist community gets to decide who is included."
This slogan was abolished when more central planning took over, and the word soviet become more associated with the central govt/ the state.
Perhaps that's not inherent to high-demand talent, but Mondragons current composition and markets. I know a handful of engineering consultancies that are cooperatives in everything but name - and I know ofa couple that are legally coops.
Many socialist democrats (or democratic socialist, whatever your flavour) believe that collectivism need not be autocratic and all encompassing. The negative aspects you're describing, in my opinion, are the results of the fascistic elements of an autocratic communist regime. "The Fascist conception of the State is all-embracing..." and so on.
The liberty that open democracy promises is resistant (but not immune) to the kind of coercion you've correctly identified as being characteristic of the Soviet system.
This difference in profit is invested back into the company in terms of capital investment and lower prices allowing more capitalist exploitive corporations to out compete and ultimately buy or destroy coops.
Coops that exist in very small not very profitable niches may survive in the form of small businesses that make enough to survive but not to thrive its hard to see how this has any effect on the other 99.99% of the economy where most people are obligated to live.
My conclusion is that it emerged out of the unique environment of already high Basque solidarity, but even more so under Franco's oppression. After a few generations, they admit that the hardcore spirit is gone and made initiatives to try to restore it, but still some of the biggest co-ops have died or been sold off (ie Fagor).
My friends from there told me: "It's where your dumb cousin works", as it's very political with a lot of patronage kinds of networks that democratic elections at that scale tend to produce. They made a startup community there, but it seemed like most of the kids were trying to get out, not stay to reform the coop.
I think the Italian Emilia Romagna region cooperatives [1] may be a less centralized model that could be better, as it does away with the big organization that eventually rots, like any big old org.
[1] https://www.yesmagazine.org/economy/2016/07/05/the-italian-p...
Obviously this article gives a rosy picture. However, the renewed interest in alternatives is precisely due to the new forms of arbitrary oppression that 21st century capitalism inflicts on many people, so maybe that would be one pathway for Mondragon and other meta-coops to flourish. Who knows.
Moreover, it's not like actually-existing capitalism doesn't tend to produce its own forms of inequality. Maybe a sociologist or economist could show that the "patronage networks" in something like Mondragon are an effect of their structure but the overall negative outcomes are lessened/mitigated compared to the negative social outcomes of Western capitalism. A proper comparison would be an open research question.
That's too bad about Fagor, 10 years ago I ordered a pressure cooker from them but had it returned immediately due to an improper lid fit. That would've been around the time of its decline and eventual closing off. I ended up buying a 2x more expensive pot from a Swiss company, it's lasted me 10 years so far.
You might try reaching out to these guys if you want to visit. They actually get a lot of visitors, and there's a whole tour program I did when I was there.
https://mondragonteamacademy.com/
As far as the effectiveness of Mondragon, I agree that we shouldn't judge it by capitalist standards, but more ask: Can it survive within capitalism while still doing well by its people?
I worry that Fagor, etc. may point to that not being long-term true, but it has been around for a long time, so maybe not. I more think that their model is hard to replicate outside of their high solidary cultural environment, rather than predicting their demise.
They are still a developing country and by no means wealthy, but the average income in this area is double what it is in the rest of the country.
Their economy is built almost entirely on cooperatives. The government provides land and seed funding to get the cooperatives going https://www.hamptonthink.org/read/the-social-economy-of-roja...
Yet with this they were able to beat ISIS when others had failed.
It seems like you're conflating sovereignty with economic dependence, which are two distinct concepts—being entirely economic independent seems highly geographically dependent. Few regions in the world are lucky enough to even have this option. For instance, you can be economically dependent on neighbors but still locally determine who runs the local courts. So it's not great evidence of how their society is run, particularly when other states—say, Afghanistan, where the current government has clearly exercised local sovereignty—have similarly been affected by the withdrawal of US troops and the seizing of assets.
Every regional power seems to periodically crush the population of their sector of Greater Kurdistan, and encourage their neighbors' sectors to start an insurrection.
The US has sacrificed these people over and over again in pursuit of foreign policy objectives.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/oct/13/the-kurds-a-bi...
https://theintercept.com/2019/10/07/kurds-syria-turkey-trump...
1 - Cooperatives excite you and
2 - You use social media
you might want to look at the social.coop Mastodon instance (or cosocial.ca if you're Canadian).
Not only has the community on both those sites been a breath of total fresh air for me, I am not worried about the server I'm on having decide between disappearing and selling ads, and I feel like I'm partaking in a social enterprise.
Just recently social.coop had an open vote on how to donate some of our surplus to the open software we use and organizations that promote cooperation. It's been so nice to see and be apart of.
cosocial.ca charges CA$50 for its annual membership. Omg.lol charges $20/year for Mastodon and a bunch of services and for $29/year, I can offer Mastodon, Lemmy, Matrix and Funkwhale, with 250GB of storage.
We all collectively own the funds, and if we ever want to lower yearly rates or pay our members dividends from surpluses, members are free to put it to a vote.
Part of the reason we run a surplus is to deal with any unexpected costs (they don't just scale with users, but also the popularity of users on our server), but FWIW I think we should open up a pay-what-you-can tier much like social.coop has. Thanks for reminding me, I'll send it to the coop for consideration.
And if "everyone" owns the coop, then why do you need to get the surplus in the first place? Seems to be it would be just fine to say "Every month we run a report of the total expenses, and every member pays an equal share".
It's a fairly common pricing strategy, which offers stability to both clients and organizations surviving on shoestring budgets and good-will.
All I am saying is that the coop (at least cosocial.ca) is not more capital and resource efficient than any good old service provider. We are talking here at a 250% price difference for less functionality. How would you justify that for orgs on a shoestring?
The middleman (in the case, the business providing hosting services) also has a vested interest in pricing risk properly and in reducing the costs of accidents.
Neither of us know anything about the financials of this group, but I can imagine a scenario in which they catch on, and their userbase scales 47x overnight (I mean, they're hoping for that, right?) and they need to spin up new resources right now. Good luck getting someone to write a "we got really popular" insurance policy, let alone pay out within the matter of hours / days they'd need the money. The "extra", right now, could be going towards filling up their reserve fund. Or not - we don't know - but that would be one of any number of legit reasons for asking for more than marginal-cost contributions.
Anyway, people supporting this aren't doing it out of an entirely economic cost / benefit calculation. They believe in whatever mission the org has, and have a high-trust relationship with it, so "paying" more for whatever "product" won't be a concern for them (at least right now). The contribution model the organization has chosen is ideally suited for that sort of (not purely business) relationship.
This group likewise doesn't interest me, but I can tell you stories about organizations I've belonged to and / or helped run that have worked that way more successfully than they would have in any other.
No, insurance is the basic tool for anyone dealing with risk management and financial planning under chaotic variables. One class of these variables are "disasters", but "people get old and less productive in unpredictable rates" is also something that warrants insurance (pensions) and there will be plenty of people making a living by buying and selling options trading in the commodity markets, which also can be seen as "insurance"
> and their userbase scales 47x overnight (I mean, they're hoping for that, right?)
Why would they? They are not looking for boundless growth, just a sustainable operation for their servers.
> They believe in whatever mission the org has, and have a high-trust relationship with it
But what is this mission? "Run a service sustainably, without profiting of user data and contribute to the development of an open social web?" To me it seems there is not much else they can claim beyond what I said, and if that is the case then I can report that all of that is achievable through my run of the mill service that offers more services while costing 40% less.
Your services look great, and I don't "get" these guys either. The people who do are (for now) happy to contribute at whatever level for whatever reason. Not being a "competitor" (as you seem to be?), I'm happy to wish them well.
- The Minneapolis/St. Paul region has so many food co-ops that there's a co-operative warehouse dedicated to serving them (and other businesses too) https://www.cpw.coop/
- New England has a multitude of 30-40 year old food co-ops (along with startups like mine) and has its own association of food co-ops to help advocate for better state policy/governance http://nfca.coop/
- National Co-op Grocers is a US-wide group that helps co-ops buy food at cheaper rates and provides a ton of great branding food co-ops who are members get to use https://www.grocery.coop/
I'd love to see more tech co-operatives sprout up someday... there is an alternative to VC that keeps ownership equal, and it's been all around us this whole time!
Do you happen to know any (specifically in tech), that you would recommend?
Thanks!
When we expanded about 17 years ago we managed to drive a new Whole Foods that had sprouted across town out of business within a year. Haven't heard of that happening elsewhere. They had a terrible location which didn't help but I think it was more due to the loyalty of our customers who had buy-in (literally).
Because the majority of workers are doing the minimum amount of work to get by, because ~50% of workers are below average intelligence, because those with the entrepreneurial skill and/or business management competence necessary to make this happen benefit more from the current system and have less motivation to mess with it.
Better to have a system based on creating things.
Note that capitalism does not exclude worker-owned companies at all. You're free to start one.
Pretty damning critique of capitalists there, comrade.
BTW, studies of the bones of pre-Columbian Indians shows they worked hard and suffered from periodic famines, as well as a lot of violence.
Industries tend to require raw materials, which many times are located in or around land.
But the profits were looted from the workers who actually built all that stuff.
Capitalists aren't the ones hammering in steel spikes or wearing clean-room fab suits.
There aren't more of them because they have a hell of a time securing financing when most businesses are financed through equity sales which they can't do.
Despite government support to the extent much larger than that for SpaceX collective farms have nothing to show for it.
Things like Friends of Amateur Rocketry have all the characteristics of a collective (including legal status) https://friendsofamateurrocketry.org/
The constraining factor is typically budget (as mentioned up-thread).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JZD_Slu%C5%A1ovice#TNS_Compute...
> most businesses are financed through equity sales
Maybe once we've seen a few hundred of these come and go it'll be time for a general theory of their kind.
2B people spent better part of 20th century doing the experiments, killing tens of millions of those who didn’t completely shared the ideas of the collective, and you think it is premature?
General theory is in the Das Kapital. So far the things have worked as described. People by mistake ascribe happiness to the outcomes calculated there while there is no such happiness predicted by that theory. Ie communism isn’t a happy place like some naïve readers think, communism is prison and oppression.
Surely the USSR is an example of the pigs pulling a bait and switch rather than communism.
The failure of the USSR to achieve communism is a side show to all the variations on worker | producer collectives that didn't fall to Stalinism.
Or have you worked there and this is first hand?
If anything the current situation stands to worsen that situation with smart young people who might contribute to a better future dying or fleeing.
It might be a lack of education (not a value statement). Socialism in Spain was not established at once. It was an effort spanning many decades.
If we would suddenly find ourselves in a medieval kingdom we would certainly need time (and help) to adapt to that system. Likewise, people from that period would need time (and help) to adapt to ours. Regardless of whether it is better.
Socialism came to be commonly associated with "State-capitalist monopoly" (Lenin) later in the 20th century but that does not describe revolutionary Spain at all.
There companies were mostly worker owned, democratically managed and freely associated within democratic regional and industrial cartels representing consumers' and producers' interests respectively. Highly advanced democratic systems. Larger companies were expropriated compulsory. Yes. But they were transferred into the ownership of the workforce. While smaller companies generally were free to operate as "private" enterprises though at a certain size that rarely made sense because all of industry was structured to serve democratically managed industrial operations.
Even Lenin propagandized "All power to the soviets!" because his coup d'etat would have been impossible without popular support.
My hometown in Oregon had a cooperative, Burley, that made bike stuff like trailers and tandems and some clothing. Word was that it was kind of dysfunctional because of how democratic it was even if all the people cared deeply. I think they finally ended up selling out to some outfit who scrapped everything but the trailers.
Or to put it another way: Ground meat is great, but the components thereof by themselves are generally regarded as waste.
And I'm sure that plenty of people who could start a business on their own could start a business with the help and support of like-minded partners, and might even be better off for it. I'm not sure where we get the idea that founders must be lone-wolf savants.
Correct. I've definitely heard of AKB 48 and other idol groups; I have never heard anything concerning any specific member of one other than randomly showing up on a cheap variety show long after they retired ("graduated") from showbiz.
>Ground meat made from poor quality meat is poor quality ground meat
But it's generally preferable to the poor quality component meats, which was what I tried to allude to.
>people who could start a business on their own could start a business with the help and support of like-minded partners,
People with the chops to become founders on their own can also become co-founders joining with other similar people.
People without the chops can't become founders without joining others to become co-founders.
Basically: All apples are fruits, but not all fruits are apples.
And the more difficult project you have, the more extreme this gets. If it is something that most people could do, it is easy for the cooperative people to find each other. It if it something that only one person in a thousand can do, the one-in-a-thousand cooperative person will have a huge problem finding the rest of the team.
Why? Everybody with the money to start it, wants more money or special tax treatment via charity.
I’m actively funding ours myself for 0% return in order to bootstrap the infrastructure we need
Actually, I wonder if there's a word for this effect?
There’s then also something deeper about making the trade-off between growth(rate) and stability..
OTOH photographer coops are quite common, here is a famous one https://en.wikipedia.com/wiki/Magnum_Photos
However, if your issues are tied to local characteristics, then (in maybe an abstract way) you still have another fundamental obstacle to scalability, not related to compensation..
(FWIW i think an interesting related question is whether YC might be able to scale outside SF if they werent so into the slogan “do things that dont scale” — which i sometimes interpret as the viridical paradox “scale by not scaling”)
Maybe nationalism can do that, but keep in mind that when this was combined with nationalism we got Nazism (Nazism took lots of inspiration from Austrian corporatism which was similarly influenced by Catholic social teaching here). I'm not sure it's either safe or advisable to do this aside from religion
By historical reasons the Basque country has an special tax regime and economical benefits from the Spanish government. This may have an influence on the outcome. Is easier to win when the other run handicapped, and not so easy to replicate it if we remove that context.
Most people also ignores that this system exists. Out of Euskadi, the name is more associated to the (in)famous band orchestre Mondragon, that was an appropriately anarchical mess, part circus, part rock band.
Be afraid, very afraid: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XWKHnjWMTNI
I'm sure 99% of people first heard this term in the famous Holy Grail bit. I have never seen it used in the wild. Thanks!
making any statement about 99% of the people who have heard of anarcho-syndicalism represents a staggering degree of unconcern for veracity, given how hard it is to get a handle on that group
Arizmendiarrieta wasn't a Franco follower at all. He fought with the Republicans and went to jail during the war. After that stopped writing in Basque, as that wasn't seen with good eyes in Franco times.
Work syndicates, cooperatives are absolutely in line with the Falange. Straight out of the 26 points
"We seek redistributing arable land in such a way as to revive family farms and give energetic encouragement to the syndicalization of farm laborers"
If you make a picture and someone steals it, okay that's not fair. If you make a picture and someone makes a copy, also not fair. But if you and million others make pictures, and someone else looks at them and learns how to make their own pictures... that's basically how people were doing it since ever. Except now this process can also be automated.
Every artist who never studied the art of others, and invented their own style from scratch, has a right to complain, of course.
> The profits generated by each cooperative are put to work for the benefit of the greater whole. Each cooperative gives 14-40% of their gross profits to their division (depending on the division), and another 14% to their parent company. The rest are invested back in the cooperative (60% of net profits), distributed among their employees (30% of net profits), and donated to social organizations in their communities (10% of net profits).
> Workers buy into their cooperative when they become employees, investing up to €16,000 into a personal equity account. They pay 30% of that investment upfront, with the remainder taken out of their paychecks over following 2 to 7 years. After two years with the organization, workers become “members” and start earning interest on their investment at a rate of at least 7.5% annually. If the cooperative does well, they might earn much more than that. Workers can pull this money out of their accounts when they leave the cooperative or retire.
... so it's not ownership, right? It's profit-sharing while you're an employee (the "interest" the worker gets is out of that 30% of net profits discussed previously), but you don't own shares in the company that you can then sell, like an employee who receives an RSU or receives and exercises an option.
In some sense, corporate employees that get some form of equity as part of their compensation are more literally worker-owners. I think the problem with American companies that have an employee stock plan is that the employee stock pool is a small slice of the total ownership, and employees don't participate in any real democratic governance. Despite being shareholders, they get far less information about the financial health or strategic position of the company than investors with board seats. Real partial ownership doesn't lead to real power or access to information. And the aim of the company is still to serve the larger investors, not the workers.
Like a company can't just be cool with the fact that they serve a profitable market niche and gainfully employ people. Investors need capital gains and won't just be satisfied with getting reliable dividends!
Stock buy backs ruined corporate governance...
My understanding is both return $X/share of capital to shareholders, buybacks are just more tax efficient, flexible, and a little more difficult to see the direct effect of.
This arrangement is called a pension, and is still quite popular in areas of the world with strong workers rights.
That might be how your pension works.
Other pension schemes; eg Singapores and some other former and current commonwealth countries pay pension from the returns from 60 odd years of compulsary investment and additional supplementary investment.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Central_Provident_Fund
https://www.expatica.com/sg/finance/retirement/singapore-pen...
"Returns from an investment fund" are not the same as "taxes collected monthly", money, being fungible, can make it seem that way.
As soon as a worker leaves or sells their shares, these shares aren't worker-owned anymore and the interests of their owner can quickly diverge from the ones of a worker. That's roughly what a coop fixes I think.
I own shares of past companies I've worked at, but I don't have any representation in how the company is run. It doesn't matter if my interests have diverged from current workers, because I have no influence.
If a company compensates its employees partially with RSUs, and those employees own and can eventually transfer those shares freely, and the company was also democratically governed by its workers ... could you not have "real" ownership (by current and past workers) and still protect current workers' democratic governance?
yes and no, i’d call the distinction collective ownership. you can sell your shares (by quitting), or you can stay and participate democratically. but you can’t do both, and that protects your say in the company, preventing investors from overruling worker-owners.
> i have no influence
neither do the current workers. the issue isn’t retail investors, but the ones with board seats. if boards only had one seat for an investor, that’d be one thing, but usually workers only get a single seat, if any.
> protect current workers’ democratic governance
you could do this with preferred shares, voting shares, etc. investor shares are non voting, voting shares can only be owned by workers, etc. you still have to counter their concentration though.
Any organization that arranges for its workers to govern it has some organizing document that describes this structure. Any organization that arranges for its workers to become owners must pick mechanism for this to happen. My view is that these can be basically independent choices:
- A firm can pursue a profit-sharing-for-current-workers approach as described for Mondragon, or can issue RSUs or options ("real" and transferable ownership)
- And regardless of what "ownership" vehicle they pick, they can still be organized to be democratically governed by its workers (establishment of which need not be dependent on any stipulated "ownership"). I.e. your organizing docs can describe a board composed of current employees, elected by employees, etc.
I am skeptical of the claim that profit-sharing while you're an employee is "ownership" in part because you are incentivized to prefer that the firm take profits while you work there. By comparison, if as a worker your vested stake persists even after you leave or retire, you might be much more inclined to vote for large reinvestments this year (and for the next several) which may not yield a profit until after you've left. Temporary "ownership" may not encourage the same long-term view as ordinary literal ownership.
> Cooperative guarantee that profit is owned by the people who create it.
I don't think all the value created by workers is realized as profit immediately. Workers can create value which only shows up in contributions to revenue much later. If you and your coworkers figured out the design and manufacturing process for a new product and the product only goes to market after you retired, you helped create the profits even if they arrive after you left the firm.
If the coop structure as you narrowly define it doesn't allow workers to receive the profits of their labor in industries that have a long time to market or R&D cycle, then isn't that a recipe for those high value industries to be inaccessible to coops?
Try to imagine an alternate history where Nvidia was a coop. A lot of the value behind its current high revenue was done many years ago. Cuda was released in 2007. I don't know how much of the hardware has inherited from older designs. If only current workers benefit from the current high sales, has the organization really ensured that "profit is owned by the people who create it"? That seems implausible.
Now suppose that all the work they did was in the R&D phase (and fundamental to the project) but the final product had not been released at the time of death of the contributor — so the profits had not been realized — thus the payout on those shares would be a small fraction of their true valuation.
Imagine if a novelist died just after submitting their final draft to their editor but prior to the book’s publication. Forcing the estate to sell off the book before it had a chance to hit the shelves — and become a bestseller — would be an outrage, yet the rigid nature of worker co-ops (cessation of work forces the sale of shares) guarantees this.
The issue is that the deceased researcher's contribution to the project may be so central and foundational that they may be entitled to a large plurality (or even majority) stake, but forcing the other worker-owners to buy out that stake to pay the estate would bankrupt the coop at this critical pre-production stage. Since only active workers are allowed to maintain ownership, allowing the estate to retain those shares and later receive dividends on future profits is off the table. This issue seems to tie everyone's hands and sound the death knell for the coop.
The novelist case was meant to show an extreme non-coop situation. I don't see any compelling reason for writers of books to join coops, since the writing of the book is the only hard part these days (and countless ways to self-publish exist).
The case with the novelist is also easy to answer. Publishers do more than just printing books. They also do marketing, host events, send authors to interviews etc. All of that work becomes smaller if you share it with others. Plus being new to the industry, you can get the help from experienced writers. Cooperating with other people has loads of advantages. I could go on for hours. Also nobody is forced to join cooperatives. Every novelist can decide to remain a freelancer. It’s basically a cooperative with a single worker. A lot of cooperatives are founded by groups of freelancers by the way, because already having a business mindset, having experienced the freedom of owning your own business and wanting to stay in control when collaborating with others, makes cooperatives the obvious choice.
You are always more free, have more options and are treated better when you own the result of your work.
And as the worker creating that future profit you are very well aware of that, plus everyone else working on the design and manufacturing is in the same situation as yourself. The good news is: all of you are also owners of the company. So together you can decide how an exit package should look like for people deciding to leave before the design reaches the market and generates profit.
The same situation in a non-cooperative is a lot worse, because you have no stake in the company. The owner might be willing to negotiate an exit package before you even start working there, but they also might not. Plus before working at the company, you have no idea what the profit margins look like and what you might be working on. It’s the worst time for you to agree on an exit pacakge. Also during employment you are in a worse position, because the owner(s) can just let you go, if you are the only one asking for your fair share of future profits. You don’t have a say in the company. Most often they see your current salary as your share of the profit, no matter how much profit your design might create in the future.
So who are the owners if not the workers?
And yes, the real problem is information asymmetry. This is always the real problem. Arguably the secretary who knows everything that's going on with the company via watercooler talk has more power than the CEO whose underlings tell him only what he wants to hear. A lot of corporate owners, even powerful shareholders like the Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia, have been bilked by unscrupulous but savvy management who knows how to control information flow.
"Ownership" as in: You control it, and you ought to control it, too.
Control is exercised by means of the democratic process (the worst type of process except for all others).
Can any people from this region tell us what the downsides of working for Mondragon are? The article only touched on lower pay.
Also how much does the President of the parent Mondragon Corp get paid? The often cited 6:1 or 9:1 lowest paid worker to CEO seems to be applied to CEOs of the various corporations not the president of the parent company.
“Lorenzo estimates that the president of Mondragon is the highest-paid position (level 6) with a salary of around €200,000. Managers and directors earn between €80,000 and €120,000.”
The author doesn't speculate why, but I'd guess it's partly due to Basque ethnic solidarity. Mondragon sounds a lot like the kind of late 1800s / early 1900s syndicalism that later evolved into Italian fascism and German National Socialism.
Of course, another big "collectivist capitalism" success story is China, which is also fiercely nationalist.
I don't see either of those models working in the West on a large scale any time soon.
But you do see it among the Amish, and the Basques, and the Boers, and in the kibbutzim, and in families generally, because kin relations are meaningful among humans and elsewhere in the animal world.
And I'm not arguing that "collectivist success requires ethnic purity", just noticing a correlation. Where you see apparent altruism in economics -- including nepotism in hiring -- you tend to find kin relations.
Probably the game theorists and evolutionary psychologists have it figured out.
The needs aren't forced upon you. They're inherent. Labor is required to meet the needs you must meet in order to live (and live in comfort). They'd be needed even if no board of directors had ever sat in a meeting room. So who's coercing you? It's like a farmer hating his field: you're mad that companies 'make' you work to survive; a farmer might hate his field for 'making' him plant seeds to produce food.
I don't get it. It seems delusional.
Are you proposing we seize their land? That’s what the Soviets did. Millions died. With the weaponry we have today it could be hundreds of millions or billions. All for what? So people don’t have to work?
Now suppose we do collectivize all the farms, this time miraculously without killing everyone, and we successfully set up the automation to feed everyone (despite the fact that a lot of crops still need to be picked by hand due to a lack of robot technology). We still don’t eliminate the need for work. There’s tons of other stuff to be done. Building houses, computers, trains, planes, automobiles, and new factory robots. There’s still tons of research going into all this stuff, maintenance and repair. People still need to do all this work. Who is going to pay them? Who is going to own what they produce?
If I build a robot in my garage to automate harvesting the peppers I grow in my backyard, do I own it?
Not necessarily, but I think the workers should operate their farm democratically.
> That’s what the Soviets did
The USSR was state capitalist. Workers' councils (or soviets) stopped being considered very early on.
> If I build a robot in my garage to automate harvesting the peppers I grow in my backyard, do I own it?
Yes, it's your personal property. Private property is something else.
And how did they come to own their land? You trace the claims back enough and it'll resolve to "some ancestor took it from someone else at the point of a spear". But we don't need to seize the land. A land value tax achieves the same goals while leaving in place all the nice free-market stuff you're talking about.
Yes, this falls under the same umbrella of theories that Nozick's rectification [1] falls under, where the same critiques and remedies apply.
A land value tax achieves the same goals while leaving in place all the nice free-market stuff you're talking about.
Now you're speaking my language. I'm fully on board with land value tax, as it purports to achieve many other goals that I value, such as fixing up a lot of dysfunctional city planning and development.
[1] https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/nozick-political/#RecHisI...
If we oversimplify a human's needs into clothing, food, and a dwelling, and ignore the concept of money, the industrial revolution has made it so that humanity is able to produce enough of those for everybody. It then becomes a distribution and coordination problem rather than a problem of there not being enough for everybody. Of course, if we abolished money there would be other problems, so it's still delusional, but if 100 people can make enough food and shelter and clothing for 1000 people using machines, why do the other 900 need to sit in an an office making spreadsheets five days a week?
It's not that simple, of course (because those machines have to come from somewhere), and homesteading is a thing, but it's food for thought.
"Socialism" back then, much like "Human Rights" today, was generally associated with what is morally right. It was not an ideology of extremist groups. Fascism "evolved" from socialism same as everybody and their mother evolved from it.
And because of its dominance, everybody tried to exploit it, too. So you called your organisation "National Socialist Party" and your heads of propaganda copied the rhetoric.
Also, libertarian socialism was nowhere as developed as in Spanish society at that time. This is not the most surprising society to generate Mondragon.
Yugoslavia had a dynamic market socialist economy and was powerful enough to align against the USSR for decades, yet was multi ethnic.
It suffered from the typical authoritarian weak succession and was ultimately destroyed by its resurgent ethnic nationalism.
Sure, if you dishonestly use their slogans rather than policy decisions as your barometer. What actually happened is that fascists co-opted the language of the left and deployed it in service of entirely different ends.
Basque country is, again, rich because it has an special tax treatment and could be considered a tax heaven to some extent.
I'd say its a well developed region comparable to Northern Italy. Both were badly hit by the Euro. Had they kept their own currencies, they'd be closer to Sweden or Southern Germany.
Spaniards tends to have this idea that Spain is a shithole when it’s really one of the best countries in the world.
Its looting of the gold and silver from S. America apparently didn't help.
You may think it is sad, they may just think it is the way it should be done and that's it. I don't think you can judge the coop concept based on the impression you got from the city. Its inhabitants may on average feel happier than those where you live.
But lots of employees live and work in much nicer spots like the San Sebastián area.
Many engineering and hardware companies all around the Basque Country are owned by Mondragón.
Dude reinvented the socialist mode of production but renamed it "capitalism" instead lmao
Another problem is law. At this point it favors the common ownership forms of business. Starting a coop is hence much harder than it should be. This is what i think where the "it's a shame" make most sense. We should make w-coops easier to start and give them tax benefits as they are on the long run much more beneficial/ less detrimental to society.
While I believe you are correct that co-ops are not a great fit for the growth business strategy that VCs make their bread and butter on, I believe that on many metrics co-ops tend to be more sustainable than the corporate alternatives[0]. This means they are more likely to be around tomorrow to pay off a loan.
All this to say, it would be great to see more capital for co-ops in the form of traditional loans with favourable interest rates.
[0] https://www.theguardian.com/social-enterprise-network/2014/m...
Sure, that would be great. But what can govt do today to incentivize that?
I'd say just relax (tax) law on w-coops to incentivize them compared to the less favorable forms of incorporation.
The Canadian gov't offers some grants for co-ops, but they are a pittance. Making debt cheaper for co-ops relative to corps (maybe via additional tax breaks on interest?) is, I think super important.
For example I know Germany has structures like works councils that are foreign to us in N. America (though this is not a worker coop structure). However these structures historically arise from labor movements, not from top-down planning from authorities or electoral politics, which takes more than thinking up a design for a better society without considering who and why it would be implemented
Cuba has many, but also usually are state initiated and somewhat state controlled. China, Vietnam and DPRK have many "not true worker coops" also due to state control.
Finland, Italy and Basque/Spain also score high, and we're talking about actual worker coops there.
So as an example you could have hypothetical opensource.coop that funds open source projects like signoz or posthog, giving the team a year of runway in exchange for a cut of future profits, with follow on funding if certain milestones are reached.
Same could work for "indie hackers" or boostrappers, merge a few successful companies into a holding company that shares office space, accounting, legal and etc, and reinvests a fixed % of profits to seed new projects that apply to join.
I agree with many VC-backed startups develop toxic behavior.
In a Co-op you put up your own money to buy into a co-op. This is the opposite of VC where an external party joins your org with money.
So a co-op model would only help to serve the already wealthy.
However, maybe it would be interesting to have a co-op for developer resources for example. As in companies or startups can buy into the coop in return for cheaper rates and more vertically integrated team augmentation.
You offer founders that apply a coworking space and a stipend that can get renewed each year if the members of the coop agree to keep funding it. In exchange the new member commits to giving up 10% of their future profits that get split into an investment budget and dividends.
If a company is failing the members can vote to stop funding them and set them free of the agreement.
If a company needs way more funds and VC route makes more sense you spin it out as a c corp, convert the 10% profit agreement into equity and let them raise funding like any other startup would.
This was recognized by everyone from Karl Marx to Abraham Lincoln to Adam Smith. Smith even conceded that profit was impossible if workers retain their surplus value, which is exactly the point.
I bring this up because that's what capitalism is: draining the surplus labor value from workers to the capital-owning class. In feudalism, the artistocracy and th emonarchy extracted that value. Jeff Bezos is the new king.
Why do I mention this? Because it wasn't that long ago that this view was universally accepted. The Red Scare post-WW2 spread a lot of damaging propaganda that has led ordinary people to fight for the ultra-rich to have even more money, to their own detriment.
Walmart killing all your local businesses then leaving, leaving you in a food desert with a Family Dollar store maybe. That's capitalism. Locally-owned businesses. That's socialism. Monsanto agribusiness? Capitalism. Family-owned farms? Socialism.
Something like Mondragon shows that large-scale cooperatives can work. And the reason why these sorts of things aren't more prevalent is that laws are passed to make them difficult to set up or outright illegal. Many US states outlaw municipal broadband, for example.
And any country in the last 70 years that even thinks about nationalizing resource extraction finds itself having a coup that nearly always has the CIA's fingerprints over it.
Or we simply starve them to death under the sanitized euphemism of "economic sanctions" (eg Cuba, Iraq, Venezuela). I really want people to understand that we're not doing this for any moral reason. We're doing it at the behest of Western companies who would prefer to steal the riches of these countries.
Co-operatives can go a lot further than manufacturing too. It can be a solution for housing. Housing cooperatives cut out landlords, who are rent-seeking both literally and figuratively.
I was mildly critiquing the accuracy.
>>>Locally-owned businesses. That's socialism. There is definitely nothing in the definition of socialism that says everything is locally-owned. Moreover, that can be a way to end up with things like Redlining and other institutional racial issues.
>>>There is no value without labor. The great thing Marx did was show that everything could be converted to a value measured by labor. But, economists afterwards showed that once you have that conversion, you can do it literally with anything. We could have a system based on the number of bumblebees required to build a house. That is a normative judgement that labor is somehow special.
Now, our current implementation of Capitalism is clearly wreaking havoc on our environment. But it has brought the standard of living up across the entire world past a Malthusian cycle of more food means more people, means they eat the food, and we have starvation.
The same can be said for current implementations of Communism all across the globe.
Lastly, cooperatives may be a great solution for a lot of manufacturing and housing challenges. And when you get to the scale of a country, a co-op is just a government, and a capitalistic democracy feels a lot more like a co-op than a dictatorship or authoritarianism even with all its pitfalls. A populous who then really starts to demand through votes that we change to improve the blight of our fellow humans seems an even better place to live, if we can just get there.
>> There is definitely nothing in the definition of socialism that says everything is locally-owned. Moreover, that can be a way to end up with things like Redlining and other institutional racial issues.
I read the OPs post as an example of propoganda (mega corp - capitalism, small company - socialism) not reality.
In reality it's almost the opposite, it's bootstrap capitalism for the little guys, and "socialism" and government handouts for the ultra wealthy. (I put socialism in quotes because this term is extremely commonly misused.)
It's an oversimplification to highlight the main point: workers' relationship to the means of production. In capitalism, capital owners own the means of production. In socialism, the workers own the means of production.
IME most Americans not only don't know what socialism is (despite being opposed to it), they don't know what capitalism is either (despite supporting it).
> Now, our current implementation of Capitalism is clearly wreaking havoc on our environment.
It's doing an awful lot more than that. It's pillaging the Global South. It's impoverishing us under the massive weight of housing, medical and student debt. And it's quite literally killing people. People decry the failures of the USSR, for example, but 9 million people die of starvation every year. Why isn't this attributed as a failure of capitalism in the same way?
Communist countries are the most polluted ones.
Free markets, on the other hand, work even if they aren't perfect. The more free they are, the better they work.
Couldn't it just be argued that free market extremism is as much folly as a pro-central planning position?
The trouble with calling free markets folly is they are enormously successful, in every place and time where they have been tried. The trouble with central economic planning is it always does badly.
BTW, one of the functions of government in a free market is to regulate the externalities - costs of doing business that are not borne by the business. Pollution is the most obvious one of those externalities, so calling a polluting business "extreme free market" is incorrect.
> Endorsing free markets does not have to equate with an unquestioning obsession, bordering on fetishistic, with liberty.
Question it all you like!
You shouldn't have a problem demonstrating this then? It's easy to enumerate all failed central planned economies, there really never was one that succeeded. Why don't you give an example of country that failed miserable with millions of deaths because of too much free markets.
https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2022/03/22/1087654279/how...
https://www.britannica.com/place/Russia/Post-Soviet-Russia
https://www.nbcnews.com/health/health-news/alcohol-blamed-ha...
An infestation of pyramid schemes (also happened in post-communist Albania, too, leading to civil war).
The beauty of capitalism is that it works (or seems to work for some people, for the time being) by externalizing its true costs to other countries, other social strata -- and indeed far into the future.
Though mortality rates seem not to have risen (and may in fact declined) in the U.S. during the peak depression years (1930-1933) -- as a global phenomenon, the collapse of a system based on "too much free markets" is generally seen as one of the primary drivers of WW2, so we would have to attribute some share of its 70-85 million fatalities this market-driven collapse as well.
And not just by accident. There's also the fact that "free market" interests and Western financial support were key to Hitler and Mussolini's rise to power in the first place, as the former saw the latter as a perhaps unsavory but ultimately necessary bulwark against the rising spectre of a global socialist movement (whether on the Bolshevik model or otherwise).
Plus the whole European colonial project in Asia, Africa and the Americas, and the several hundred million deaths that it brought to the table. Though to be fair, this wasn't so much a matter of any collapse of the free market system of the time -- but rather of it working exactly as it was intended, from the very start.
And of course now we're headed for a much larger disaster with likely at least as many hundred millions of deaths looming on the horizon -- in the form of climate change and its attendant disruptions, also very much a direct result of "too much free markets".
So there you go.
Are there any sustainable socialist economies by any metric?
> European colonial project
Colonialism is not free market.
> also very much a direct result of "too much free markets"
Again, communist countries are the most polluted ones. The reason is straightforward - their economies produced so little, they couldn't afford environmental protection costs.
China has hit it out of the park, I think it's quite fair to say. (Could easily name a whole bunch more, but gotta keep this short. It's also a moot subject, per my last item below).
Colonialism is not free market.
That's the thing -- "free market" societies have never really been free, once externalities are accounted for. But the multi-century European colonial project was no mere externality. Its genesis, ideology and economics were inseparable from the development of Western-style capitalism as we know it.
Again, communist countries are the most polluted ones. The reason is straightforward - their economies produced so little, they couldn't afford environmental protection costs.
I wouldn't be so sure about that. But this also gets into a much more important topic we've been leaving out: there's no dichotomy between "socialism" and "capitalism" -- and never was. Nearly every modern, large-scale economy has been a working hybrid of both systems.
Even the good ole' USA.
> "free market" societies have never really been free
Of course. But the free'er they are, the better they work.
> has been a working hybrid of both systems
The socialist part flounders along, supported by taxes on the free market. The bigger the socialist part, the worse the economy as a whole performs.
We weren't talking about communism, but rather socialism. Also, its markets are very far from free.
That's all I have time for. Good luck.
It seems to work for any country that embraced free market ideas the same way socialist policies predictably don't work in any country that tried them.
You are seriously claiming WW2, colonialism and climate change is a direct consequence of people having too much choice? If only Germany had a strong dictator preventing people to be too free to choose, oh wait,...
The vast majority of folks have comparatively few meaningful choices available to them. About things like Android vs. iPhone, sure. But about things that actually matter -- like the fact that they have to work so hard all their lives; and that they probably have to drive a car to get there; that the oceans are filling up with microplastics, and their drinking water with something called PFAS that very few people had even heard of until very recently, and so on -- not all that much.
What I mean is that these bad things are the result of centuries of the elites of these partially "free" societies having too many choices available to them.
Or more specifically: of not having to account for the true costs of their choices.
is this a serious statement?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Labor_theory_of_value
As wikipedia says, "modern mainstream economics rejects the LTV" (for very good reasons). It leads to some pretty obvious absurdities if you take it seriously. For example, 10,000 people digging holes should be more "valuable" than one guy designing a microchip, because hey! The holes take more labor.
Nevermind Marx accounted for demand and markets when talking about cost of labor, but people love to strawman.
You may choose to disagree. Just as modern economists disagree with the LTV.
Modern economists haven't refuted this, and in fact many parrot it, and anyone saying they have rejected the idea is misinformed. See for instance https://bnarchives.yorku.ca/308/2/20101200_cockshott_nitzan_...
The LTV absolutely accounts for demand (what capitalists call "value") and in fact requires it for its description of how capitalism operates. It's really just saying there are two forms of value: aggregate demand and aggregate production costs, with competition driving prices down to production costs. If you don't agree with that, I don't really know how else to help because it's kind of a universal truth in a mass production market economy.
Economy is not a natural or exact science. There is a mainstream. But this does not mean that there is no valid inquiries and theories outside mainstream.
You are the one defending the LTV, not me. If value = labor, but not when that would be silly, it's a bit like saying F = ma, but not when that would be silly. No serious scientist would accept this formulation. You would be laughed out the room.
After millions of deaths, environment devastation, and political repression, Marxism deserves to be laughed out of the room as well. I hope it will be, some day.
I never said anything about "use the theory, except when its silly". What was silly was the example because of the lack of understanding of the parent comment: LTV does not work like described by that comment. You can not even properly criticize something if you do not understand it.
The moralist excuse to forbid or negate certain knowledge is also silly. Depending on where you live (USA, Europe), you probably post these comments in a society built (and perhaps even mantained) by an even larger kill count, but I never will use this as a way to refuse or negate discussion or knowledge.
I've already presented several scenarios where a different amount of labor did not produce a different amount of value. Your response has just been that "socially necessary labor" is different than "labor." But this is nonsense since we don't have any authority to tell us what is "socially necessary" and what is not. Indeed, we have many examples of socialist governments deciding that it's not "socially necessary" for certain groups of people to eat at all -- the Holodomor in Ukraine, or der Hungerplan in Nazi Germany.
Your examples are exactly as expected by LTV. LTV agrees that they do not produce different exchange values. The problem is that you are just ignoring what the LTV says, ignoring the theory definitions and is coming with your own ideas of what you think it says. And when I try to give you what the theory says, you just say that it is nonsense, saying more things that confirm that you have no idea about what you are talking:
> But this is nonsense since we don't have any authority to tell us what is "socially necessary" and what is not.
You do not need the authority. The theory describes the functioning of free markets, and capitalism running without hindrances. But taking into account the material reality that you need nature + labor to socially produce things and that in one side you have production, at the other side you have consumption and these things need to be balanced.
Pro tip: LTV was the mainstream of economical theories during the era when Adam Smith, David Ricardo, Marx, and all other classical economists published their contributions. All them agreed with LTV. Do you really think that you can refute it using so silly examples? In fact, there are several criticisms and known paradoxes that applies to older forms of LTV, but your attacks are missing even these older and more naive forms. Which is expected: you cannot formulate proper criticism for things that you do not fully understand and did not study.
That's not what Marxism says at all.
It would be more accurate to say "modern mainstream economists". To say "economics" here is a real failure on Wikipedia's moderation. Because what they're actually talking about, is the Austrian School of Economics [1]:
> The Austrian school is a heterodox[1][2][3] school of economic thought that advocates strict adherence to methodological individualism,
"Individualism" is the key part here because it betrays the intent, which is to disempower people from acting collectively, such as by forming unions. This is a key tenet of classical liberalism so an appeal to authority like "modern mainstream economics" we're really just saying "neoliberalism".
Neoliberalism isn't a neutral account or critique of capitalism. It wholly embraces capitalism as a solution to all problems. Neoliberalism can pretty much be summed up as weaker/smaller government (because it hurts profits) and indivudalism (because collective action hurts profits).
> 10,000 people digging holes should be more "valuable" than one guy designing a microchip
That's an asinine example. I mean what hole are they digging? If it's the Panama Canal, that's pretty valuable. Also, the example of one person designing a chip goes to the heart of the problem that LTV addressses. What does that design do? Well, nothing. It only has value if you make something with it you can sell (or you sell it to someone who does). You want to fab it? Well, TSMC involves a lot of labor. ASML involves a lot of labor. The materials required require a lot of labor.
Plus there's the issue that the chip design itself is intellectual property, which itself is an enclosure (in the capitalist sense).
Everything we as a society is so fundamentally interconnected that it's arbitrary and selective to attribute the value created to a tiny few. And it's done for the gain of the few at the expense of the many.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Austrian_school_of_economics
That's an asinine example. I mean what hole are they digging? If it's
the Panama Canal, that's pretty valuable.
“You don’t understand, Mr. Friedman, this canal is a jobs program to provide work for as many men as possible.”
“Oh, I see. I thought you were trying to build a canal. If you really want to create jobs, then by all means give these men spoons, not shovels.”
I am a capitalist and my money goes to pay labor to create a thing that I sell in a market. The workers create thing in the production process. I have captured a portion of the labor's true value based on the market, bringing me profit - what Marx called "surplus value."
I turn around and reinvest that profit into another business that brings me more profit. Rinse and repeat, forever.
But that profit is nothing but a portion of the labor's true value as reflected in the market price, and therefore the labor created the value. The market did not create the value. The market decided on a price to pay for the value created by the labor.
Much like "machines all the way down", value is labor all the way down.
Related: when Marxism was actually implemented, they had big problems with not building the right things, and building the things they did build poorly. For example a factory was assigned the task of building N pounds of nails a day, so they just built one giant nail that weighed N pounds (and was totally useless) rather than buliding what was needed. Because it turns out, management is actually needed and useful.
[And so are price signals, but let's take baby steps here!]
this is so wrong. management is labor, too.
In the Marxist view, the work just inherently "happens" (like water flowing down a stream) and capitalists can only be like a water wheel "capturing the value" that's flowing past. Of course, this is bullshit, but that is the mentality.
While this is generally true, it's also not the entire equation. For example, there's no gain without risk.
- When I work for someone else, I am offloading some of the risk to that person/owner. When someone starts a company and hires other people... if the company goes belly up, the founder loses their investment; the workers find another job.
- When I rent from someone else, I am offloading the risk of owning a property to someone else. If I get a job across the country, I don't need to sell my house at a loss to move.
None of this justifies people making insane amounts of money while others are starving. But neither should the worker expect to reap all the benefit unless their also willing to take all the risk.
So does the bank, and the state that (more often than not) subsidised said investment through diverse vehicles. If the bank goes belly up, we've seen what happens, we collectively contribute to save them... because we're collectively sharing all the risk of investment in our financialized economies.
I agree that some people don't want risk and others do, but as soon as you start sharing ownership that dichotomy simply disappears.
In 2008 I believe bailouts did go to companies to keep them afloat (and thus helped shareholders). However, TARP returned a small profit for the government, so it didn't end up being a gift of free money overall imo. (reasonable people can say that the bailouts were excessive and introduced moral hazard for sure).
Workers generally risk their lives or simply injury. Owners "risk" capital. I put that in quotes because our government is typically set up to rescue failing businesses and by that I mean bailing out the owners. If the business fails, the owner simply has less money or they have to become a worker.
So who is really taking a risk here?
> When I rent from someone else, I am offloading the risk of owning a property to someone else.
We shouldn't treat housing as an investment vehicle. It is shelter and necessary to live. Every level of government is subordinate to the cause of increasing property prices as society increasingly views housing as a vehicle to build generational wealth.
The majority of housing in vienna is state-owned (so-called "social housing"). Any kind of state housing has been successfuly propagandized as a "slum" ("project") but there's no need for that to happen. The UK, prior to Thatcher coming along and dismantling the whole thing, almost completely got rid of landlords simply by being the buyer of last resort for owners that wante dto sell.
> None of this justifies people making insane amounts of money while others are starving
Our economic system is predicated on withholding basic needs for profit.
To withold basic needs for profit, you need to be able to provide basic needs in the first place.
All of the alternatives I know of can't even reach that point.
Neither full-collectivism nor full-capitalism are the final answer.
Doesn't detract from your overall point though, which is quite valid.
Saying "owner simply has less money" can have many implications on their life. If they choose to put money in a company rather than have a bigger apartment/TV/car/whatever, I find it fair for that to be rewarded a bit.
I think it is disingenuous to think "basic needs" is simple to define, considering that there is no cheap and free energy source (and other resources). For someone living in a warm climate, the basic need for heating in north of Europe will look like a waste.
My opinion is that tax systems are completely outdated and they should use more "asymptotic/exponential/complex formulas". Sure a tax of x % on profit worked 100 years ago when most people were "closer" but with today's growth (of many things), you get too much concentration. But of course that would imply that people understand both tax and math, so most will not demand it.
> Our economic system is predicated on withholding basic needs for profit.
An economic system based on "to each according to his need" has been tried many times. It fails to deliver.
Have there been any attempts since the rise of the smartphone and the Internet? I'm only aware of attempts that predate them and those two things have changed capitalistic societies dramatically, for better or worse.
I also collaborate with people all over the world. That simply wasn't possible in the 1980s. I'd mail floppy disks internationally, and would use the fax machine for communication (at a dollar a page!).
Bootstrapped companies also come with risks to the founder's own capital and credit risk if loans are taken and the business fails to generate revenue to service them.
The fact that you consider "losing everything you've saved up for your entire life, plus what you've borrowed, and destroyed your ability to borrow more" as "simply" is... mind boggling to me. I would rather work for someone else than risk losing everything by starting my own business (plus I prefer to develop software rather than run a business); that risk is _way_ beyond what I'm comfortable with.
my shelter not being destroyed is extremely more important to me and my life than my landlord who has insurance for such things, especially in a place with a housing vacancy less than 1% (aka very very hard to find housing). if i leave, they will have no problem finding a tenant to take my place. any repairs and maintenance are essentially paid for by my rent. they raised property taxes? no problem, just raise rent...
from my POV, seems like a low risk investment to be a landlord.
The landlord has the risks that the renter doesn't (that a homeowner does); which is risk offloaded from the renter to the landlord. The landlord then has the risks of the tenant being a bad player, which can be extremely financially risky (worse than being fired from your job).
> from my POV, seems like a low risk investment to be a landlord
Your point of view is extremely far from the truth. Especially for landlords that have one or a few places they rent out, it can be extremely risky. Everything from tenants just deciding not to pay (and taking a year+ to evict) to a Pacific Heights situation, where the place is destroyed with no real recourse. Or, on the lower end, tenants just leaving the place in bad shape, with bugs/mice/whatever; that itself can cost tends of thousands of dollars to recover from.
this puts my life in a very tenuous place (especially bc i don't have full-time employment, took an actual risk to make a living on my own). i don't think the landlord has that risk.
Workers take risk not only of the financial kind (choosing to take a job at company A instead of B is a bet), as well as physical risk most times.
If we believe shareholder of a oil company is taking more risk than the worker in a platform, we value capital more than labour.
If we want to play the "risk grants ownership" game, then we have to be honest: at some point, the risk of the initial investment is paid off, and the risk the employees take on collectively matches or exceeds the risk of the investors. If we're being logically consistent, ownership would transfer as these risk pools shift. But we're not consistent, and our system doesn't value risk, it values capital.
Feudalism was in some ways a bit kinder, because part of the basic arrangement was the expectation that the nobles would protect the peasantry (for pragmatic that's-where-the-food-and-supplies-come-from reasons, not ethical ones). Capitalism has no such expectations or incentives.
Plausible.
But there is very little value without tools. In fact, one could argue that all material progress has been in the form of better and better tools. One person with a combine beats 100 people with sickles.
Those tools are necessary for almost all of the value that labor produces.
So if we want those tools, in the real world we need to pay the producer of those tools. (Or make them ourselves, which is possible, but runs into division-of-labor issues.) The people who manufacture combines aren't a charity; they want to receive the value of their work too.
And unless the farmer (or custom cutter) has the money to buy the combine, then there's a third party in the situation - the capitalist, the person who provides the money to buy the tools that will give the increased productivity. That person usually isn't a charity, either. They need to get some return on their money.
But the place where I at least partly agree is this: The worker who knows how to use the tools is deserves at least part of the value provided by using the tool. The tool-maker deserves part of the value; the capitalist deserves part of the value; and the worker also deserves part of the value. (If you don't like the word "deserves", well, without all three parties, the value isn't produced, and none of the three are charities, so if we want the value, we need to give them part of the returns.)
And currently, you can make a very solid case that the worker is getting the short end of the stick. I can't buy "the worker deserves it all". No, the worker does not. But I can agree that workers deserve more than they're getting.
(In the cases where the workers either make their own tools or have the money to buy them, this argument breaks down. But in an industrialized society, that seems to be the exception, not the rule.)
Did those tools magically come into existence? Or were they made? Who made them? More workers. Where did the materials come from? More workers.
The point here is that everything we as a society do is so fundamentally interconnected that thousands of people contributed to pulling gold out of a mine, for example, both directly and through the tools that were created to make it possible then why are we concentrating the proceeds of this enterprise onto the capital owner who got a lease from the government (with the threat of violence backing it) just because they wrote a check to fund the operation?
> ... there's a third party in the situation
Yes, more products of labor.
> I can't buy "the worker deserves it all"
I don't believe you intended it this way but it reads as a false dichotomy.
I don't expect radical change in our economic system. I would be happy to see more cooperatives for housing and manufacturing (like Mondragon). This requires some class consciousness and collective action.
So much of our modern society deifies hyper-individualism. You ever wonder why that is? It's sold as "freedom" but it's really to manipulate you because there's a massive power imbalance between your employer and you. If you withhold work, most likely that employer will be fine. If that employer withholds work, you might end up homeless. The only way to counter that power imbalance is with collective action.
Modern political discourse is dominated by manufactured culture war issues. This isn't new. Post-Civil War there was fear in the South of emancipated slaves and poor white people uniting [1].
To be absolutely clear, I'm not accusing you of racism or similar. My point is to show how this is manufactured to divide workers. Even the idea of the "middle class" is intentionally divisive. Why do the interests of a white-collar (middle class) worker differ from a blue-collar (lower class) worker? Why are we making that distinction?
[1]: https://bittersoutherner.com/from-the-southern-perspective/m...
An interesting example of this in an article published yesterday (a housing/renovation co-op operating in Baltimore).
https://www.theguardian.com/business/article/2024/sep/03/wat...
Yet wine is higher valued than grape juice.
Value can clearly exist without labor.
Turning commodity grape juice into commodity wine requires no appreciable extra labor compared to the required labor to prevent fermentation.
The grape juice vs. wine is a rather classic counterexample, but it's hardly difficult to come up with any number of other examples of value absent labor.
True, but there is also no value without investment and risk. Marx's failure was ignoring the other two ingredients.
Marxism is building a road with hundreds of laborers with shovels. Capitalism is one guy with a bulldozer.
P.S. Cuba has no riches to steal.
The attempts at implementing Marxism all ended in misery and famine. What more would anyone need to know about it?
BTW, a capitalist investing money also entails risk. How it works is the more risk, the more potential reward. Does Marx account for risk? I ask that because the Marxists I hear never mention the essential role risk plays, they usually just assume there is no risk.
I read historical accounts about the Kennedy assassination, but don't waste my time on the conspiracy theory books. Nor do I bother with treatises on ancient aliens or UFOs. Or books on astrology, kirlian photography, ESP, flat earth, religions dogma, etc.
If Marxism worked, I'd be more interested in it. But it doesn't, so why bother?
Why should I waste time on a theory that has been proven false every time it was tried?
It's up to you to justify it, not me.
What amazes me is the people who desperately cling to Marxism despite its 100% failure rate. How can they make a career studying it and never notice its history?
Do you notice that nobody has been able to point to a Marxist success story, after what, 150 years of trying?
BTW, the fundamental flaw of Marxism is it fails to understand basic human nature - that people are selfish. You are selfish, I am selfish, everybody is. Marxism requires rejection of selfishness. This will never work. You cannot cajole it out of people, educate it out, indoctrinate it out, or shoot it out of them. They'll still act selfishly.
Free markets work because it creates a framework where selfishness benefits others.
Maybe if you bothered to try to understand the perpetual machine that everyone’s bought into then you wouldn’t be so amazed by people buying into it all of the time
In what universe does water by the river cost the same as water in the middle of the Saharra desert? A plant worth the same whether it is local or highly exotic? Where buying lumber at $300 a cord to burn fair, but buying it for the same $300 a cord but operating a warehouse selling it for as so much as $301 a cord retroactively somehow robbing the lumberjack? The madhouse world of surplus-labor-value! Boy, if Lewis Carroll had a field day with imaginary numbers then he missed truly golden opportunities of exploring an utterly mental system which demands fixed globally perfect valuations to avoid exploitation!