Why aren’t there more of these if they work well?
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
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’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”)
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
Actually, I wonder if there's a word for this effect?
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.
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
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.