On being the right size (1928)

Jobs would still move, it's just that an industry in another country owned by someone else would eventually take the business. That is unless the local industry was somehow able to ban foreign competition.

The beauty of capitalism is that it roots out inefficiency. If you take a look at history, state controlled enterprises are the most polluting.

One problem with this is people as a group tend to be stupid. What stops the workforce from voting to reduce their work hours to 30 hours per week?

Take the Automotive unions as an example. Their demands contributed in many ways to the US auto companies nearly going bankrupt and requiring state bailouts.

Moving manufacturing to cheaper places can have a bad local effect in pockets that depend on it, but there is a net gain for us as consumers in an economy to be able to acquire things cheaply.

So our auto manufacturers complained they can't compete against the Japanese imports, we cranked up a bunch of tariffs to artificially increase the cost of foreign produced goods. For consumers that is a net loss as it drives up our prices.

Now, foreign companies produce many of their cars in the united states with union free labor and american companies have started producing cars in mexico so they can pay the pensions for all the retired union employees.

This is a simplification but that's how I understand it.

I'm not arguing that unions are bad. only that they can be very bad. There are benefits when there is an /abusive/ monopoly supplying jobs. (think foxconn), but unions can be just as abusive as employers and literally kill their own employers in the process. The free market is the best solution to the problem which enables a company to hire non-union employees when the union's demands become too great.

My philosophy is that if you can't compete on price you need to compete on quality and offer a superior product. (This is why people still buy German produced cars in other countries regardless of the increased cost in manufacturing).

For clarification sake I'm saying that the mass of people at the bottom of an organization can have demands that conflict with the survival of the business. It's good that there are smart people who fought their way up the bureaucracy through a meritocracy. They generally won't make a decision that will obviously drive a company straight into the dirt while this is distinct risk in unions with entitlement issues.

>someone other than the people doing the work get to decide how the work is done and how to spend the surplus of value that work generates. 

Who do you mean here? Foreman, manager, executive, owner... these are all real jobs that do real work.

Under Capitalism, if a worker disagrees with how their boss allocates their time and labor, the worker is free to start a new business just as the founder once had to.

The worker is also free to seek superior employment, if they feel their worth is not being fully appreciated / utilized (and so on and so forth).

Workers aren't appreciated at Business X? Start Business Z that treats its employees better. There are countless examples of this in practice over the last 150 years.

Unions are also properly legal under Capitalism. That is, the free assembly of labor. If employees don't like how they are being treated, they can collectively negotiate to try to acquire more leverage.

That completely removes your complaint about allocation of labor and accountability. Also, your entire premise rests on the notion that people are owed a particular job - just try telling nature it owes you shelter and three meals a day. The reality is, the capital to fund that job comes from someone that had to first create it. The West is losing this century because it has become lazy and hyper-entitled.

> If the workers decided these things they would never vote to outsource their own jobs

This implies they would be making the wrong decisions then, no? There needs to be some mechanism to decide who does what, or otherwise some goods and services will be produced in proportions well exceeding any possible demand.

> The main idea is to make the enterprises benefit those who do the actual work and also make them accountable to those people and their communities.

Once you start introducing multiple contradictory goals like this, you're back to the same problem that centrally planned capitalism and communism have: resolving these conflicts is an extremely difficult problem in an informational/computational sense.

The local blacksmiths are of the opinion that only locally hand-wrought nails make the finest boots. The local bootmakers are of the opinion that the nails they can get for $1000/ton from China will suffice. The bootmakers are convinced that they are being idled by the limited supply of local nails, and that the blacksmiths are able to demand an unreasonable share of the value created from the boots because they have made their contribution to the boot scarce.

Do you sacrifice the supply of boots or outsource the work of the blacksmiths?

I think that some industries/services would fare much better as co-ops. And you're free to start one and do it that way. I prefer credit-unions to banks. I would love to see more co-op style ISPs.

Complaining that your co-op can't compete with the more private entity and thus must be propped up or the competitor handicapped is very bad though and has a negative results for consumers at large.

When they can compete with privately held monopolies supplying the same service it's a win-win situation for us. Forcing places to be co-ops is not a good idea though and equates to a different kind of tyranny.

Large Companies, Governments, and even Democratic majorities (think racism) can all be tyrannical and there is no silver bullet to eliminating it.

You could say I'm libertarian leaning, but I also acknowledge the reality of large organizations which can be nearly as oppressive as the state and harbor similar levels of inefficiency.

If the workers decided these things they would never vote to outsource their own jobs and would rarely choose to pollute their own communities.

In Communist Yugoslavia we had something like that. There were companies that were managed by their employees, each having one vote. A proposal that would obtain a majority of votes would get to be implemented.

But it turned out that people would rather vote to use surpluses to pay everyone bonuses than to invest back in production and modernization. Many companies got themselves outcompeted this way, especially compared to their Western counterparts.

It is not a bad idea, but for that system to work you need workers that:

1) are educated in at least basics of economics and management, 2) are ready to take advice of someone with more expertise than them in these subjects, 3) are well off enough that they can sacrifice immediate additional income to enhance company's prospects for the future and 4) care enough.

"Most socialists have moved beyond that model and would instead prefer to see a system of enterprise that uses co-op's instead of privately or publicly owned business. Some industries would probably be nationalized or socialized..."

One of the earliest (and now largely forgotten) criticisms of Marx came from the American philosopher Benjamin Tucker, who facilely forsaw the rise of the communist implementations as an unavoidable consequence of Marxist socialism. So Tucker might argue that even a socialism as "modern socialists" would inevitably result in the same. Although this argument takes off further along that a partial state socialism, the crux of the idea of state expansionism and its effect on individual rights is salient:

First, then, State Socialism, which may be described as the doctrine that all the affairs of men should be managed by the government, regardless of individual choice. Marx, its founder, concluded that the only way to abolish the class monopolies was to centralize and consolidate all industrial and commercial interests, all productive and distributive agencies, in one vast monopoly in the hands of the State. The government must become banker, manufacturer, farmer, carrier, and merchant, and in these capacities must suffer no competition. Land, tools, and all instruments of production must be wrested from individual hands, and made the property of the collectivity. To the individual can belong only the products to be consumed, not the means of producing them. A man may own his clothes and his food, but not the sewing-machine which makes his shirts or the spade which digs his potatoes. Product and capital are essentially different things; the former belongs to individuals, the latter to society. Society must seize the capital which belongs to it, by the ballot if it can, by revolution if it must. Once in possession of it, it must administer it on the majority principle, though its organ, the State, utilize it in production and distribution, fix all prices by the amount of labor involved, and employ the whole people in its workshops, farms, stores, etc. The nation must be transformed into a vast bureaucracy, and every individual into a State official. Everything must be done on the cost principle, the people having no motive to make a profit out of themselves. Individuals not being allowed to own capital, no one can employ another, or even himself. Every man will be a wage-receiver, and the State the only wage-payer. He who will not work for the State must starve, or, more likely, go to prison. All freedom of trade must disappear. Competition must be utterly wiped out. All industrial and commercial activity must be centered in one vast, enormous, all-inclusive monopoly. The remedy for monopolies is monopoly. Such is the economic programme of State Socialism as adopted from Karl Marx.

He was writing this a full 20 years before the communist states came into existence.

What's to stop the type of co-op based company you describe becoming popular in the current market system?

Coops, exactly. These days I'm reading the Mars Trilogy by Kim Stanley Robinson (WARNING: minor spoilers), and he mentions a lot the system of coops in the new Martian economy. One of the examples mentioned is a real-life one: the Mondragón Corporation, the world's largest coop with 80,000 employees and more than 14 billion euros in revenue.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mondrag%C3%B3n_Cooperative_Cor...

(For anyone interested in economics, politics, geology and many other topics, this Hugo-winning trilogy is a great read. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mars_trilogy)

> If the workers decided these things they would never vote to outsource their own jobs

That would benefit said workers themselves, but the cost (because there is a cost) will be shouldered by some other people living in the same country. In other words this is protectionism pure and simple, in the long run is detrimental for everyone involved.

It is an argument against a very specific form of socialism as implemented by marxist-leninists. Already by the end of the 1800's there was a wide schism between left communists/liberalist marxists, anarchist communists, Luxembourgist/Spartakists and a number of other anti-authoritarian communist ideologies on one hand, and Leninists on the other about the role of the state in the socialist transition phase, where the left communists and liberalist marxists have consistently been against the idea of a vanguard party (the leninist party model) and against the idea of a strong state.

"Left communism" is generally defined by being "to the left of Leninism" (EDIT: And many left communists does not consider Leninism a socialist ideology at all), though it is worth pointing out that Leninism in itself is not necessarily authoritarian. The left communist criticism of Leninism initially focused on the (as it turned out) well founded risk that having a vanguard party following a nearly military discipline and that was not intended to include regular people in the party decision making provided a massive potential threat if it were to be abused (as it of course ended up being - it was the ultimate cultist echo-chamber combined with a fair number of power hungry people mixed in with the idealists).

Most socialists have always been against this model, and most communists were arguably also against the leninist model until at least 1920 or so. After the April 1917 revolution, the Bolsheviks was a small-ish minority group even in Russia, next to the Mensheviks, Socialist-Revolutionaries, Left Socialist-Revolutionaries, most of whome were left communists, other forms of socialist revolutionaries, and some reformists.

After the Bolshevik coup (the October Revolution - I don't like calling it a revolution, as it only had the support of a relatively small minority - it succeeded only because the Bolshevik support was largely concentrated in a few of the big cities, giving them the ability to cease control of the still weakened government apparatus), the Leninist model gained a lot of undeserved support, and cemented its position thanks to the combination of the perceived successes of the Bolsheviks (even some fairly right wing writers came back from the Soviet Union impressed with progress in things like electrification and got caught up in it), the civil war and the capitalist countries support for the Whites, which made it easy for the Bolsheviks to excuse pretty much anything they wanted to do by claiming they were fighting foreign funded anti-Russian/anti-Soviet counter-revolutionaries, and where the anti-Bolshevik fervour in the Western press made it impossible for socialists to trust them - even when they were right about the later excesses especially under Stalin.

Left communism was still widespread enough by 1920, with left communist groups in several instances still participating in demonstrations and small scale attempted revolts and armed attacks, to make Lenin publish a pamphlet ridiculing it ("Left Communism: An Infantile Disorder"). A number of prominent left communists who had tried to remain with the Bolsheviks and try to influence the party, and many more outside it, eventually lost their lives over it as especially Stalin dialled up the terror to get full control and left communism was seen as a considerable threat.

Also note that while Haldane later became skeptical about the Soviet Union, when he wrote this article, he was well on his way to becoming a Marxist-Leninist, arguably a Stalinist. As late as 1962 he reiterated his admiration for Stalin....

Anyway, though we agree that the Marxist-Leninist/Stalinist idea of socialism was fundamentally broken, what you describe is a specific type of socialism that is quite far from the mainstream today. Most socialists are social democrats. Within social democratic parties you do find some support for co-ops, but as limited tendencies (e.g. in the UK, the Co-operative Party is in permanent alliance of some sort with the Labour Party). Within most revolutionary socialist organisations finding support for the coop movement is relatively rare, as it is seen as too limited. You do find quite a lot (to the extent you can talk of "a lot" in organisations of this size...) of support for left communist ideologies like council communism and market communism though, which share characteristics similar to those you describe.

You're describing syndicalism; it's not true that it was never implemented by the communists. The Soviet Union had a very serious go at it, allowing the artel as an economic unit (essentially a kind of co-op), and allowing people to freely sell products of their own labor. Within months, this led to a renewed stratification of society, the emergence of a nouveau rich class, and something approaching a return to capitalism (some people's labor is more profitable than others'). In the case of the Soviet Union, this led to a crackdown on the labor market. They also made attempts to organize along trade union lines instead - which reduces the stratification problem somewhat since a trade is not a single economic unit - but having the electricians and the mechanics within a factory report to different management was not practicable. The USSR came to its system of government-run conglomerates because it was the only way they found to combine socialism with getting at least something done; it was not their initial intention to have everything run by the government, if only because the didn't really want the management burden.

In other cases, the evolution towards capitalism just ran its course. Israel stumbled into syndicalism by default - its labor unions and cooperatives predate the state. In virtually all cases, the cooperatives did not grant new members the same rights as the founding members. E.g. the bus cooperative - which started out as a free association of owner-drivers - now relies on hired labor for most of the actual driving, with wages the same as any other driving job in the capitalist free market. The final stop for this kind of developments is in the unionized ports, where they have full union members making tens of thousands of dollars a month for sinecure jobs, with a lot of the gruntwork being done by minimum-wage hired labor with no rights. It's nice to talk about how "the workers" will not vote for this or that, but when it comes to voting members - of anything - voting themselves more rights than the people asking to join, they have, they did, and they will vote for that.

> The main problem with capitalism is that someone other than the people doing the work get to decide how the work is done and how to spend the surplus of value that work generates.

I think that the main problem with capitalism is that a free market system (assuming it works, though it doesn't in practice because competition doesn't quite behave according to the abstract models) strives to maximize economic output rather than welfare. Some capitalists care enough to hope that a system that maximizes product would also improve welfare, but that is not the goal; at best, it's a desirable side effect. That is why many critics of capitalism point out that under capitalism, people serve the "economy" rather than the other way around.

In all of your examples, it depends on the team, their skill level as individuals and how well they communicate... the large the extended teams that have to coordinate, the larger a part communication takes, and the less time each member of a team has to accomplish any work. In software, I've seen this time and again. Adding more people to a team is sometimes a very bad thing.

I don't know if I'm ok with using 83% (125/150) of all my Monkeysphere slots on "work".

Dunbar's number is the number of people in a group in which every individual knows every other individual personally. This is not the same as the number of people an individual can know personally.

The way you can split a company in two is identical to the way our brains already distinguish between social groups. I don't need to remember that John from work doesn't know Mary from the bridge club, only that there is no overlap between the two groups.

Another problem with the maximum company size that you propose is that Dunbar's number is not a hard limit of 150, it depends on the conditions under which such a group forms and operates. The Wikipedia article on it is, as so often, a good primer.

" legs obliquely to gain stability, like the giraffe. I mention "

https://www.marxists.org/archive/haldane/works/1920s/right-s...

There are no other differences with that version.

Dinosaurs were not cold blooded as it turns out. They live on today as birds.

Pterodactyls were small. They had roughly the same wingspan as the modern bald eagle.

Earth's atmosphere had more oxygen in it back then, which it easier to be big.

Check it out. Six years ago Yahoo! answers had some decent answers:

http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20080301144511AA...

The size is not only determined by the underlying physics, but also by the environment. So there can be a arms race of size, the predator needs to be roughly the same size as its pray, so the larger pray has a evolutionary advantage which gives larger predators an evolutionary advantage.

And to stay with the analogy of the article, the same is true for organizations. Some parts of organizations need to be as large as the corresponding parts of competing organizations. For example the legal department and marketing.

The author was an evolutionary biologist who happened to be a Marxist. Apparently, like Ralph Milliband, one of those Marxists who didn't like Russian communism! See the other comments for a link to his wikipedia page.

A decade later, Coase worked out the economic argument in much more detail in "The Nature of the Firm". (The logic works the same for business enterprises in a market economy as it does for nation- or world-sized Communist economies)

http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1468-0335.1937....

Red Plenty was such a good book. Highly recommended.

Another interesting read is the rise and fall of the Kibbutz, possibly the most famous form of a commune.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kibbutz

This smells like ad hominem.