Comment by intalentive
2 years ago
>If the model is a good one, detractors say it can’t be replicated outside of the Basque Country, and there’s some truth to that.
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.
>Of course, another big "collectivist capitalism" success story is China, which is also fiercely nationalist.
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.
I've heard this story ever since I was a shit-eating Ron Paul voting right-libertarian. The whole "collectivist success requires ethnic purity" argument. I don't buy it. It is, inevitably, either an excuse to destroy functional collective institutions, an excuse to advocate for ethnic cleansing, or both.
To elaborate on my previous comment: if you want people to be less individualistic and more community-minded, and especially if you want economic organization to be more cooperative, decentralized and bottom-up, then people are going to need to feel a deep sense of buy-in and belonging, and you don't really see that in an undifferentiated mass of atomized "consuming and producing units".
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.
It's true that, in those groups, a shared ethnic identity enables economic cooperation. But the lack of solidarity you observe is the result of a regime of coercion. The official policy: leave your neighborhood, family, friends, and passions for 40+ hours a week to build a capitalist's business. You have to do it to survive. And the police are there to make sure revolts don't break out.
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Now Basque country is not considered "the West"?
>"on a large scale"
The importance of "leftist" fascism is overplayed.
"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.
>Mondragon sounds a lot like the kind of late 1800s / early 1900s syndicalism that later evolved into Italian fascism and German National Socialism.
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.