Comment by samatman
2 years ago
The difference between Mondragon, the kibbutzim, and other successful examples of collective labor, and the Soviet system, is precisely that the former are not governments, and operate in a capitalist system of property rights and free markets (in a practical rather than spherical cow sense of that term).
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.
> 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
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.
The "soviet system" as you call, started (yes the revolution) with a slogan "power to the soviets". In the slogan the word "soviet" meant "worker coop".
This slogan was abolished when more central planning took over, and the word soviet become more associated with the central govt/ the state.
I didn't say "soviet system", I said "Soviet system", as in the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. I do know what the word means.
In that case i just want to clarify it to others who may read it.
> The difference between Mondragon, the kibbutzim, and other successful examples of collective labor, and the Soviet system, is precisely that the former are not governments...
I've heard it put as "Socialism works great, as long as the socialist community gets to decide who is included."
I do feel like you've framed this as dichotomy: you either have a capitalist system or you have an autocratic centralized government.
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.
It's not clear to me how this model can be meaningfully replicated. For instance corporations naturally minimize their labor costs according to the relative economic leverage of the participants often to the point of poverty vs those with little leverage whereas a cooperative would seem to be inclined towards decency at the cost of maximal profit.
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.
The kibbutzim are failures propped up by generous government subsidies, using money taxed from capitalist businesses.