Comment by trhway
2 years ago
They don’t allow genuine innovation in any shape or form, and that in particular leads to highjacking by bureaucrats and degradation. So they may work in short term (work for some at the price of oppressing the ones who don’t fit well into the collective) - I’m from USSR for example - yet the result is predetermined.
That is flatly false. Worker cooperatives are every bit as innovative as any other form of private corporation. These are owned by workers not a centralized government. There are quite a few of them and you may well have purchased their products with it even realizing it. Two additional examples you may have encountered are Equal Exchange and King Arthur Flour.
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.
Can you explain this more? As I understand, after equity IPO, most companies use debt capital markets to raise money to expand their business.
You've just changed my brand of flour, thanks.
Example of innovation please. I’ve seen first hand that no collective farm is able to produce nor SpaceX nor even EV nor even plant in time and harvest in time.
I'm not close enough to manufacturing to evaluate how innovative their approaches to factory automation are, but it's not like they're based solely on turnips:
https://www.mondragon-assembly.com/automotive/
The collective farm that produced SpaceX is the United States Government. It carried out all the research and development necessary to create and further the North American space program. And it is existential in furthering it to this day. Without this source of contracts, research projects and income SpaceX would not be able to produce its commercial spin-off products.
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There are multiple Kibbutz in Israel that plant and harvest on time and are the major source of innovation for Israel's AgTech sector (which is only behind the US in terms successful startups).
Open source software
It seems a bit premature to speak so generally about collectivism. It's quite possible that the USSR failed for reasons that do not apply to Mondragon.
Maybe once we've seen a few hundred of these come and go it'll be time for a general theory of their kind.
>It seems a bit premature to speak so generally about collectivism
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.
Compulsory participation is quite a separate thing. Everyone who works at Mondragon could just go work somewhere else if they wanted.
Wasn't the USSR quite open about not being communist and at best working towards "socialism" as a pathway towards communism?
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.
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Mondragon has lasted 68 years and I believe the USSR had lasted 69 years. Why do you think they will fail in the next year? Also given the speed of advancement has increased in the past 30+ years, it seems like they have kept pace a lot better than the USSR (or it's successor Russia)
Or have you worked there and this is first hand?
I don't think the USSR is a great example. The region has been under the thumb of authoritarian dictators for a 1000 years and those who most strongly disagreed with this have for that millennium either left or died leaving behind a nation largely populated by the children of people willing to go along to get along under such a system. Cultures and circumstances leave a mark on a people not least by the process by which survivors are selected.
If anything the current situation stands to worsen that situation with smart young people who might contribute to a better future dying or fleeing.