Comment by trhway
2 years ago
>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.
Totally. The USSR had no worker-owned companies. They all belonged to the state. There was no economy which is based on cooperatives in a free market, yet.
I think we can also say that the former USSR has also failed to achieve capitalism despite having 30 years to do it. So maybe there's some other factors at play.