Comment by pjerem
6 months ago
The article mentions it, but don’t insist on it. Duralex is now quite a special company: they were a renowned and beloved brand that was heading toward bankruptcy, until last year when the company was bought by its own workers and turned into a cooperative.
Since then, they have stayed afloat, probably thanks mainly to people wanting to support a worker-owned business by buying their glasses, but still, it works.
It’s a pretty positive story so far, and I hope they’ll continue to thrive under this new structure.
It's also because almost every french home has one of their glasses and they are good quality.
So it's a mix of history, tradition, enjoying good products, the pride you get from your country producing good products.
And not only homes. I moved to France several months ago, and I keep seeing the Duralex mark in cafes, at my workplace, basically everywhere.
Sounds like their biggest problem is that the product is so good the domestic market may be saturated. I was pleased to read in the article that they're working to increase exports. I'm a big believer in products that are engineered to last rather than be regularly replaced.
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There's a reason why worker owned companies (which were quite prevalent and a key factor in the 20th century's socialist movements) did not survive in our capitalist world. If we want to see these kinds of companies thrive, we need to change the entire market philosophy. Otherwise they will always be out-competed by companies that favour revenue/profit over worker benefits. In fact they will not even take off in the first place, because that needs capital and investors who own capital will want shares in return, which goes against the core principle of worker-ownership.
They did survive. There are thousands in Spain and Italy especially.
One of the most well-known is the Mondragon Corporation from the Basque country, one of Spain's largest comanies:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mondragon_Corporation
I am particularly interested in coops as a model for a tech startup. How would one go about structuring a new corporation to best ensure it remains a coop?
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Mondragon is often used by people who don't know much about the subject as a counter example, but if you look under the hood, you'll see it doesn't even compare: Less than half the workers own shares and the majority of shares is held by a small circle of executives in the richest branches. That's basically a standard capitalist pig with some socialist lipstick to give pseudo-Marxists an argument in these discussions, when there is none to be had in the first place. In fact Nvidia has a higher percentage of employees owning shares than Mondragon. Would you call that "worker-owned" too?
None of this should be surprising either, because anything that truly benefits workers will be at odds with things that benefit the business. In society there are always people who primarily get paid and people who primarily work. Even the real Marx realized that. If you really want to defeat capitalism, then you have to do more than just play pretend.
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There are many successful co-ops all over the world, including in the US. You just don't hear about them because they don't look much different from corporations from the perspective of the average person.
Such companies are more common than you think.
The main they don't survive is not due to capitalism. (Capitalism is just trade without use of force at the end of the day) but due to the lobbying power of corporations. Corporations constantly lobby the government for more regulation and rules, which they just budget for, but smaller companies don't have the funds to meet so they cannot stay in business. Look at the first couple of years of COVID for example, Walmart, Target and the big box stores lobbied the government to stay open because they were "essential" while all the small businesses got wiped out due to their lack of lobbying power.
The solution is to stop giving corporations the ability to lobby governments, and stop using the government to control/fund markets. Not to blame it on capitalism.
> the small businesses got wiped out due to their lack of lobbying power
Small businesses have a lot if lobbying power (NFIB, US Chamber of Commerce to a certain extent) especially during the pandemic. The PPP loan forgiveness program was ridiculously generous. Despite it being marketed as a way to save jobs, only a third of the money ended up going towards jobs that were at risk.
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That's not what capitalism is... or it's a very elementary understanding of it. Trade without force existed prior to and contemporary to capitalism. (See markets and mercantilism for more history there.) Capitalism is specifically the sort of mercantilism under which maximizing one's capital (typically the money commodity) becomes the aim.
Historically, money commodity was used to mediate exchange between two other commodities - I sell my wheat, get money, use money to buy pork. I'm buying commodities because I intend to use them or share them. Commodity -> money -> commodity. Capitalism inverts this -- the goal is to maximize money. I start with money, I convert it to a commodity that I can sell for a greater value, to get larger money. Money -> commodity -> money. You see Amazon operate this way: "if we can put one dollar in and get $1.01 out, do it".
Highly recommend this book on the transition in England and France from agrarian and feudal mercantilism into capitalism in the 18th and 19th centuries: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Origin_of_Capitalism
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The whole article documents a product that people do want and like so much that they're willing to donate 4x what the owner-operators of the company asked for.
It's odd to see you expressing disdain for 'high school politics' and 'because younger generations don't know' while also displaying such ignorance or disregard of the subject matter, like watching factual waves roll in and dash themselves on the rocks of obdurate opinion.
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You realize there's an entire spectrum of socialist ideology between liberalism and authoritarian planned economies, yeah? It's not a Boolean, and it's not a slippery slope. We could have broadly liberal markets owned and run by the workers, and without the authoritarianism.
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Are you honestly comparing their proposal to the USSR and the "proletarian dictatorship imposed at gun point" to democratically changing laws to force all companies to become worker owned cooperatives?
At the end of the day, if we had a million worker owned cooperatives, they would still need to compete. Since workers from Coop1 need to sell better products than workers from Coop2, otherwise they will still lose their jobs.
Also, the current setup is a race to the bottom: lowest quality that doesn't self destruct immediately (aka planned obsolescence), dumping ALL externalities onto the general public: ideally with the same timed fuse approach so that it's not noticed immediately (dumping toxic waste in rivers, polluting the earth and the air, oil spills, etc - the list is endless), all in the name of a slightly lower initial price to attract customers. It's not sustainable.