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okay my issue wasn’t that worker controlled firms would be legally incapable of joint ventures for profit. My issue was - who makes the decision? Do the workers

okay my issue wasn’t that worker controlled firms would be legally incapable of joint ventures for profit. My issue was - who makes the decision? Do the workers understand finance and supply chain management and commodity prices and political risks? No, so why should they make the decisions

Kbelicius 5y ago
Ever heard of representative democracy?
- grapist420 5y ago
  yes representative democracy deals with this problem in a way that workers councils doesn’t. swarms of lobbyists (not evil) and aides are not industrial workers
  - Kbelicius 5y ago
    It seems that you aren't familiar with the meaning of words that you are using. Workers councils are made up of delegates that are voted on by the workers i.e. they are a representative democracy.
    - fallingknife 5y ago
      And why would you expect that this new elected body would be any more effective at advancing it's electorates interest instead of just its own?
      - Kbelicius 5y ago
        I would expect that they would be more effective at advancing it's electorates interest than the owners would be at advancing their workers interests for the simple reason that the new elected body can be simply removed and a new one voted in.
        grapist420 5y ago
        what’s magical about workers? why wouldn’t they just be corrupt themselves
        Kbelicius 5y ago
        > what’s magical about workers? Did anybody say there was anything magical about workers? Since you are asking this question you must think that there is something magical about owners so why don't you tell us about that first? > why wouldn’t they just be corrupt themselves How would that corruption play out?
TaylorAlexander 5y ago
There is a large body of writing and historical practice on how to make decisions in this manner (communal organization and management of production). The anarchists Mikhail Bakunin, Peter Kropotkin, and Errico Malatesta wrote about this in the 1800's. Of course the Soviet Union was remarkably successful at growing from a very poor nation to a global superpower in 50 years. I absolutely oppose authoritarianism and that was their downfall, but they were an amazing economic success. Anarchists would say absolute centralization of planning was the failure, as perverse incentives developed until it fell apart. But decentralized planning seems extremely interesting. A more recent author who has written extensively on libertarian socialist decentralized planning and organization is Murray Bookchin. I think you would enjoy this 1994 piece on what Bookchin called "Communalism" [1] But to provide you a basic answer to advance the conversation more immediately: People must be educated to follow any society. We've never expected the checker at Home Depot to understand logistics of her store. But this is due to the division of labor, not a limitation of the human mind. When people imagine a totally different society this tends to include schools which raise people for that society. And so every person would be taught more about how all the bits fit together and how to make decisions collectively. As I said, many different schemes have been proposed and tried for what system would work best. But someone like Murray Bookchin would suggest that different regional cooperatives can make their own decisions about how best to organize. I would be remiss not to mention the Mondragon Corporation in the Basque Region of Spain. They're a federation of cooperatives with a total revenue of 13B Euro ($16B) in 2013. They do big industrial stuff, finance, retail, and education. [2] However I realize I am talking about how really big decisions get made. Maybe you're asking about individual firms. It's past my bed time but for that look at how cooperatives are managed. This history of a grocery coop in San Francisco is very interesting. [3] Here's a list of other Bay Area cooperatives. [4] [1] https://social-ecology.org/wp/1994/09/what-is-communalism/ https://social-ecology.org/wp/1994/09/what-is-communalism/ [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mondragon_Corporation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mondragon_Corporation [3] https://web.archive.org/web/20170606172106/https://www.rainbow.coop/about-us/history/ https://web.archive.org/web/20170606172106/https://www.rainb... [4] https://nobawc.org/ https://nobawc.org/
- grapist420 5y ago
  the soviets had expert top down control, not worker control. we currently have decentralized (by a bunch of experts who own stuff and pay each other and publish papers and legislate) control let’s say workers now control Amazon. all of Amazon workers. But it turns out Amazon AWS is a big part of Amazon revenue, the workers know jack about that, they either delegate authority to some aws experts and now as bans the same problem again if they ruin it. And you’re also assuming worker cooperatives wouldn’t follow profit motives - wouldn’t they? Workers want money. You want to abolish profitmotive but won’t do that. Workers could totally abuse monopoly or regulatory capture by vote

Kbelicius 5y ago

Ever heard of representative democracy?

grapist420 5y ago
yes representative democracy deals with this problem in a way that workers councils doesn’t. swarms of lobbyists (not evil) and aides are not industrial workers
- Kbelicius 5y ago
  It seems that you aren't familiar with the meaning of words that you are using. Workers councils are made up of delegates that are voted on by the workers i.e. they are a representative democracy.
  - fallingknife 5y ago
    And why would you expect that this new elected body would be any more effective at advancing it's electorates interest instead of just its own?
    - Kbelicius 5y ago
      I would expect that they would be more effective at advancing it's electorates interest than the owners would be at advancing their workers interests for the simple reason that the new elected body can be simply removed and a new one voted in.
      - grapist420 5y ago
        what’s magical about workers? why wouldn’t they just be corrupt themselves
        Kbelicius 5y ago
        > what’s magical about workers? Did anybody say there was anything magical about workers? Since you are asking this question you must think that there is something magical about owners so why don't you tell us about that first? > why wouldn’t they just be corrupt themselves How would that corruption play out?

TaylorAlexander 5y ago

There is a large body of writing and historical practice on how to make decisions in this manner (communal organization and management of production). The anarchists Mikhail Bakunin, Peter Kropotkin, and Errico Malatesta wrote about this in the 1800's. Of course the Soviet Union was remarkably successful at growing from a very poor nation to a global superpower in 50 years. I absolutely oppose authoritarianism and that was their downfall, but they were an amazing economic success. Anarchists would say absolute centralization of planning was the failure, as perverse incentives developed until it fell apart. But decentralized planning seems extremely interesting. A more recent author who has written extensively on libertarian socialist decentralized planning and organization is Murray Bookchin. I think you would enjoy this 1994 piece on what Bookchin called "Communalism" [1] But to provide you a basic answer to advance the conversation more immediately: People must be educated to follow any society. We've never expected the checker at Home Depot to understand logistics of her store. But this is due to the division of labor, not a limitation of the human mind. When people imagine a totally different society this tends to include schools which raise people for that society. And so every person would be taught more about how all the bits fit together and how to make decisions collectively. As I said, many different schemes have been proposed and tried for what system would work best. But someone like Murray Bookchin would suggest that different regional cooperatives can make their own decisions about how best to organize. I would be remiss not to mention the Mondragon Corporation in the Basque Region of Spain. They're a federation of cooperatives with a total revenue of 13B Euro ($16B) in 2013. They do big industrial stuff, finance, retail, and education. [2] However I realize I am talking about how really big decisions get made. Maybe you're asking about individual firms. It's past my bed time but for that look at how cooperatives are managed. This history of a grocery coop in San Francisco is very interesting. [3] Here's a list of other Bay Area cooperatives. [4] [1] https://social-ecology.org/wp/1994/09/what-is-communalism/ https://social-ecology.org/wp/1994/09/what-is-communalism/ [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mondragon_Corporation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mondragon_Corporation [3] https://web.archive.org/web/20170606172106/https://www.rainbow.coop/about-us/history/ https://web.archive.org/web/20170606172106/https://www.rainb... [4] https://nobawc.org/ https://nobawc.org/

grapist420 5y ago
the soviets had expert top down control, not worker control. we currently have decentralized (by a bunch of experts who own stuff and pay each other and publish papers and legislate) control let’s say workers now control Amazon. all of Amazon workers. But it turns out Amazon AWS is a big part of Amazon revenue, the workers know jack about that, they either delegate authority to some aws experts and now as bans the same problem again if they ruin it. And you’re also assuming worker cooperatives wouldn’t follow profit motives - wouldn’t they? Workers want money. You want to abolish profitmotive but won’t do that. Workers could totally abuse monopoly or regulatory capture by vote