That would be more inspiring if not for the name: MONDRAGON Corporation. Sounds like something with Evil Overlords for executives and Stormtroopers for security . . .
- Could an anarcho-syndicalist Spain have won the World Cup?
BrainGlutton, if I can ask you directly, what’s your opinions on the issues I raised in posts 3 and 11?
That would be a problem. Of course, a traditionally managed company seems so much easier to create because we know how it works; countless real-world models are available, and studied, and taught in business schools. And even a traditionally managed company is “not exactly sure what the picture looks like” if it’s trying something new, like early Microsoft and, I am sure, a dozen companies from the same period who tried the same thing and failed.
But, remember, what we’re talking about here is the rank-and-file seizing control of the whole economy more or less at once, rather than just trying out a different model within a capitalist economy. And mostly they just took over going concerns and reorganized them on a more egalitarian/participatory basis. If that had lasted, over several decades, with the bugs being worked out and new approaches being tried and mistakes being made and learned from (as they would be learned from, in a syndicalist as opposed to a Stalinist economy), I think it might have provided the world with models that could be tried in other countries with reasonable certainty of success.
Yes, industrial democracy is very complicated, compared to traditional capitalist management models. Just as political democracy is complicated, compared to traditional monarchy or aristocracy; that doesn’t mean it’s not worth doing. We’ve been experimenting with democracy for centuries now, trying out ways to make it more responsive to the people’s desires while still being an efficient and effective system of practical government; and we’ve learned a lot, haven’t we?
True, but I think collective management can only be judged as a success if it’s capable of handling an ongoing economy. And that means that collective management has to be able to develop new indutries and phase out old ones. You don’t get to call yourself a pilot just because you can fly a plane in the air - you have to be able to take off and land a plane as well.
This reponse seems to be ducking the question. The situation I described was not complicated and it would not be uncommon. What’s your personal opinions on how it should be handled?
On the specific issue I mentioned, do you feel that the new workers should have the same rights as established workers? Or do you feel the established workers deserve something extra to reflect the work they’ve already put into the business?
On a broader note, should a workers collective be allowed to run its own business, even to the point of establishing heirarchies within the business? Or should there be some outside tribunal that has the power to step in and forbid the collectives from taking some actions?
Cooperativas (worker-owned businesses) are very popular in Spain, from canneries to one of the country’s biggest supermarket chains (Eroski); it’s a form that’s exported to many Latin American countries via ONGs as it works quite well if done right. But note that:
- joining the coop is voluntary. If you’re offered a spot and decline it, you do not get shot.
- many of them have some hired workers, often managers or finance people. Eroski for example was pretty slummy until they hired external managers; many farmer’s coops hire an accountant (who can’t be a coop member because he doesn’t have any produce to sell, but has financial skills beyond those of the cooperativists). Before that, any attempt from managers to direct lower-ranking worker’s work risked being met with “I’m as much as an owner as you are!”
I don’t know of any where seniority is an official “grade”. If you own one share, you own one share. People who have been along longer are listened to because they have more experience (but only if they also have a brain), but they have as many votes as the latest newbie: one.
One of the things that got taken over in '36 was many ships in the Navy, whose officers got murdered. Those ships immediately proceeded to run aground… cooperative ownership is nice so long as someone knows how to steer.
Out of time: Eroski’s hired managers are just a handful of people in Central, managers in stores are cooperativists.
“Maybe”? “Maybe”?? They not only were right, they were sane.
Franco was fighting with military supplies and “volunteers” provided for free (well, at least provided not in exchange for money) by Germany and Italy. He was the one with superiority of material and men.
In order to have even a slight chance of winning a war against Franco’s forces, the VERY LAST thing you would want to do would be to spend energy and manpower in “social revolutions” that won’t do anything against the rather more pressing problem of having an army in front of you that wants to annihilate you.
The anarchists that pressed for the “social revolution” right there, right now… The best I can say about them is that they were woefully deluded. The only thing they achieved with their behaviour was to guarantee the demise of the Republic at the hands of Franco.
My Republican grandfather claims that his thought upon hearing about the Navy ships was “we’ve lost the war”. The middle of a war is not the time to be reorganizing the whole society inside, out and sideways, and many of these people were doing it gun in hand, substituting one form of tyranny (as they viewed it) for another (as those forced at gunpoint but not shot did). It’s bad enough and sad enough that so many people on both sides took it as the time to be taking people for a final walk for real or imagined individual or collective grudges without making it the government’s goal, the country’s modus operandi.
It’s amazing then, if communal and cooperative businesses are doomed to fail, that capitalist states have felt it necessary to use violence and the law against them. Rather than sit back and wait for their inevitable failure, they’ve criminalized them, or sent troops or hired thugs in against them.
Seems to me to be a bit pointless to go so far to deal with something that’s just going to fail anyway.
I included the “maybe” only because I’m thinking that if everything had been done the way the Communists wanted (remember, they were the ones mainly resisting the Revolution and calling for a more “pragmatic” policy), the result might have been victory – and a Stalinist Spain.
Granted, even that would have been preferable to Franco.
As historical examples here have stated, radical governments don’t always fail quietly. They sometimes kill a lot of people and cause a lot of other damage before they collapse.
Communal and cooperative businesses aren’t the same thing as radical governments. The assaults on the Diggers and the laws banning white men living in Native American villages, for example, weren’t attempts to deal with threats from radical governments.
You don’t feel that Winstanley and his supporters were radicals? While they were non-violent, they were denouncing the English government.
As for laws against white people living with Native Americans, what does that have to do with communal and cooperative businesses? Laws prohibiting different races from associating were racist in origin.
They were radicals but they weren’t a government (other than outside their individual communities). Nor were the cooperative mills who saw their equipment destroyed by thugs hired by the capitalists.
And the laws against living in native communities weren’t race based from what I have seen as much as social order based. And anyway I’d argue it isn’t possible to separate race relations from the overarching economicc structure anyway.
What’s illegal about them now? You’re free to set up such businesses all you want.
Congratulations for a non-sequitur there. When people have set them up in the past, especially during the Industrial Revolution, they were subject to assaults from both the groups of thugs hired by capitalists, and the law enforcement forces, also in the control of capitalists.
Whether they are legal or not now is somewhat irrelevant to that.
I guess my education is lacking, so please enlighten me. Can you give examples?