Oh, come on, the afterword ruined an otherwise great article!
I would love to learn more about co-ops. As far as I know, Mondragon Corporation is probably the biggest one, but there is frustratingly little information to find about them online.
What I heard about co-ops (no idea how generally this applies) is that if they grow, they often change to something else. Like, you have a worker-owned company with 100 workers, and one day they have an opportunity to grow 10× in size. And suddenly the original 100 workers are like: “wait, we spent decades working for this moment to happen, and now the new guys should be our equals? no way!”, and the company finds a way to change itself in such way that the new 900 workers are mere workers, but not co-owners. (Perhaps the Mondragon Corporation is exceptional precisely for not doing this. They encourage new people joining their system; they even lend them money to start new branches within the system.)
The difficult part about starting a co-op is in my opinion simply the fact that people who have the skills necessary to start a co-op, can usually use the same skills to start a company that is fully owned by them.
Calling co-ops “socialist” means introducing a culture war needlessly. I grew up in socialism, and we had lots of companies that were definitely not owned by their workers, workers did not put in much effort, and the only reason they didn’t fail was the government endlessly bailing them out. On the other hand, there are co-ops in capitalist countries. So please do not use “socialist” and “co-op” as synonyms!
Given the recent discussion surrounding the structuring and transparency of EA organizations, perhaps the community could consider turning their EA organizations into socialist firms.
Not sure if you are aware of the irony, but notice that you are proposing to convert a “non-socialist” firm into a “socialist” one, instead of creating a new “socialist” firm from scratch. Which shows that even you do not see a creation of a “socialist” firm as a realistic goal. Perhaps it is much easier for your tribe to take over an existing successful organization than create a new one, but shouldn’t your opponents be making this point?
Try figuring out a way to start co-ops without taking over existing firms, and you may find much less resistance. (Yes, it is possible, the Mondragon Corporation did it.) You might find that very difficult, but then you will be addressing the real problem.
Notice that if you cannot solve the problem of starting new co-ops, then even if thanks to some revolution the co-ops would take over the world, it wouldn’t work in long term, because sometimes the existing ones would deteriorate and there would be no new ones to replace them.
I was also born in a former socialist country -Yugoslavia, which was notable for the prevalence of worker-managed firms in its economy. This made it somewhat unique among other socialist countries that used a more centralized approach with state ownership over entire industries.
While it is somewhat different than worker-owned cooperatives in modern market economies it does offer a useful data point. The general conclusion is that they work a bit better than a typical state-owned firm, but are still significantly worse in their economic performance compared to the median private company. This is the reason why despite having plenty of experience with worker-managed firms almost all ex-YU countries today have economies dominated by fully private companies and no one is really enthusiastic about repeating the worker-managed experiment.
Oh, come on, the afterword ruined an otherwise great article!
I would love to learn more about co-ops. As far as I know, Mondragon Corporation is probably the biggest one, but there is frustratingly little information to find about them online.
What I heard about co-ops (no idea how generally this applies) is that if they grow, they often change to something else. Like, you have a worker-owned company with 100 workers, and one day they have an opportunity to grow 10× in size. And suddenly the original 100 workers are like: “wait, we spent decades working for this moment to happen, and now the new guys should be our equals? no way!”, and the company finds a way to change itself in such way that the new 900 workers are mere workers, but not co-owners. (Perhaps the Mondragon Corporation is exceptional precisely for not doing this. They encourage new people joining their system; they even lend them money to start new branches within the system.)
The difficult part about starting a co-op is in my opinion simply the fact that people who have the skills necessary to start a co-op, can usually use the same skills to start a company that is fully owned by them.
Calling co-ops “socialist” means introducing a culture war needlessly. I grew up in socialism, and we had lots of companies that were definitely not owned by their workers, workers did not put in much effort, and the only reason they didn’t fail was the government endlessly bailing them out. On the other hand, there are co-ops in capitalist countries. So please do not use “socialist” and “co-op” as synonyms!
Not sure if you are aware of the irony, but notice that you are proposing to convert a “non-socialist” firm into a “socialist” one, instead of creating a new “socialist” firm from scratch. Which shows that even you do not see a creation of a “socialist” firm as a realistic goal. Perhaps it is much easier for your tribe to take over an existing successful organization than create a new one, but shouldn’t your opponents be making this point?
Try figuring out a way to start co-ops without taking over existing firms, and you may find much less resistance. (Yes, it is possible, the Mondragon Corporation did it.) You might find that very difficult, but then you will be addressing the real problem.
Notice that if you cannot solve the problem of starting new co-ops, then even if thanks to some revolution the co-ops would take over the world, it wouldn’t work in long term, because sometimes the existing ones would deteriorate and there would be no new ones to replace them.
I was also born in a former socialist country -Yugoslavia, which was notable for the prevalence of worker-managed firms in its economy. This made it somewhat unique among other socialist countries that used a more centralized approach with state ownership over entire industries.
While it is somewhat different than worker-owned cooperatives in modern market economies it does offer a useful data point. The general conclusion is that they work a bit better than a typical state-owned firm, but are still significantly worse in their economic performance compared to the median private company. This is the reason why despite having plenty of experience with worker-managed firms almost all ex-YU countries today have economies dominated by fully private companies and no one is really enthusiastic about repeating the worker-managed experiment.