Message from @AaronMk
Discord ID: 335320977418223620
but you get the picture
hello
Hail Posadas
Do you just understand basic economics ?
@Chaton Do u understand any economics?
No.
Do you?
@Chaton You know that the 'basic economics' you are learned is Capitalist economics and not Socialist/Communist economics, right?
No.
Proper economic theory can actually be applied to a variety of systems
It is only a failure of imagination that ties economists to capitalism or socialism
For example, i advocate a system where society is composed of co-operatives operating within the resources and regulatory context of collectives, which are in turn confederated together; this takes place on the scale of a city state. Imagine a libertariam market socialist singapore, if you will.
Within this context, i think that large-scale capital allocation (currently managed via the stock market and gov spending) can be handled in the following way:
Each collective pays in a portion (figure that out later) of each payment it gets to its collective fund. This portion goes to an alliance fund.
Once a [time period], vouchers are distributed, representing dollars in the fund on a 1-to-1 basis. Every project in every collective in the alliance gets to say why they should get your vouchers. You can give your vouchers to any project you want, as long as you are not a member of that project. These vouchers are then turned in for money from the alliance fund.
Using the usual assumptions of economics (perfect info, rational choices, ect.) you can predict that people will invest in things that maximize their utility; one of the effects of this is that the average value of everyone's transactions continuosly goes up. Further, attempts to cheat the system by not meeting your goals don't work long term, because they add in the info as to who is and isn't trustworthy, and then ceases funding for the expansion of firms controlled by bad actors.
It would be hard to call this system capitalist in the least, but it is still amenable to analysis by "capitalist" economics
I for one like a good left-wing market cooperative. If as a staging operation from whence the mindset of the people as a whole can become accustomed to the idea of it. In my experience most people falter at the idea of communally or collectively owned industries because they believe the people as a whole would not be capable in the "complex" problems of managing regular payrole.
That's stupid. Payroll is really, really easy. You just all take your shares of the profit every [time period]
Plus, co-ops are awesome, having all the upsides (constant innovations) of markets with none of the downsides of capitalism (no need for constant growth, no one is acting as a servant to a master, ect)
It's what most people seem to not understand, fundamentally paperwork isn't the most complex thing in the world to do ever. Maybe buisiness finance is a lot harder than home finance, but if you're all having trouble then someone could be appointed by the whole to do it, or like most of them do; have independent accountants do the numbers.
I mean shit, if the company Gore can run on this very idea with over 9,000 paid employees then why can't the rest of us?
Is it really even that hard? It seems really easy for a firm of about a dozen people, which is what most co-ops would be
What's Gore?
Gore is a company here in the States that makes special fire-resistent fabrics for cars, fire-fighters, and the US Army; recently they branched into computer parts. They have some 9,000 employees, none of which are superior to the other and even the founder carries the same title as everyone; associate. They're structured completely horizontally and found that in order to surmount the challenges of having a totally horizontal company with such a large pool of members it's to continually split their factories/shops. Every time one shop goes above 150 people ("We start seeing cars park in the grass" as I've heard someone put it) they go to build or establish an entirely new autonomous plant for another 150 people.
Huh
They've been rated one of the best companies to work for for awhile now. The idea is based on what their founder learned working at DuPont where small autonomous groups would be formed if only to form as-needed problem solving units, and they worked so well the guy figured, "Why not all the time?"
...wait, it's not even ideologically motivated?
More off of personal experience, so no. It's not like the guy read Proudhon and thought, "I like this guy. Let's do Proudhon."
He did it, they worked out the kinks as the organization grew, and it is as it is.
Huh
How do the factories interact with eachother?
I'm not sure. I tried to look into that myself. But I'm sure they have some people going between to figure out what each other are doing. There has to be some level of inter-shop management. But all I've read stresses the horizontal-ness of it and some of the criticsm leveled against going that route (ie: some critics like to talk about how it's easy for people to hide their unproductivity in this manner of organization).
But if it's gotten as big as it had, it's worth looking into some more and consideration. I know there's a few other companies I link to when people complain about how a lack of hierarchy is bad to underline how you can have an effective large company without supervisors or managers; Mondragon in Spain is another I use too.
Mondragon doesn't have managers?
I thought mondragon had managers
Last I checked they're a bike manufacturing co-op.
Or so they're called on de webz
Who?
Yeah