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This is somewhat by the by, but I’m curious to know how you’d interpret the failure of the kibbutzim.
On a local level we already have what you’re suggesting in the sense that there’s nothing that prevents a small band of individuals from organizing along a cooperative pathway (obviously, since that’s what we’re talking about). The problem I see is one with scale and how it generalizes to a larger population. Local production and distribution doesn’t produce an economic surplus that the broader mass of humanity outside the cooperative can benefit from on any large scale. Now technically that’s an imperfect example because some cooperatives do produce a profit but that in turn gets distributed among the workers, there is no capitalist or investor that reaps up the overall net profit to the exclusion of the workers.
I get what it is you’re hypothesizing but it just strikes me as a way for extremely dysfunctional labor to get by without keeping up their end of the work. It doesn’t seem to me to provide a solution that ‘fixes’ the problem.
Fundamentally the only way this would ever be determined is just to get the system enacted and try it out. I could be wrong, so could do. I just have a very hard time seeing it working given my empirical views about human nature.
The kibbutzim are/were more than just a worker-owned business; they were also income-sharing communities. You can have the business end of it without the communal living part. Mondragon corporation is often pointed-to as the prime example of a large corporation running as a worker co-op.
Yeah, I’m aware of Mondragon (1, 2). Even Mondragon admits however that once a labor collective gets to a certain size they get spun off from the rest of the cooperative because it becomes unmanageable. There’s a reason vertically arranged hierarchies, whether its labor or sociopolitical are easier to manage when they become more complex than horizontal systems.
They aren’t really a “corporation” in the sense Americans think of them; like “Microsoft” is a corporation. They’re a federation of cooperatives. I’m not against them at all. In fact there are many things I like about them. But they definitely have long-term organizational constraints on them that capitalistic firms don’t have. I'm not hitting them for any of the fallacious reasons idiots like Ben Shapiro come up with (he's a moron who doesn't understand shit and has never gone out of his way to read the texts of his ideological opponents).
So long as I’m not prohibited from transferring into the subunit that’s the most difficult to work in and is the most profitable for the firm, I’d just outwork everyone else; so long as it justifies my 4:1 ratio or whatever it is against the lowest paid workers and is represented in my internal capital account of the company, I’d have no problem working for one.
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"Only once in history did democratic socialists manage to create socialism. That was the kibbutz. And after they had experienced it, they chose democratically to abolish it." - Joshua Muravchik, "The Mystery of the Kibbutz", as quoted in this fascinating GrokInFullness blog post
It feels like "failure" is too strong a word to use for that, though. Even if it didn't work well enough economically, it was at least a counterexample to the old "you can vote your way into socialism but you have to shoot your way out" joke.
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