Guevarista wrote:
Mondragon is a distributist more than a socialist system, they only donate a small percentage of profit generated through their unpaid labour, the rest is private wealth, but it is essentially a capitalist enterprise with social ownership that exists to generate profit for the owners, hence can exist quite happily within a global corporate market as Noam Chomsky says:
you also have to get beyond that to dismantle the system of production for profit rather than production for use. That means dismantling at least large parts of market systems. Take the most advanced case: Mondragon. It’s worker owned, it’s not worker managed, although the management does come from the workforce often, but it’s in a market system and they still exploit workers in South America, and they do things that are harmful to the society as a whole and they have no choice. If you’re in a system where you must make profit in order to survive. You are compelled to ignore negative externalities, effects on others.
www.counterpunch.org/2012/04/30/talking-with-chomsky/
What they're working for could be said not to really differ too much from what the average employee of Argos is working for imo
Bullshit.
Your average argos worker gets a few quid an hour and is PAYE employed and most likely part-time.
They get crap healthcare and crap education and have to pay for their own housing and their money when they go shopping is pissed away.
You're a mile off the mark there again Gue...
If memory serves we've been here before, the point was more that this is a class issue, you can change the material conditions slightly within the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie as Mondragon have done making it more lucrative, secure, productive, or you can overthrow it in the way it came to power during the French Revolution and Enlightenment.
You and whose army?
You keep forgetting that there's millions of people out there who have no clue what is being done to them and for that matter cannot identify who their enemy actually is.
You seem to expect some group social movement to happen from unions which have already been taken over by plants who the elites have put in to run things.
Thus far unions have not even managed to get the average british worker anything close to what Mondragon staff get and Mondragon staff aren't even union members!
You should develop your critique of Mondragon it's flawed and goes against many of the principles you say you stand for, ie anti-authoritarianism, removal of profit motivation, it's an essentially distributist system based on traditional Christian values I know you hold though like the family unit, gender relations, simplicity of lifestyle, private property.
www.globaljusticecenter.org/2011/11/15/cooperativization-on/Why on Earth would I be against the good Christian values of distributism?
As for private property as I said before, Mondragon has social housing, social education and social healthcare all paid for from the co-op profit pool.
They also stand to get the biggest pension payoff short of bank managers and politicians.
So again you're a mile off the mark and again you avoid bothering to include all the stuff about Mondragon I mentioned earlier.
Did you know that all shareholders in Mondragon are self employed? Are you aware of the tax implications?
Have you ever wondered why the basque region is associated with 'terrorists' ?
I think the basis of most of our disagreements are based on the private property and class questions, i've decided to just be more extreme nowadays on the question, I think all production of property should serve the common need, it should be undertaken to serve the need and excess created should be distributed to eliminate the need, on which basis we can begin to grow as a healthy organism in a beneficial environment, there are immediate steps that can be taken in that direction imo, NGO's, Lobby groups political networks already exist along those lines, being politically active.
I think its because you fail to see how I view the 'class' and 'property' aspect of things from an anarchists perspective.
I would like to see a world where 'class' and 'property' (in terms of housing at least) just simply do not exist. For that to happen money must not exist.
If you have money then you have property.
Its important to note that there is some property that does exist, for example, your own body, then there are some basic human rights that should exist, the right to live peacefully and a right to privacy.
If you carte blanche abolish property rights then the door is left open for chairman mao types to take away your basic human rights. So you have to think carefully about how you word it.
Mondragon workers for example although they live in social housing their house is considered their property for the duration of the time they work there. Nobody has the right to come in and bust their door down and have a party in their living room just because it's 'social housing' if you see what I mean.
Its a bit like its rented. They have far more disposable income than most of us (if not probably all of us) on this forum do.
There's guys there earning 70k and they're working on milling machines.
The downside to mondragon imho is simply the cost of getting a job there, you have to BUY your job at mondragon because you have to buy a share in the company. Mondragon has had to exist within the current monetary system which is itself flawed for all the reasons I've mentioned previously. You cannot create wealth out of nothing by printing more money. You merely divide up the value of each unit less and less the more you print.
As things stand, Mondragon is the best example of anarcho-syndicalist co-op and certainly the fairest system in use thus far for the workers, it pisses from a great height on Argos. Anyone can see that....
