Comment by losvedir | Hacker News Reader

Comment by losvedir | Hacker News Reader

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Correct me if I'm wrong, but there's nothing actually legally preventing a Mondragon-type industrial co-op like this from existing in the US, right?

That it's not so common is an interesting question: does it get outcompeted by your standard corporation? Would people rather generally work as employees than take on risk as owners? Something else? I think in a co-op like this, employees would still be eligible for food stamps, and there's nothing preventing them from "decimating" a local economy, either.

I think this is "socialist", and it seems to be working, and everyone is happy, so more power to them. But my understanding is since there's nothing preventing people from setting this up, the "Red Scare" was not a bunch of people going, "hey, change the laws so me and my buddies can set up a co-op". Like, what's the actual policy change desired? "Let folks who want to run corporations and work for them do so, and let folks who want to operate in a co-op do so?" No, because that's our current situation.

The Barrier to entry is probably capital costs.

Probably difficult at this point for enough lowly workers to pull their money and form a company, open stores, and compete with a Whole Foods.

The mega corps already dominate and can undercut anything that is starting up.

Amazon is kind of like a fiefdom where if they see someone building a castle in the distance, they can send some knights out to attack before it gets too big.

There are some large co-ops in the US. The largest iirc is CHS, a tier 2 co-op (co-op made of smaller co-ops).

Every part of our economy and government is dedicated to wiping out any form of socialism.

A developing nation even thinks about nationalizing their resource extraction? Suddenly there’s a coup with the CIA’s fingerprints all over it.

NATO is a foreign policy arm of the United States dedicated to crushing any leftist momentum. Hell, we recruited Nazis to run it.

We constantly back totalitarian regimes to crush leftists.

At a more local level we do things like make municipal broadband illegal.

Our government uses eminent domain to seize property for corporate interests.

The only non-terrorist domestic law enforcement the FBI does seems to be union busting.

We’ve started wars over communism.

We had private organizations like the Pinkertons crush collective action. Look up Homestead.

It was rumored that when the UK wanted a post-Brexit trade deal, one of our conditions was privatizing the NHS.

Every level of our society is devoted to crushing collective action.

>A developing nation even thinks about nationalizing their resource extraction Suddenly there’s a coup with the CIA’s fingerprints all over it.

In the Cold War, yes, because then it was assumed (rightly in some cases, wrongly in others) that any country who would nationalize their stuff was simply a Soviet puppet state following orders from Moscow. After the Soviet collapse, that isn't what the CIA (or American policy in general) cares about.

> NATO is a foreign policy arm of the United States dedicated to crushing any leftist momentum. Hell, we recruited Nazis to run it.

Everybody used Nazis after the war. Both the US and USSR snatched up every competent Nazi scientist, engineer, and intelligence officer they could and cut deals with them not to charge them with war crimes if they'd work for them. (Operation Paperclip for the US, Operation Osoaviakhim for the USSR). And of course NATO today isn't focused on containing Communism but rather the right-wing dictator who rules Russia today, and unlike in the Cold War, the current critics of NATO are almost entirely right-wing.

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