A research project on alternatives to capitalism and state socialism, covering cooperatives, nationalization, and platform co-ops.
Commenters mention Gar Alperovitz's work on cooperative economics; an author joined to discuss Emilia-Romagna, and another thread covered US nationalization history.
Imagine a society in which all but 10 individuals invest a fixed percentage of their income money in an index fund that in turn buys shares of any publicly listed firm in proportion to its market capitalization. The remaining 10 trade actively. For simplicity, assume that the necessary purchases and sales are done every day at market opening, based on the data from closing at the previous day.
The ten active traders would determine those market capitalizations; everyone else would be along for the ride. If that group of ten colluded, they could extract money from the passive traders conducting straw purchases of a stock to inflate its price (and thus market cap), triggering the index fund to buy it, at which point they can take a profit and divide the spoils among themselves.
This is obviously hugely stylized and exaggerated. But clearly, at some point between no passive investment and overwhelming passive investment, there is a strategic tipping point.
Politically, we have to ask why the mass of passive investors should allow private traders pursuing short term profit maximization strategies to determine the allocation of investment in our society. Wouldn't every vision of the good life be better served by democratically electing the bodies that make the major investment decisions that determine our economic direction, returns to labor, basic infrastructure, etc?
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/08935696.2022.2051375
https://thenextsystem.org/node/204
>That should absolutely not apply to Discord, Google Mail, or Amazon AWS, because those are all private companies restricting the use of their private property.
That's not some law of physics. Just a man made law that game them those "use of their private proverty" rights (or rather, rich and powerful people lobbied and bought legislation, and got them for themselves).
We can take them back. And we can also stop treating them as legal "persons" while we're at it.
>You may call them "public spaces" or "public services" but that is an abuse of the word "public".
Public in the legal sense is just what we deem public in the legal sense.
As for public in the dictionary sense, that's irrelevant here.
Besides, after offering a service used by millions, that's basically a public service (I mean in the dictionary sense: directed at a mass public) - and even legal scholars have argued that they function as a kind of public utility (and could/should be regulated as such).
If we're to take it even further, then it's also a historical fact that all countries, including the USA, have nationalized companies (made some private companies public the same way public libraries are, either entirely or in part - e.g. having the state be shareholders of large part of them). So it's not like it's some unprecedent thing.
https://thenextsystem.org/history-of-nationalization-in-the-us#:~:text=Nationalization%20is%20the%20process%20of,is%20not%20always%20the%20case.
As many here have noted, UBI still leaves in place a power structure, or material relation of dependency. I just think there are a lot more nuanced and interesting approaches to this problem.
For instance, what would it take to devolve ownership of essential infrastructure for social reproduction (practically: hospitals, farms, housing, schools, etc) at the local level? How could we blend small forms of cooperative ownership into an economy that still has room for entrepreneurship? What's the right amount of state capacity to safeguard against disaster? IMO, these question of ownership were thoroughly excised from US political discourse for a mixture of reasons, some understandable (revulsion to Soviet totalitarianism) and some frustrating (lack of information because the conversation threatens entrenched power).
US political culture has an emphasis on personal liberty that I would never want to lose, but I'd love to see more Americans engage their capacity for invention toward resolving the tensions between individual freedom and collective wellbeing. In my opinion, Gar Alperovitz's work around the concept of a "Pluralist Commonwealth"[1] is a really interesting stab at this problem.
1. https://thenextsystem.org/principles-introduction
Gar Alperovitz is doing some incredible and really important economic work today, supporting research into economic systems other than capitalism and state socialism. He's doing lots of research into cooperative economic structures, municipally supported public-private economies, how we could build sustainability controls into the structure of the economy, and so forth. It's fascinating work.
If you have any interest in economics at all, it's worth checking out his think tank, the Democracy Collaborative [1] which studies cooperatives (worker and otherwise) as well as supports improvements in local democratic control, and it's spin off project The Next System Project [2] which is soliciting white papers outlining new economic and social systems that aren't either capitalism or state socialism that might solve the problems inherent to both.
[1] https://democracycollaborative.org/
[2] https://thenextsystem.org/
Interesting to see this pop up here! I'm the author, and work for a research institute looking to learn from examples like this one to build a more resilient and democratized economy in the US. While Emilia-Romagna isn't perfect, one really interesting thing it shows is that you can build a high growth, integrated industrial ecosystem using cooperative capital, with the appropriate policy supports and federation structures. In some ways it is more interesting than Mondragon (the other big proof of concept for at-scale worker cooperatives) because it is far less monolithic.
Anyway, if you are interested, check out more of our work at https://thenextsystem.org and https://democracycollaborative.org
> they do change who fundamentally has control of the company during that time
No, they were contracts authorised by the War Powers Act of 1941 [1][2].
Management was conserved and largely left to its own decisions. When workers struck, mines and factories were nationalised [3], but that was the exception.
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_Powers_Act_of_1941
[2] https://www.dcma.mil/News/Article-View/Article/2100501/a-history-of-defense-contract-administration/
[3] https://thenextsystem.org/sites/default/files/2019-09/A_History_of_Nationalization_in_the_US-Hanna-NSP.pdf