cyu
27th October 2008, 20:10
A small positive step?
Excerpts from http://news.infoshop.org/article.php?story=20081026235358809
(The winning essay in the 2008 Libertarian Alliance Chris R. Tame Memorial Essay Competition was an unusual choice for the anti-authoritarian right, one that champions anarcho-syndicalist and other cooperative models rather than corporatism and exploitation as the likely product of a free society.)
There were two ways Parliament could have abolished feudalism and reformed property. It might have treated the customary possessive rights of the peasantry as genuine title to property in the modern sense, and then abolished their rents. But what it actually did, instead, was to treat the artificial “property rights” of the landed aristocracy, in feudal legal theory, as real property rights in the modern sense; the landed classes were given full legal title, and the peasants were transformed into tenants at will with no customary restriction on the rents that could be charged…
…Factory owners were not innocent in all of this. Mises claimed that the capital investments on which the factory system was built came largely from hard-working and thrifty workmen who saved their own earnings as investment capital. In fact, however, they were junior partners of the landed elites, with much of their investment capital coming either from the Whig landed oligarchy or from the overseas fruits of mercantilism, slavery and colonialism.
In addition, factory employers depended on harsh authoritarian measures by the government to keep labor under control and reduce its bargaining power.
Numerous economic arrangements currently exist that offer glimpses into what post-statist, post-plutocratic institutions of production might be.
One of these is the Mondragon Cooperative Corporation, a collection of worker- owned and operated industries originating from the Basque region of Spain. Having been in existence since 1941, the Mondragon cooperatives initially established a “peoples’ bank” of the kind originally suggested by the godfather of classical anarchism, Pierre Joseph Proudhon,19 for the development of still more enterprises, which now total more than 150 in number, including the private University of Mondragon. Its supermarket division is the third largest retail outlet in Spain and the largest Spanish-owned food store chain. Each individual cooperative has a workers’ council of its own, and the entire cooperative federation is governed by a congress of workers from the different enterprises.20
Still another quite interesting example is the Brazilian company Semco SA. While privately owned as a family business, Semco practices a form of radical industrial democracy. Under the leadership of Ricardo Semler, who inherited the company from his father, Semco maintains a management structure where workers manage themselves and set their own production goals and budgets with remuneration based on productivity, efficiency and cost effectiveness. Workers receive twenty-five percent of the profits from their division. Middle management has essentially been eliminated. Workers have the right of veto over company expenditures. Job duties are frequently rotated and even the CEO position is shared by six persons, including owner Semler, who serve six month terms in the chief executive position. The company now has over 3,000 employees, annual revenue of over $200 million and a growth rate of forty percent each year.21
An economy organized on the basis of worker-owned and operated industries, peoples’ banks, mutuals, consumer cooperatives, anarcho-syndicalist labor unions, individual and family enterprises, small farms and crafts workers associations engaged in local production for local use, voluntary charitable institutions, land trusts, or voluntary collectives, communes and kibbutzim may seem farfetched to some, but no more so and probably less so than a modern industrial, high-tech economy where the merchant class is the ruling class and the working class is a frequently affluent middle class would have seemed to residents of the feudal societies of pre-modern times. If the expansion of the market economy, specialization, the division of labor, industrialization and technological advancements can bring about the achievements of modern societies in eradicating disease, starvation, infant mortality and early death, one can only wonder what a genuine free enterprise system might achieve, and would have already achieved were it not for the scourge of statism and the corresponding plutocracy.
Excerpts from http://news.infoshop.org/article.php?story=20081026235358809
(The winning essay in the 2008 Libertarian Alliance Chris R. Tame Memorial Essay Competition was an unusual choice for the anti-authoritarian right, one that champions anarcho-syndicalist and other cooperative models rather than corporatism and exploitation as the likely product of a free society.)
There were two ways Parliament could have abolished feudalism and reformed property. It might have treated the customary possessive rights of the peasantry as genuine title to property in the modern sense, and then abolished their rents. But what it actually did, instead, was to treat the artificial “property rights” of the landed aristocracy, in feudal legal theory, as real property rights in the modern sense; the landed classes were given full legal title, and the peasants were transformed into tenants at will with no customary restriction on the rents that could be charged…
…Factory owners were not innocent in all of this. Mises claimed that the capital investments on which the factory system was built came largely from hard-working and thrifty workmen who saved their own earnings as investment capital. In fact, however, they were junior partners of the landed elites, with much of their investment capital coming either from the Whig landed oligarchy or from the overseas fruits of mercantilism, slavery and colonialism.
In addition, factory employers depended on harsh authoritarian measures by the government to keep labor under control and reduce its bargaining power.
Numerous economic arrangements currently exist that offer glimpses into what post-statist, post-plutocratic institutions of production might be.
One of these is the Mondragon Cooperative Corporation, a collection of worker- owned and operated industries originating from the Basque region of Spain. Having been in existence since 1941, the Mondragon cooperatives initially established a “peoples’ bank” of the kind originally suggested by the godfather of classical anarchism, Pierre Joseph Proudhon,19 for the development of still more enterprises, which now total more than 150 in number, including the private University of Mondragon. Its supermarket division is the third largest retail outlet in Spain and the largest Spanish-owned food store chain. Each individual cooperative has a workers’ council of its own, and the entire cooperative federation is governed by a congress of workers from the different enterprises.20
Still another quite interesting example is the Brazilian company Semco SA. While privately owned as a family business, Semco practices a form of radical industrial democracy. Under the leadership of Ricardo Semler, who inherited the company from his father, Semco maintains a management structure where workers manage themselves and set their own production goals and budgets with remuneration based on productivity, efficiency and cost effectiveness. Workers receive twenty-five percent of the profits from their division. Middle management has essentially been eliminated. Workers have the right of veto over company expenditures. Job duties are frequently rotated and even the CEO position is shared by six persons, including owner Semler, who serve six month terms in the chief executive position. The company now has over 3,000 employees, annual revenue of over $200 million and a growth rate of forty percent each year.21
An economy organized on the basis of worker-owned and operated industries, peoples’ banks, mutuals, consumer cooperatives, anarcho-syndicalist labor unions, individual and family enterprises, small farms and crafts workers associations engaged in local production for local use, voluntary charitable institutions, land trusts, or voluntary collectives, communes and kibbutzim may seem farfetched to some, but no more so and probably less so than a modern industrial, high-tech economy where the merchant class is the ruling class and the working class is a frequently affluent middle class would have seemed to residents of the feudal societies of pre-modern times. If the expansion of the market economy, specialization, the division of labor, industrialization and technological advancements can bring about the achievements of modern societies in eradicating disease, starvation, infant mortality and early death, one can only wonder what a genuine free enterprise system might achieve, and would have already achieved were it not for the scourge of statism and the corresponding plutocracy.