"Mutualism" by Sara Horowitz was an interesting book that discussed some of the history of this style of worker owned businesses. She traces some of it's history, and points out other examples of this style of worker or member governance showing up in other organizations: https://www.porchlightbooks.com/products/mutualism-sara-horo...
Employee ownership is not a silver bullet to every problem. The governance model and governing body of employee-owners has to be well constructed as with anything. As a philosophy generally, it has a lot of potential to avoid certain common problems with more traditional business models.
Credit Unions tend to be a more commonplace example of member/worker governance, though in my experience it's somewhat rare for the average member to engage much with the governance.
It should be said that Sara [1] was also the founder of the Freelancers Union [2], offering solo benefits and other resources to freelancers.
The book is great because it's so practical, with 3 org design principles [3]:
[1] A solidaristic community
[2] An economic mechanism that supports the community's mission
[3] A long-term time horizon where the economic value is recycled back to the community
I think part of the reason people assume it's not possible is that (at least in the UK) there is so much faux-consultation which has approximately no effect; both in the public and private sector. But it looks superficially like the same thing.
Worth noting that is completely legal in the USA and even encouraged by the tax code. They are called ESOPs (Employee Stock Ownership Program). An ESOP configured as an S-Corp that is 100% employee owned pays no federal business tax. Some examples of well known ESOPs in the US are Wawa, Bob's Red Mill, and W. L. Gore & Associates (makers of Gore-Tex).
Well, sort of. Technically speaking, S-Corps by definition pay no federal income tax since they're pass-through entities. If the sole shareholder of an S-Corp was an ESOP, the income is passing through to it. The ESOP has beneficiaries (the employees) whose shares sit in a trust. Income to the ESOP isn't taxed at the moment of filing, it's deferred: when the beneficiaries take distributions according to their shares, they pay ordinary income tax in that year.
Igalia is very serious about worker ownership. They aren't legally structured as a cooperative, as they don't technically meet the definition - as I understand it, they were nervous about the idea of committing wholly to new employees getting an equal vote right away, so there is a longer, more gradual process through which employees become owners and gain voting rights. But a very large fraction have them, and (like a cooperative) their rights are legally enforceable.
Because the workers are also shareholders, and shareholders like money either way. Some of their business units were becoming extremely uncompetitive. So they ship a bunch of the manufacturing away to subsidiaries where you are not really a member of the coop: You aren't getting shares if you are in many of those other subsidiaries. They still managed to build a class system anyway. If you work at their retailers, you aren't the same as if you work at their Basque factories.
As for workers that were part of the coop in uncompetitive jobs, they moved them around as they could, but ultimately no amount of union or coop-like behavior is going to help if you are getting outcompeted.
A lot of people think it's all wine and roses when you get more worker input, but then you realize quite a few of the warts come straight from having a bunch of people with different amounts of power, and you still have power differentials even if everyone votes.
Sibling commented on organizational disadvantages that may or may not be inherent to cooperatives.
However, another explanation is that the dominant economic and legal environment - and, indeed, society itself - is structured around a single business model: the capitalist as chief, and workers with no meaningful voice in management.
Mondragon emerged in a region with strong traditions of industrial organization, communal solidarity and popular education, as well as a recent memory of workers' movements. It also arose within living memory of the large-scale worker collectivizations of the Spanish Revolution, particularly in Catalonia.
Much of the social and institutional environment that has made this possible has weakened over recent decades. This was not merely an accidental development: in much of the world, it was the result of a conscious political project that accelerated in the 1980s.
Worker cooperatives are fully compatible with capitalism. Only mentioning it because sometimes this idea gets unfairly maligned due to some mistaken association with socialism or even communism. There should be more of these sorts of entities in the USA and Europe, and frankly everywhere. It's an assured route towards better conditions for the working class, by making them owners and stakeholders in a more substantial way than merely holding some stock equity (which is kind of a superficial ownership that's sometimes presented as this same type of worker cooperative ownership).
Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars Trilogy, especially Green and Blue Mars, provide a nice fictional exploration of this idea. I think Mondragon may even be name dropped.
Capitalism is not simply free markers - it means "control by people with capital." People control society proportionally to how much capital they have, and those who control vast boards of capital are very uninterested in allowing capital to be spread around more equitably.
I would say that capitalism is not only characterized by private ownership of capital, but also by free market for labor, which could be almost considered a complementary feature (other side of the same coin).
On the other hand, socialism primarily rejects free market for labour in favor of worker emancipation and participation in decision-making. So both socialism and capitalism are compatible with free markets; it's the labor market where the opinion differs.
(As a socialist, I would add, salaries cannot be treated in economics the same way as e.g. price of apples, because apple doesn't care what its price is.)
Control by billionaires is incompatible with free markets. A billionaire will always use his power to close up the market and grant himself a monopoly.
Socialism is completely incompatible with free markets. Free markets typically stop being opinionated beyond the concept of enforcing contracts/consent, i.e. people are allowed to structure their economic relationships with one another however they want, they just have to respect their agreements.
Socialism is a prescriptive ideology, it is concerned precisely with the nature of the economic relationships people make. Labor theory of value. "From each according to their abilities, to each according to their needs." Workers own the means of production. To the degree that people are able to freely structure their economic relationships with one another, then the vast majority of those relationships will look nothing like the prescriptions of socialism. To the degree that the economic relationships are made to look like the prescriptions of socialism, then the economic model would fail to be described as a free market.
This is why in a free market/"capitalist" economy, communes can exist, Mondragon can exist...because you can structure your relationships with one another however you want. It's just that most people don't like that structure. "Capitalism" itself doesn't care at all if that's the way people want to distribute equity and control of the corporation. Now, if you want to structure an arbitrary economic relationship in a socialist communist country...good luck.
I often wonder if these classifications have long outlived their usefulness, and only lead to endless, often heated, ideological discussions about their definition. To the extent that those benefiting most from observably-broken-form-of-global-capitalism can use that as a tool to sow division and strife and ensure nothing changes. The gist of your and parent's comment is the interesting bit, where new systems and mechanisms are discussed.
I don't think it's a tool for sowing division. There is a significant group of self-proclaimed socialists who proudly stan the Soviet Union and Mao's China, so I think it's more of a case of ideologies being more messy than they seem.
Personally, I don't care as much about the label themselves as I do about the relationships they describe behind.
Not sure why this comment is downvoted. In the context of Marxian Socialism and Command Economies, it's very much true that socialism is incompatible with free markets.
Going even further, without a free market for labour, there's no true worker emancipation. Even with "worker-ownership" (read corporate-ownership under a democratic governance), each worker's power is still diluted by the governing body (which, funnily enough, means socialism strengthens capitalism as "control by those who own capital" while weakening capitalism as "free markets").
I didn't downvote it (obviously), but, for starters, it confuses socialism with communism (and also makes a typical categorical error in assuming that FEATTATEATTN is an implementation rather than desired value).
Second, it confuses capitalism (existing systems) with free market (some kind of ideal). It also pretends "free market" is a value neutral proposition. That completely ignores real-world role played by property, information, money and other multiparty relationships that socialism (and other regulations) try to address.
Third, it ignores the fact that socialism has been, not extensively, but successfully, implemented in the real world. (Mondragon and other worker coops, postwar tripartity models of worker participation in company control, etc.)
Lastly, it treats "free market" as an all-or-nothing proposition, which is never the case. There is, for example, no free market for nuclear bombs or for human children, and for a good reason.
Which brings us to your second paragraph, why rejecting free market can emancipate the workers. Treating labor as a commodity means that the person who performs the labor loses their decision power to the market, and so they lose freedom. Thus socialism demands that you do not separate human from the labor, and so they should always have a say over conditions in which they perform the labor. (This is different from other commodities, which, being inanimate objects, do not have a say about how they are used.) Accepting that free market for labor shouldn't exist is not really that different from accepting that free market for slaves shouldn't exist; in both cases there is human freedom attached which shouldn't be simply subjugated to the decisions of the "free market".
I would also say that worker coops show that your 2nd paragraph is empirically untrue. (Which is also bad for that model, because they often struggle to find capital, most of it being owned by
capitalists who demand control over it.)
In regards to socialist/communist confusion, OP primarily refers using the term "socialism", except at the end where they use "socialist communist countries", likely referring to the self-proclaimed socialist countries that strive/strived towards communism. (I'm not sure FEATTATEATTN means here)
> There is, for example, no free market for nuclear bombs or for human children, and for a good reason.
Reasons that don't contradict OP's: "Free markets typically stop being opinionated beyond the concept of enforcing contracts/consent." Nuclear bombs only current purpose is indiscriminate eradication of human life and child trafficking is well... child trafficking. They all break consent. The same can be said about slavery, but not labour.
Which brings to the core of this discussion: the free market of labour. The addition of the free market of labour cannot, on its own, result in loss of self-control by either party. Removing it, however, rewards those who benefit the most from the current arrangement, which is most likely to be the employers.
While commodities, and other conventional properties, indeed do not have a will of their own; once appropriated, they become an extension of the will of their owner. With this in mind, labour, capital and commodities aren't different: neither the human actions applied to make bread, nor the machines needed to make bread nor the bread itself care about their prices or how they are used, but their owners do. In both cases, the same human freedoms are being affected in the same way. Slavery is special because the traded resource in question is another human being, someone capable of self-ownership, and the slaver isn't simply dictating on, for sake of simplicity, non-essential part of their body as with labour and commodities, but the slave's whole body and life, thus violating the consent part.
Which segways to your final paragraph. When I mentioned "worker-ownership", I was specifically alluding to worker coops. They not only do not prove what I said untrue, they, both theoretically and empirically (but mostly theoretically, yet), prove it true. One empirical part is the fact that Mondragon's increasing reliance on contractors, for instance. But, more interestingly, is the fact that, presuming that all ~70,000 Mondragon employees are members (they aren't), each would have around 0,0014% share. Given that Mondragon works under indirect democracy, this share doesn't even translate to direct influence. Is this painting the image of worker emancipation? Notice how the corporate power over the individual is still strong - sure smells like capitalism, as defined as "control by those who own capital", except "those" here is a corporation, which is not that different from today.
Given that you brought the slavery, likely for the analogy with wage-slavery - trying to fix workers by making their employers democratic is like solving slavery by making their slavers republics. The proper solution is to give direct private ownership over the means of production to all, but that's likely economically infeasible (but who knows, society where everyone is a capitalist like this would be neat). However, we can fix the issue with coops previously by keeping them small, but to handle the large contingency of workers and their diversity, a lot more coops would need to exist. Furthermore, these coops would need to be able triage workers that fit into their culture, and worker would need to be able to chose coops that satifify them. That implies a free market of labour. It points to the issue being more located in the concentration of power on people, not individuals, which means socialism can't do anything to fix this, specially if it implies getting rid of the free market of labour. Perhaps pushing for coops can help prevent corporate power concentration, but a healthy free market of labour is critical.
> The addition of the free market of labour cannot, on its own, result in loss of self-control by either party.
I disagree with this, and it's less true in theory than in practice. The free market is deliberately engineered to push down price to cost of production. In terms of labor, it means your remuneration will be reduced to subsistence wage, and not more. An apple doesn't care about its price, but price of your labor determines your living standard and your freedom.
And where this doesn't happen in the real world, it is actually a consequence of labor market failure, for example, labor negotiations through unions.
(There are also other labor market failures that prop the wages upwards, for example for CEOs.)
So I am not sure how you imagine free market for labor to help workers unless you assume a market failure of some sort.
The individual share of worker within a coop might be low, but it's still better than 0 under a private (capitalist owned) company. Moreover, all the value produced gets redistributed to the workers, not just a portion. (And I agree here that outsourcing Mondragon is bad.)
> That implies a free market of labor.
No it doesn't. Free market of labor is more than just a free choice of job, it also means that people who are not involved in the job itself might dictate the conditions of production (for example, it implies no labor laws, so you might die in the summer heat as a consequence). And it is by design.
(I was appalled to find that Hayek defended mining towns. Freedom to change the job my ass!)
It is quintessential socialism: collective ownership (of the “means of production”).
It is just embedded in a market system, just as, say, USSR or Cuba was embedded in the global economy.
That doesn’t make it not socialist.
And not all socialism is “bad”. It has to do with whether it is voluntary or not. I am a libertarian, and I fully support communes, housing cooperatives, credit unions and the like. I consider the lack of a superfluous extractive landlord or shareholder class a feature.
It is not a mistaken association. Socialism traditionally meant workers control over production. Work councils in Germany originally pursued direct workers control over respective businesses. Unions in Germany pursued some version of this well into the 1950s. Most socialist movements in Europe understood this to _be_ Socialism until the Soviet counter-revolution swept it all away.
And there is another forgotten truth. Before the Soviet counter-revolution, liberals advocated for this type of Socialism.
The form of association, however, which if mankind continue to improve, must be expected in the end to predominate, is not that which can exist between a capitalist as chief, and work-people without a voice in the management, but the association of the labourers themselves on terms of equality, collectively owning the capital with which they carry on their operations, and working under managers elected and removable by themselves.
It remains confusing that, after centuries of profiting off capital generally being a much better strategic choice than profiting off labour, workers insist and persist in trying to make labour work.
If the unions had dumped their efforts into co-ops instead of trying to fight their own companies then they might have managed to have a positive impact. They've been at it for long enough for capital accumulation to have kicked in even at pathetic rates of saving.
You may be surprised to learn that if one does not have capital, yet does have the capacity to labour, then one may seek to make labour work rather than profiting from capital.
Most people don't know this, but Huawei is another giant cooperative.
> Huawei Investment & Holding Co., Ltd. is a private company wholly owned by 169,054 of its employees and retired beneficiaries. As of December 31, 2025, company founder Ren Zhengfei's investment accounts for nearly 0.59% of the company’s total share capital.
"Mutualism" by Sara Horowitz was an interesting book that discussed some of the history of this style of worker owned businesses. She traces some of it's history, and points out other examples of this style of worker or member governance showing up in other organizations: https://www.porchlightbooks.com/products/mutualism-sara-horo...
Great read, highly recommend.
The National Center for Employee Ownership also maintains a list of 100 employee owned businesses in the USA: https://www.nceo.org/research/employee-ownership-100-largest...
Employee ownership is not a silver bullet to every problem. The governance model and governing body of employee-owners has to be well constructed as with anything. As a philosophy generally, it has a lot of potential to avoid certain common problems with more traditional business models.
In this space it's also important to understand the difference between cooperatives and collectives: https://institute.coop/about-worker-co-ops/worker-cooperativ...
Credit Unions tend to be a more commonplace example of member/worker governance, though in my experience it's somewhat rare for the average member to engage much with the governance.
Yea, I agree, it's a great book!
It should be said that Sara [1] was also the founder of the Freelancers Union [2], offering solo benefits and other resources to freelancers.
The book is great because it's so practical, with 3 org design principles [3]:
[1] A solidaristic community [2] An economic mechanism that supports the community's mission [3] A long-term time horizon where the economic value is recycled back to the community
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sara_Horowitz
https://freelancersunion.org/
https://ssir.org/articles/entry/mutualism-next-generation
Interesting.
I think part of the reason people assume it's not possible is that (at least in the UK) there is so much faux-consultation which has approximately no effect; both in the public and private sector. But it looks superficially like the same thing.
Worth noting that is completely legal in the USA and even encouraged by the tax code. They are called ESOPs (Employee Stock Ownership Program). An ESOP configured as an S-Corp that is 100% employee owned pays no federal business tax. Some examples of well known ESOPs in the US are Wawa, Bob's Red Mill, and W. L. Gore & Associates (makers of Gore-Tex).
Employee stock ownership is a leap forward and studies consistently highlight its economic benefits.
However, Mondragon, and co-ops like it, go further. They are industrial democracies: one worker, one vote.
Well, sort of. Technically speaking, S-Corps by definition pay no federal income tax since they're pass-through entities. If the sole shareholder of an S-Corp was an ESOP, the income is passing through to it. The ESOP has beneficiaries (the employees) whose shares sit in a trust. Income to the ESOP isn't taxed at the moment of filing, it's deferred: when the beneficiaries take distributions according to their shares, they pay ordinary income tax in that year.
Why don't cooperatives of IT professionals exist? It's a business with low capital entry and high dividends.
Workers should prefer to own their company as risks are really low (in contrast to other industries).
AFAIK, Galois is 100% employee owned: https://www.galois.com/life-at-galois
I know people working both at Galois and Mondragón, and they seem to be relatively similar in spirit.
They might be rare, but they do exist: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Igalia
Igalia is very serious about worker ownership. They aren't legally structured as a cooperative, as they don't technically meet the definition - as I understand it, they were nervous about the idea of committing wholly to new employees getting an equal vote right away, so there is a longer, more gradual process through which employees become owners and gain voting rights. But a very large fraction have them, and (like a cooperative) their rights are legally enforceable.
They moved most production work to factories in China, which ironically aren't cooperative.
How'd that happen if it's one worker, one vote?
Because the workers are also shareholders, and shareholders like money either way. Some of their business units were becoming extremely uncompetitive. So they ship a bunch of the manufacturing away to subsidiaries where you are not really a member of the coop: You aren't getting shares if you are in many of those other subsidiaries. They still managed to build a class system anyway. If you work at their retailers, you aren't the same as if you work at their Basque factories.
As for workers that were part of the coop in uncompetitive jobs, they moved them around as they could, but ultimately no amount of union or coop-like behavior is going to help if you are getting outcompeted.
A lot of people think it's all wine and roses when you get more worker input, but then you realize quite a few of the warts come straight from having a bunch of people with different amounts of power, and you still have power differentials even if everyone votes.
Sibling commented on organizational disadvantages that may or may not be inherent to cooperatives.
However, another explanation is that the dominant economic and legal environment - and, indeed, society itself - is structured around a single business model: the capitalist as chief, and workers with no meaningful voice in management.
Mondragon emerged in a region with strong traditions of industrial organization, communal solidarity and popular education, as well as a recent memory of workers' movements. It also arose within living memory of the large-scale worker collectivizations of the Spanish Revolution, particularly in Catalonia.
Much of the social and institutional environment that has made this possible has weakened over recent decades. This was not merely an accidental development: in much of the world, it was the result of a conscious political project that accelerated in the 1980s.
Worker cooperatives are fully compatible with capitalism. Only mentioning it because sometimes this idea gets unfairly maligned due to some mistaken association with socialism or even communism. There should be more of these sorts of entities in the USA and Europe, and frankly everywhere. It's an assured route towards better conditions for the working class, by making them owners and stakeholders in a more substantial way than merely holding some stock equity (which is kind of a superficial ownership that's sometimes presented as this same type of worker cooperative ownership).
Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars Trilogy, especially Green and Blue Mars, provide a nice fictional exploration of this idea. I think Mondragon may even be name dropped.
Yes it is! the Mondragon Accords. my first thought when seeing the title :) had no idea the name was based on something real!
Have been listening to an audio-book of 2312 when I have the time to be fully attentive
Capitalism is not simply free markers - it means "control by people with capital." People control society proportionally to how much capital they have, and those who control vast boards of capital are very uninterested in allowing capital to be spread around more equitably.
The parent post is not even the worst offender. In his (otherwise good) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/23_Things_They_Don%27t_Tell_Yo..., Ha-Joon Chang completely flips the meaning between free markets and capitalism.
I would say that capitalism is not only characterized by private ownership of capital, but also by free market for labor, which could be almost considered a complementary feature (other side of the same coin).
On the other hand, socialism primarily rejects free market for labour in favor of worker emancipation and participation in decision-making. So both socialism and capitalism are compatible with free markets; it's the labor market where the opinion differs.
(As a socialist, I would add, salaries cannot be treated in economics the same way as e.g. price of apples, because apple doesn't care what its price is.)
Control by billionaires is incompatible with free markets. A billionaire will always use his power to close up the market and grant himself a monopoly.
Socialism isn't even well-defined.
Socialism is completely incompatible with free markets. Free markets typically stop being opinionated beyond the concept of enforcing contracts/consent, i.e. people are allowed to structure their economic relationships with one another however they want, they just have to respect their agreements.
Socialism is a prescriptive ideology, it is concerned precisely with the nature of the economic relationships people make. Labor theory of value. "From each according to their abilities, to each according to their needs." Workers own the means of production. To the degree that people are able to freely structure their economic relationships with one another, then the vast majority of those relationships will look nothing like the prescriptions of socialism. To the degree that the economic relationships are made to look like the prescriptions of socialism, then the economic model would fail to be described as a free market.
This is why in a free market/"capitalist" economy, communes can exist, Mondragon can exist...because you can structure your relationships with one another however you want. It's just that most people don't like that structure. "Capitalism" itself doesn't care at all if that's the way people want to distribute equity and control of the corporation. Now, if you want to structure an arbitrary economic relationship in a socialist communist country...good luck.
>> Capitalism is ... OTOH socialism ...
> No, socialism is not ... and capitalism is ...
I often wonder if these classifications have long outlived their usefulness, and only lead to endless, often heated, ideological discussions about their definition. To the extent that those benefiting most from observably-broken-form-of-global-capitalism can use that as a tool to sow division and strife and ensure nothing changes. The gist of your and parent's comment is the interesting bit, where new systems and mechanisms are discussed.
I don't think it's a tool for sowing division. There is a significant group of self-proclaimed socialists who proudly stan the Soviet Union and Mao's China, so I think it's more of a case of ideologies being more messy than they seem.
Personally, I don't care as much about the label themselves as I do about the relationships they describe behind.
Socialism isn't well-defined except that it's Not Capitalism and claims to be better than capitalism. Even Hitler called himself a socialist!
Not sure why this comment is downvoted. In the context of Marxian Socialism and Command Economies, it's very much true that socialism is incompatible with free markets.
Going even further, without a free market for labour, there's no true worker emancipation. Even with "worker-ownership" (read corporate-ownership under a democratic governance), each worker's power is still diluted by the governing body (which, funnily enough, means socialism strengthens capitalism as "control by those who own capital" while weakening capitalism as "free markets").
> Not sure why this comment is downvoted
I didn't downvote it (obviously), but, for starters, it confuses socialism with communism (and also makes a typical categorical error in assuming that FEATTATEATTN is an implementation rather than desired value).
Second, it confuses capitalism (existing systems) with free market (some kind of ideal). It also pretends "free market" is a value neutral proposition. That completely ignores real-world role played by property, information, money and other multiparty relationships that socialism (and other regulations) try to address.
Third, it ignores the fact that socialism has been, not extensively, but successfully, implemented in the real world. (Mondragon and other worker coops, postwar tripartity models of worker participation in company control, etc.)
Lastly, it treats "free market" as an all-or-nothing proposition, which is never the case. There is, for example, no free market for nuclear bombs or for human children, and for a good reason.
Which brings us to your second paragraph, why rejecting free market can emancipate the workers. Treating labor as a commodity means that the person who performs the labor loses their decision power to the market, and so they lose freedom. Thus socialism demands that you do not separate human from the labor, and so they should always have a say over conditions in which they perform the labor. (This is different from other commodities, which, being inanimate objects, do not have a say about how they are used.) Accepting that free market for labor shouldn't exist is not really that different from accepting that free market for slaves shouldn't exist; in both cases there is human freedom attached which shouldn't be simply subjugated to the decisions of the "free market".
I would also say that worker coops show that your 2nd paragraph is empirically untrue. (Which is also bad for that model, because they often struggle to find capital, most of it being owned by capitalists who demand control over it.)
In regards to socialist/communist confusion, OP primarily refers using the term "socialism", except at the end where they use "socialist communist countries", likely referring to the self-proclaimed socialist countries that strive/strived towards communism. (I'm not sure FEATTATEATTN means here)
> There is, for example, no free market for nuclear bombs or for human children, and for a good reason.
Reasons that don't contradict OP's: "Free markets typically stop being opinionated beyond the concept of enforcing contracts/consent." Nuclear bombs only current purpose is indiscriminate eradication of human life and child trafficking is well... child trafficking. They all break consent. The same can be said about slavery, but not labour.
Which brings to the core of this discussion: the free market of labour. The addition of the free market of labour cannot, on its own, result in loss of self-control by either party. Removing it, however, rewards those who benefit the most from the current arrangement, which is most likely to be the employers.
While commodities, and other conventional properties, indeed do not have a will of their own; once appropriated, they become an extension of the will of their owner. With this in mind, labour, capital and commodities aren't different: neither the human actions applied to make bread, nor the machines needed to make bread nor the bread itself care about their prices or how they are used, but their owners do. In both cases, the same human freedoms are being affected in the same way. Slavery is special because the traded resource in question is another human being, someone capable of self-ownership, and the slaver isn't simply dictating on, for sake of simplicity, non-essential part of their body as with labour and commodities, but the slave's whole body and life, thus violating the consent part.
Which segways to your final paragraph. When I mentioned "worker-ownership", I was specifically alluding to worker coops. They not only do not prove what I said untrue, they, both theoretically and empirically (but mostly theoretically, yet), prove it true. One empirical part is the fact that Mondragon's increasing reliance on contractors, for instance. But, more interestingly, is the fact that, presuming that all ~70,000 Mondragon employees are members (they aren't), each would have around 0,0014% share. Given that Mondragon works under indirect democracy, this share doesn't even translate to direct influence. Is this painting the image of worker emancipation? Notice how the corporate power over the individual is still strong - sure smells like capitalism, as defined as "control by those who own capital", except "those" here is a corporation, which is not that different from today.
Given that you brought the slavery, likely for the analogy with wage-slavery - trying to fix workers by making their employers democratic is like solving slavery by making their slavers republics. The proper solution is to give direct private ownership over the means of production to all, but that's likely economically infeasible (but who knows, society where everyone is a capitalist like this would be neat). However, we can fix the issue with coops previously by keeping them small, but to handle the large contingency of workers and their diversity, a lot more coops would need to exist. Furthermore, these coops would need to be able triage workers that fit into their culture, and worker would need to be able to chose coops that satifify them. That implies a free market of labour. It points to the issue being more located in the concentration of power on people, not individuals, which means socialism can't do anything to fix this, specially if it implies getting rid of the free market of labour. Perhaps pushing for coops can help prevent corporate power concentration, but a healthy free market of labour is critical.
> The addition of the free market of labour cannot, on its own, result in loss of self-control by either party.
I disagree with this, and it's less true in theory than in practice. The free market is deliberately engineered to push down price to cost of production. In terms of labor, it means your remuneration will be reduced to subsistence wage, and not more. An apple doesn't care about its price, but price of your labor determines your living standard and your freedom.
And where this doesn't happen in the real world, it is actually a consequence of labor market failure, for example, labor negotiations through unions.
(There are also other labor market failures that prop the wages upwards, for example for CEOs.)
So I am not sure how you imagine free market for labor to help workers unless you assume a market failure of some sort.
The individual share of worker within a coop might be low, but it's still better than 0 under a private (capitalist owned) company. Moreover, all the value produced gets redistributed to the workers, not just a portion. (And I agree here that outsourcing Mondragon is bad.)
> That implies a free market of labor.
No it doesn't. Free market of labor is more than just a free choice of job, it also means that people who are not involved in the job itself might dictate the conditions of production (for example, it implies no labor laws, so you might die in the summer heat as a consequence). And it is by design.
(I was appalled to find that Hayek defended mining towns. Freedom to change the job my ass!)
It is quintessential socialism: collective ownership (of the “means of production”).
It is just embedded in a market system, just as, say, USSR or Cuba was embedded in the global economy.
That doesn’t make it not socialist.
And not all socialism is “bad”. It has to do with whether it is voluntary or not. I am a libertarian, and I fully support communes, housing cooperatives, credit unions and the like. I consider the lack of a superfluous extractive landlord or shareholder class a feature.
It is not a mistaken association. Socialism traditionally meant workers control over production. Work councils in Germany originally pursued direct workers control over respective businesses. Unions in Germany pursued some version of this well into the 1950s. Most socialist movements in Europe understood this to _be_ Socialism until the Soviet counter-revolution swept it all away.
And there is another forgotten truth. Before the Soviet counter-revolution, liberals advocated for this type of Socialism.
- John Stuart MillIt remains confusing that, after centuries of profiting off capital generally being a much better strategic choice than profiting off labour, workers insist and persist in trying to make labour work.
If the unions had dumped their efforts into co-ops instead of trying to fight their own companies then they might have managed to have a positive impact. They've been at it for long enough for capital accumulation to have kicked in even at pathetic rates of saving.
You can’t profit off capital if nobody does the labor. We need both roles and both deserve respect.
What would Musk do if nobody worked for him? He is probably not going to be able to develop rockets alone in his basement.
I call free weekends, 40 hours work week, no children work all positive impacts of the unions. And there are for sure more of these.
You may be surprised to learn that if one does not have capital, yet does have the capacity to labour, then one may seek to make labour work rather than profiting from capital.
capitalists profit of labour, it's just other people's labour.
Most people don't know this, but Huawei is another giant cooperative.
> Huawei Investment & Holding Co., Ltd. is a private company wholly owned by 169,054 of its employees and retired beneficiaries. As of December 31, 2025, company founder Ren Zhengfei's investment accounts for nearly 0.59% of the company’s total share capital.
https://www.huawei.com/en/media-center/company-facts
I believe it's an ESOP, but not a co-op because the workers don't have much voting control of the company.
I think you're right regarding that. From what I read, voting rights are restricted,a and senior executives retain veto power over major decisions.