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How large are the cooperatives that you organize? Do you have any cooperatives as large as a small US town - let's say, 5,000 to 10,000 people? Community size does have a direct impact on the effectiveness of personalized oversight - in larger communities, petty graft is both more attractive and less obvious ronya fucked around with this message at 03:16 on Jun 5, 2020 |
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Jun 5, 2020 03:13
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To be clear, I said that larger communities are more vulnerable to graft than smaller ones. I did not say that cooperatives are more vulnerable to graft. ... that being said, one common explanation for why large cooperatives are rare is that they get graft-ier faster than alternative ownership forms as they grow larger, so I suppose that is nitpicking. My guess is that the dynamics for municipal governance are pretty different from corporate governance - facing different incentives and restrictions. A proposal for a cooperatively owned farm federation, otherwise embedded in a liberal democratic context, is not the same kind of problem as a proposal for a farming community that will also pass its own laws and enforce its own justice. However, since you ask, for Conventional Thought™ on the efficiency and nature of cooperatives, I would suggest Dow's Governing the Firm: Workers' Control in Theory and Practice, which lays out the literature pretty well. Dow also briefly touches on Mondragon. The take today tends to emphasize corporate governance issues... that the corporate governance issues that plague shareholder (public or private) firms - like investor heterogeneity (people want different things across different time horizons), free-riding (maintaining oversight is individually costly, but the benefits are diffused, so stakeholders do less of it), free cash flow vs debt (free cash empowers insiders, debt empowers the third-party lender), etc. - affect large worker-held firms more than large shareholder-held firms. Agency problems that cooperatives plausibly handle better, like worker monitoring, conversely do not scale. Yada yada yada, lots of theory, none of it is really relevant to municipal governance or policing, I think. ronya fucked around with this message at 08:54 on Jun 5, 2020 |
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Jun 5, 2020 08:49
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I think some writers have observed before that the idea that cooperatives allow the owner-stakeholders-workers/consumers to pursue multiple objectives tends to be taken self-evidently as a failing by the econ types, but as a benefit by the socio types, and the two ships pass in the night Do elaborate when you get wifi... maybe drop me a PM if it is too off-topic Crumbskull posted:And like I said, if you don't understand how complex political economic organizations which utilize direct democracy and equal representation for stakeholders with a commitment to mutual self-aid and a concern for community might possibly serve as a model for what community policing would look like, well..... A concrete and simple difference is diversity of goals... for the firm stakeholder, to a first degree of approximation, the stakeholders have an overriding common interest: they want to get paid. They may have divergent ancillary interests but this is the single largest one that dominates the others. This commonality of interests means that democratic control becomes mainly over means, not ends. On the other hand, community governance is heavily about ends. To drag this back on-topic, many communities may wish to actively enforce a prohibition on, let's say, graffiti for the sake of example. They may wish to use force to do so. Quality-of-life calls constitute the majority of day-to-day police calls in the developed world, not serious crimes or crowd/riot control, so this is a realistic scenario. But between reform and abolition, for that goal, abolition would not be not an option... this is obviously a zero-sum or negative-sum battle with someone whose calling in life is spontaneous art expressed in the medium of public-facing walls. For this reason democratic theory revolves heavily around majoritarian restraints and plural coexistence, rather than agency theory - there is no common interest for the agent to pursue (or fail to). The police question becomes predominantly a 'rights' debate, not an 'common interests' debate. Political theory that starts by assuming that all members of the community have or will have broadly identical political ethics sets itself too easy a task... an argument for police abolition that starts by saying "I support this because it would make goals I reject impossible to pursue" struggles at the "first, obtain broad agreement on goals" barrier. But if that is done - would abuses of policing power have the same severity or frequency if such broad agreement, such radical re-thinkings of conflict resolution/public health/property already existed, to begin with? Probably not. It's the same old saw: in a society of methodological anarchists, liberal democracy is probably pretty pleasant, and a shift to true statelessness wouldn't actually change very much.
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Jun 5, 2020 10:59
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The Oldest Man posted:Conflict Resolution in a Revolutionary Society is this put forth as a social model consistent with a multicultural society where communities of people with diametrically different moral and religious outlooks on life are expected to coexist (mainly by leveraging the atomicity of economic life in industrial societies - so that when one goes to a job, buys groceries, goes to the hairdresser, etc., one mainly engages in alienated commodity exchange and not reinforcement of one's place in a network of social relationships)? is it consistent with a liberal society where a central code of individual rights is expected to supervene over local community norms of justice? is it a dispositional individualist model envisioned to only apply as a model of societies composed of anarchists who individually favour this mode of conflict resolution, or is it a structural model that holds that institutional change (in e.g. policing) is itself the moral/political/ethical good? it is certainly an anarchist model, not only in the abolition of police but also in the abolition of legislative process (hence criticism-self-criticism as the main way to identify social wrongs and appropriate weregild) (this is earnestly asked; I have seen anarchist models answer "no, and that's a good thing" to both questions - some anarchoprimitivists can argue that dense multicultural life can only exist due to state oppression; localists can argue that societies larger than the local community are imaginary communities that don't exist and whose sense of justice shouldn't supervene on actual local communities. Mainly I am curious on your take.) ronya fucked around with this message at 09:44 on Jan 7, 2021 |
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Jan 7, 2021 09:32
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