Das Uberdog
remembers the alamo
what i actually mean is that you've got an unhealthy fixation and need to seek counselling
IWCA: 'Economic Democracy' Part Two
- Thread starter Gyre
- Start date
i think that's what happened in Preston. i also think you need a degree of separation between activity and theory; the skill of 'praxis' is figuring out the best points of intersection. that's a fairly academic argument said:Preston? Respect? Mike Lavelette is a lovely bloke (he once leant me fifty quid), but he lives in a huge (and I mean HUGE!) house with his precocious children Jocasta and Vivian in Fulwood or summat, Fuck him
Having actually read the IWCA article now, what they seem to be proposing centres on associating the 'left' once again with 'freedom' and enlightenment ideals such as those absorbed and repeated ad infinitum by Griffin and co. Fantastic idea.
When do Respect ever talk about freedom? Someone give me one document where they actually use that word.
Bet you can't.
The language they use is irrelevant to the majority of the people in this country. 'Freedom', however, is something that everyone can understand.
Thus the urgency of what they are trying to communicate.
Good luck to them. William Law's comment on their website sums it up fpr me:
If there is no solidarity on estates, bring that solidarity to these people where they feel it the most. When their homes and families are threatened directly. Simple, but spot on. FREEDOM innit.
Das Uberdog
remembers the alamo
i don't support the Respect project - what i'm arguing is merely that the task we took on our heads in Avenham was much greater than anything we could live up to, whilst politically keeping our heads above water and retaining a broader perspective.
Precisely, one of the intentions of the piece was to begin to reclaim the concept of freedom for our side. Neo-liberalism has been allowed to claim it for over six decades now.
ahh ok so perhaps i have actually met them, but dont realise it
Frogwoman, if I believed even half the bollocks that's spouted about the IWCA, I certainly wouldn't be a member. Maybe listen a bit less uncritically when people tell you things and question whether they've a vested interest in slagging us off. Bear in mind, for example, that the unions support Labour who're the IWCA's opposition so to speak. Andrew Smith is extremely careful to cultivate those union links/union reps and you'd be amazed at how inordinately impressed many of these trade unionists seem to be at vaguely knowing their local MP. In my experience as well, the unions at a number of Oxford's larger employers are completely in bed with management and are used (even more than usual) to control their members than the to represent them.
No doubt you've yet to hear of our racism, sexism, that we wanted drug dealing tackled in BBL because we wanted to take over it ourselves and who knows what other rubbish....
As Random eluded to, this might also be of interest.
http://www.iwca.info/?p=10100
love detective
there's no love too small
do you think some of us are?
love detective
there's no love too small
clearly
This is the second part of our discussion of the concept of economic democracy (Part 1 available at http://www.iwca.info/?p=10145). Section 1 of this piece is a brief historical survey of the doctrine of economic democracy in this country: how the aims and ideals under discussion were once live factors and mainstream currents in the labour movement, when there was such a thing. We do this to show that we are not pulling these aims and concepts out of thin air: they come from somewhere and are not without precedent. Section 2 deals with nuts and bolts. We survey the theoretical model of a democratic economy as outlined by the Czech economist Jaroslav Vanek, before discussing the two most important real-world examples of economic democracy: the Mondragon group of cooperatives in the Basque country and the experiment with self-management in the former Yugoslavia. We conclude that Mondragon has succeeded because it closely follows the key characteristics of Vanek’s theoretical model while the Yugoslav experiment failed because it diverged so markedly from it, particularly in its interpretation (or lack of one) of property rights.
that'll recruit a load of people to the cause!!
that'll recruit a load of people to the cause!!
sunnysidedown
caput mortuum
I'm looking forward to your critique of this article BA, don't let the moment/subject pass you by.
butchersapron
Bring back hanging
Oddly enough i just looking at this on the bus home from town. I'll set tmw aside for it.
sunnysidedown
caput mortuum
nice one.
sihhi
Tyranny, like hell, is not easily conquered
I wanted to reply to this earlier but I was busy with losing job etc.
The stuff on Mondragon is severely outdated I think.
This final line is a joke, and I'd normally attack as lunacy, but my respect and association with the iwca means I will back off a little.
Every antidemocratic aspect of Mondragon has come from those tiny seeds of 'acceptable compromises' in the 1950s. 'It was Francoism, what else could people do?' is a fine answer to give to critics in the 1970s. But now Mondragon is Spain's 9th biggest capitalist firm, relying on capitalist credit, capitalist markets, capitalist procedure etc to keep going. It is also a major multinational named 'Fagor' a nice neutral good marketing name for lots of non-English languages. It doesn't really market in the Anglo-Saxon world
Its technical college is now a university at the spearhead of reducing grants and introducing fees. Its bank is increasing demands from its mortgage policy holders by around 6%. The bank actually bought the naming rights to local basketball team Saski Baskonia so in print you can no longer refer it just by its name you have to add Caja Laboral or just call it Caja Laboral (the name of the bank).
I have recently done a little (free) translation for 'revolutionary' Turkish metal workers who are on a rolling programme of strikes to give to their European confederation. One of the things that caught my eye was a reference to 2006-7, some people in a fridge factory tried to join a very mainstream, right-wing union Celik-Is and fifteen people were thrown out of work and barred from re-entry to any factory in the area [employers share a blacklist in Gebze/Kocaeli, they also have a very strong confederation called MESS, the same federation in the 1970s that spread the cost of channelling profits into the main fascist party and its youth wings/mafia gangs ulku ocaklari who shot dead many hundreds of suspicious/dangerous workers, bringing on military rule which killed thousands more]. So Mondragon is participating in the blacklisting of workforces seeking elementary union rights. Mondragon Fagor's factory is in Gebze enterprise zone, undercutting Turkish tax codes.
Its suppliers abroad are also unsavoury to say the least, if it was anyone but the IWCA, I'd be screaming at them for sloppy journalism and characterisation etc, according to Znet
http://www.zcommunications.org/mondragon-diaries-5-days-on-the-cutting-edge-by-carl-davidson
That means 6.5 Euros a day, it comes to around 430TL a month. In 2010 the breadline figure was 850TL a month for a family of four (that's like minimum food requirements and rent), the poverty line is 2700TL a month for a family of four.
[As an aside so that we better understand 'semi-periphery' middle-ranking industrial countries world countries and our country's future. There are no compulsory state unemployment benefits in Turkey. There are private unemployment insurance schemes used by middle-class people. The state's version of that scheme started around 2000 where the worker opts in and pays contributions. Payouts are graded to how long you've been in work. If you've worked and paid in 8 years, you get the highest level which is close to 1200TL but only for ten months. On average in any given month 160,000 receive unemployment payments, there are 4.85 million unemployed, some estimates put it at 7million.
So when you weaken the dole, wages for productive work just crash through poverty levels. They don't sprint upwards creating a non-'lazy' population taking its 'fair share'.
A further point is how expensive food is. A kilo of meat is at 24TL, a straight conversion puts that at £9.50. The Turkey-wide mean average for meat consumption has dropped to 6-5 kilos meat per person per year from around 18 kilos in the 1990s. In Britain it is 80 kilos meat per person per year. Meat will start to be out of reach to many more.]
Mondragon has all kinds of severely dodgy joint initiatives. One example is its partnership in Dubai with Jacky's subsidiary of massive multinational Jumbo Group, it is a key Indian player in Dubai close to the royal family which started the imported indentured labour from the subcontinent in the first place in the 1970s.
Anyway, it is part and parcel of the capitalist system so recently shed 5,000 jobs in 2008/2009 and as demand picked up in 2010 reopened a fraction of those positions.
As reported here (a pro-Mondragon article) http://www.noticiasdenavarra.com/20...-14-empresas-en-navarra-con-4142-trabajadores
If the 'risen working-class' replicates this model a hundred times in a hundred different places, it will create new leaders, new managers and result in the working-class tearing itself apart - sort of what we've got now.
One main problem for our side is that workplace structures have become so divided and pyramidised, the concept of a solid base holding out (on strike or whatever) against a management to equalise job structures has been almost totally eradicated from the workplace - workplace democracy, economic democracy is just not on the agenda. Demands to direct election of principals of colleges, senior medical officers of hospitals, their being on an average workers' wage and subject to immediate recall are not often raised.
We continue to fight the neoliberal myth that managers need extra resources because their jobs are stressful.
Their jobs cannot under any circumstances be seen as productive jobs, they are merely administrators.
Instead those good democratic demands tend to be made on MPs, councillors, TU officials only, hence the correct revulsion at MPs and MEPs expenses but comparative praise for Willie Walsh 'he gives people jobs', 'turned around the fortunes of BA' etc etc.
The overall language of demands are 'cuts are unfair' 'the alternative', 'jobs', 'justice', 'tax the rich', 'the money is there'. Stuff older adults have heard before and witnessed not succeed in the 70s and 80s and stuff which sounds hopelessly naive/lame to the young.
In short, there's too many contractors, subcontractors, lump working, 'differentiated' teams and team leaders. Inevitably this means the cost of productive labour can be kept down (class struggle/industrial action is strangled), so that wealth can be distributed to make more middle-managers.
For the far right there's too many mixed race, mixed culture people for the concept of racial separatism to have meaning. So the Euro-Right over the past two decades has morphing forward into anti-immigration conservate 'one-nation'ism. And doing electorally well out of it.
[The FN praise de Gaulle nowadays rather than see him as the traitor of Algeria, Churchill figures prominently on BNP leaflets. The anti-immigrant stance of both is stressed naturally.]
The more the BNP grows, the more it will attract failed Tories/UKIP of one form or another, and the more there will be tension and division between w/c activists, m/c leaders and silent supporters - the one thing the BNP can not much stomach is democracy. But anti-immigrantism will remain the most potent force in British politics. bI
-
There's no perfect vision of economic democracy but I'd say we can all be quite blunt in current circumstances Britain is not a democracy, since its nonelected masters hate and suffocate all attempts at economic democracy. If you like shouty slogans 'Shareholder democracy is parasite-ocracy'.
The stuff on Mondragon is severely outdated I think.
This final line is a joke, and I'd normally attack as lunacy, but my respect and association with the iwca means I will back off a little.
Every antidemocratic aspect of Mondragon has come from those tiny seeds of 'acceptable compromises' in the 1950s. 'It was Francoism, what else could people do?' is a fine answer to give to critics in the 1970s. But now Mondragon is Spain's 9th biggest capitalist firm, relying on capitalist credit, capitalist markets, capitalist procedure etc to keep going. It is also a major multinational named 'Fagor' a nice neutral good marketing name for lots of non-English languages. It doesn't really market in the Anglo-Saxon world
Its technical college is now a university at the spearhead of reducing grants and introducing fees. Its bank is increasing demands from its mortgage policy holders by around 6%. The bank actually bought the naming rights to local basketball team Saski Baskonia so in print you can no longer refer it just by its name you have to add Caja Laboral or just call it Caja Laboral (the name of the bank).
I have recently done a little (free) translation for 'revolutionary' Turkish metal workers who are on a rolling programme of strikes to give to their European confederation. One of the things that caught my eye was a reference to 2006-7, some people in a fridge factory tried to join a very mainstream, right-wing union Celik-Is and fifteen people were thrown out of work and barred from re-entry to any factory in the area [employers share a blacklist in Gebze/Kocaeli, they also have a very strong confederation called MESS, the same federation in the 1970s that spread the cost of channelling profits into the main fascist party and its youth wings/mafia gangs ulku ocaklari who shot dead many hundreds of suspicious/dangerous workers, bringing on military rule which killed thousands more]. So Mondragon is participating in the blacklisting of workforces seeking elementary union rights. Mondragon Fagor's factory is in Gebze enterprise zone, undercutting Turkish tax codes.
Its suppliers abroad are also unsavoury to say the least, if it was anyone but the IWCA, I'd be screaming at them for sloppy journalism and characterisation etc, according to Znet
http://www.zcommunications.org/mondragon-diaries-5-days-on-the-cutting-edge-by-carl-davidson
That means 6.5 Euros a day, it comes to around 430TL a month. In 2010 the breadline figure was 850TL a month for a family of four (that's like minimum food requirements and rent), the poverty line is 2700TL a month for a family of four.
[As an aside so that we better understand 'semi-periphery' middle-ranking industrial countries world countries and our country's future. There are no compulsory state unemployment benefits in Turkey. There are private unemployment insurance schemes used by middle-class people. The state's version of that scheme started around 2000 where the worker opts in and pays contributions. Payouts are graded to how long you've been in work. If you've worked and paid in 8 years, you get the highest level which is close to 1200TL but only for ten months. On average in any given month 160,000 receive unemployment payments, there are 4.85 million unemployed, some estimates put it at 7million.
So when you weaken the dole, wages for productive work just crash through poverty levels. They don't sprint upwards creating a non-'lazy' population taking its 'fair share'.
A further point is how expensive food is. A kilo of meat is at 24TL, a straight conversion puts that at £9.50. The Turkey-wide mean average for meat consumption has dropped to 6-5 kilos meat per person per year from around 18 kilos in the 1990s. In Britain it is 80 kilos meat per person per year. Meat will start to be out of reach to many more.]
Mondragon has all kinds of severely dodgy joint initiatives. One example is its partnership in Dubai with Jacky's subsidiary of massive multinational Jumbo Group, it is a key Indian player in Dubai close to the royal family which started the imported indentured labour from the subcontinent in the first place in the 1970s.
Anyway, it is part and parcel of the capitalist system so recently shed 5,000 jobs in 2008/2009 and as demand picked up in 2010 reopened a fraction of those positions.
As reported here (a pro-Mondragon article) http://www.noticiasdenavarra.com/20...-14-empresas-en-navarra-con-4142-trabajadores
If the 'risen working-class' replicates this model a hundred times in a hundred different places, it will create new leaders, new managers and result in the working-class tearing itself apart - sort of what we've got now.
One main problem for our side is that workplace structures have become so divided and pyramidised, the concept of a solid base holding out (on strike or whatever) against a management to equalise job structures has been almost totally eradicated from the workplace - workplace democracy, economic democracy is just not on the agenda. Demands to direct election of principals of colleges, senior medical officers of hospitals, their being on an average workers' wage and subject to immediate recall are not often raised.
We continue to fight the neoliberal myth that managers need extra resources because their jobs are stressful.
Their jobs cannot under any circumstances be seen as productive jobs, they are merely administrators.
Instead those good democratic demands tend to be made on MPs, councillors, TU officials only, hence the correct revulsion at MPs and MEPs expenses but comparative praise for Willie Walsh 'he gives people jobs', 'turned around the fortunes of BA' etc etc.
The overall language of demands are 'cuts are unfair' 'the alternative', 'jobs', 'justice', 'tax the rich', 'the money is there'. Stuff older adults have heard before and witnessed not succeed in the 70s and 80s and stuff which sounds hopelessly naive/lame to the young.
In short, there's too many contractors, subcontractors, lump working, 'differentiated' teams and team leaders. Inevitably this means the cost of productive labour can be kept down (class struggle/industrial action is strangled), so that wealth can be distributed to make more middle-managers.
For the far right there's too many mixed race, mixed culture people for the concept of racial separatism to have meaning. So the Euro-Right over the past two decades has morphing forward into anti-immigration conservate 'one-nation'ism. And doing electorally well out of it.
[The FN praise de Gaulle nowadays rather than see him as the traitor of Algeria, Churchill figures prominently on BNP leaflets. The anti-immigrant stance of both is stressed naturally.]
The more the BNP grows, the more it will attract failed Tories/UKIP of one form or another, and the more there will be tension and division between w/c activists, m/c leaders and silent supporters - the one thing the BNP can not much stomach is democracy. But anti-immigrantism will remain the most potent force in British politics. bI
-
There's no perfect vision of economic democracy but I'd say we can all be quite blunt in current circumstances Britain is not a democracy, since its nonelected masters hate and suffocate all attempts at economic democracy. If you like shouty slogans 'Shareholder democracy is parasite-ocracy'.
sihhi
Tyranny, like hell, is not easily conquered
I thought those who demand from others 'Where is your vision?' 'The visions are old hat' 'Your vision cannot physically work with X happening in China/global warming etc' could have chipped in.
Anyway there was basically a puff piece in the Guardian about Mondragon, which repeats some of the misrepresentations of the IWCA article but in a more patronising way.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/mar/30/basque-country-big-society-spain
This ^^ glosses over the fact that the Basque government does run state services.
This ^^ doesn't gel with this
http://www.zcommunications.org/mondragon-diaries-5-days-on-the-cutting-edge-by-carl-davidson
550E a month is only 6,600 E a year.
Another thing worth mentioning is pension and supplemental benefits, management in Mondragon are given cars unlike ordinary cooperative members, pensions are complicated and (more for management than workforce) linked to annual performance of the social enterprise.
Obviously the wages that are referred to in the piece only apply to established cooperative members. Even if you are a cooperative member and you lose your job and are not prepared to relocate to annother location with another job role for which you are trained by Mondragon (and paid very little in that time since you are considered 'unskilled'), then you lose your member of cooperative status.
Non-cooperative members can work a long time but still be made redundant/rehired as part time etc. Certain functions are outsourced to external capitalist firms such as the insurance division in a tie up with Spain's main bank Banco de España. Guard labour requirements are done by an external security companies e.g. Eroski supermarket chain uses security firms.
Another thing that is usually glossed over by such pieces is how investment was originally made into a the Mondragon model before it had resources of its own. Undeniably the threat from ETA galvanised landlord and Francoist state funds into Mondragon. Mass democratic struggle within ETA's trade unions in capitalist firms and small-unit paramilitary armed struggle in ETA aiming for an international Marxist independent state made the crucial period survivable i.e. Mondragon was given a shield from the state to defend itself from other capitalist predation in the 1960s and 1970s. Franco even gave the highest state prize to Arizmendiarrieta. Sharryn Kasmir writes about this in her 1996 book the Myth of Mondragon.
This all gets glossed over in the piece.
Anyway there was basically a puff piece in the Guardian about Mondragon, which repeats some of the misrepresentations of the IWCA article but in a more patronising way.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/mar/30/basque-country-big-society-spain
This ^^ glosses over the fact that the Basque government does run state services.
This ^^ doesn't gel with this
http://www.zcommunications.org/mondragon-diaries-5-days-on-the-cutting-edge-by-carl-davidson
550E a month is only 6,600 E a year.
Another thing worth mentioning is pension and supplemental benefits, management in Mondragon are given cars unlike ordinary cooperative members, pensions are complicated and (more for management than workforce) linked to annual performance of the social enterprise.
Obviously the wages that are referred to in the piece only apply to established cooperative members. Even if you are a cooperative member and you lose your job and are not prepared to relocate to annother location with another job role for which you are trained by Mondragon (and paid very little in that time since you are considered 'unskilled'), then you lose your member of cooperative status.
Non-cooperative members can work a long time but still be made redundant/rehired as part time etc. Certain functions are outsourced to external capitalist firms such as the insurance division in a tie up with Spain's main bank Banco de España. Guard labour requirements are done by an external security companies e.g. Eroski supermarket chain uses security firms.
Another thing that is usually glossed over by such pieces is how investment was originally made into a the Mondragon model before it had resources of its own. Undeniably the threat from ETA galvanised landlord and Francoist state funds into Mondragon. Mass democratic struggle within ETA's trade unions in capitalist firms and small-unit paramilitary armed struggle in ETA aiming for an international Marxist independent state made the crucial period survivable i.e. Mondragon was given a shield from the state to defend itself from other capitalist predation in the 1960s and 1970s. Franco even gave the highest state prize to Arizmendiarrieta. Sharryn Kasmir writes about this in her 1996 book the Myth of Mondragon.
This all gets glossed over in the piece.
sihhi
Tyranny, like hell, is not easily conquered
Mondragon news - increasing investment and exploitation abroad, because business in Spain or Europe is not good:
Mondragon's car parts production wing, Cikautxo - is expanding into India via the the 'Export Oriented Unit' in Pune.
http://machinist.in/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=3732&Itemid=2
"Cikautxo’s boasts of enviable customer base in India and internationally e.g. VW, Daimler, Ford, Renault, Nissan, GM-Opel, PSA, Behr, Valeo, amongst others and it’s our honour to extend our expertise to some of the best in the automotive industry," said Rishi Kshettry.
Fagor (fridges and ovens) wants to expand its partnerships in China.
'La firma de electrodomйsticos busca reforzar su crecimiento en el mercado de China'
72% of Fagor's turnover is international.
http://www.construnario.com/notiweb/29414/nuevos-nombramientos-en-la-cupula-directiva-de-fagor-group
90% of its trade by volume is international.
Fagor's new boss is Ander Terradillos who graduated from 'Ciencias Empresariales' - business studies in the University of the Basque Country, received an MBA in Wolverhampton University, was a boss elsewhere before joining Fagor (as a boss) in various roles from 1999 on.
How is the largest component of Mondragon treating its workers:
"los trabajadores que son cooperativistas (socios del grupo) redujeron sus sueldos, aceptaron flexibilizar sus calendarios laborales, reubicarse entre las empresas del grupo y prejubilarse. En materia de personal, la plantilla media de Fagor Electrodomйsticos se situу en 7.547 personas, con un descenso de 963 puestos. "
"The workers who are cooperative members (full share-owning members) reduced their salaries, accepted short-time working, were re-deployed to other Mondragon Group companies
and took early retirement. Of its total workforce of 7547 people, there was a drop of 963 people. "
That's over a tenth of the workforce made redundant.
http://www.noticiasdenavarra.com/20...perdidas-de-97-millones-en-el-primer-semestre
Alecop - the private training and apprenticing firm has expanded into Morocco to train a section of technicians for Japanese car multnationals transfering production from Europe to Morocco.
http://www.cincodias.com/articulo/e...trabajadores-automocion/20110905cdscdiemp_11/
In Spain the search is on for marketable opportunities leading to niche areas such as a Mondragon's Gestion de Servicios Residenciales offering a subscription scheme for elderly but active people to buzz on an alarm in case they fall at home. It's not a public service but a 'copago' one - 'co-payment' paid in part by government/social insurance schemes people have already paid into and in part by the user as 'user fees'.
http://www.elcorreo.com/alava/v/201...asistencia-amplia-todos-mayores-20110920.html
(This privatisation has been creeping into the Spanish health service for some time. The opponents are here http://casmadrid.org/includes/NO_AL_COPAGO.pdf)
I will reiterate this:
I mean the crucial early period for the firm/cooperative - the 1960s and 1970s. Mondragon grew at the expense of its capitalist competitors particularly with the recession of the mid-late 1970s. Mondragon became something of a strike-free haven in the 1970s, good labour relations were one factor and Basque nationalism was another: invest in your own'/'make something Basques can be proud of' philosophy of Basque small factory and workshop owners. I think some workshops incorporated on this basis. Infrastructural developments in the 1960s also helped the Basque factories compared to other 'backward regions'. Francoist regime was not slobbering and incompetent. It saw that by the 1960s the greatest threat came from Marxist Basque separatism. Its economic programme responded to the threat with new roads investment. The state mollycoddled Mondragon cooperativism and went hard against ETA. Mondragon supporters claim success was only due to Mondragon itself not to any wider social reality (i.e. other people's struggles).
One part of Mondragon I hadn't mentioned was Auzo Lagun - Spanishised to become 'Ausolan'.
http://www.ausolan.com/public_ausolan/ctrl_ausolan.php
It's an exclusively female firm (self-declared and self-imposed) that does cleaning and catering. Again working on the partners (i.e. full-time , shareholders, members of the economic democracy) and contractees 'eventuales' (short-term contracts, fewer rights, no pension, people who will 'eventually' become partners etc etc). When there was a strike in the cleaning side of the business by the contractees in 2002 what was noticeable was how little support there was from the partners for the contractees', and how management did not renew contracts for many trade union members. When in 2008 Polish workers in a Mondragon Fagor factory went on strike, again there were dismissals, Libcom has more on that.
Its supermarket cooperative wing Eroski is similar to LIDL, ALDI, Carrefour etc etc.
http://www.solidaridad.net/_articulo6262_enesp.htm (Spanish)
An analysis of Mondragon's expansion abroad - I touched on it above - a sizeable part of Mondragon's business and factories are in France
http://www.cnt-ait-montpellier.org/..._autogestion flirte avec le capitalisme.html#
( in French)
More French analysis about cooperatives including Mondragon here: http://1libertaire.free.fr/Autogestion68.html
A good history of the politics associated with Mondragon is here
http://gipuzkoa.cnt.es/IMG/doc/laexperienciademondragon.doc (Spanish)
mentions management's vicious anti-communism hounding out Trotskysist trade unionists in the 1980s and 1990s, I wish it had more detail.
Finally an interesting account here (in French) of Cuba's Raul reforms says people from Mondragon are advising the Cuban government on the new legal set-up.
http://www.polemicacubana.fr/?p=1064
Mondragon's car parts production wing, Cikautxo - is expanding into India via the the 'Export Oriented Unit' in Pune.
http://machinist.in/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=3732&Itemid=2
"Cikautxo’s boasts of enviable customer base in India and internationally e.g. VW, Daimler, Ford, Renault, Nissan, GM-Opel, PSA, Behr, Valeo, amongst others and it’s our honour to extend our expertise to some of the best in the automotive industry," said Rishi Kshettry.
Fagor (fridges and ovens) wants to expand its partnerships in China.
'La firma de electrodomйsticos busca reforzar su crecimiento en el mercado de China'
72% of Fagor's turnover is international.
http://www.construnario.com/notiweb/29414/nuevos-nombramientos-en-la-cupula-directiva-de-fagor-group
90% of its trade by volume is international.
Fagor's new boss is Ander Terradillos who graduated from 'Ciencias Empresariales' - business studies in the University of the Basque Country, received an MBA in Wolverhampton University, was a boss elsewhere before joining Fagor (as a boss) in various roles from 1999 on.
How is the largest component of Mondragon treating its workers:
"los trabajadores que son cooperativistas (socios del grupo) redujeron sus sueldos, aceptaron flexibilizar sus calendarios laborales, reubicarse entre las empresas del grupo y prejubilarse. En materia de personal, la plantilla media de Fagor Electrodomйsticos se situу en 7.547 personas, con un descenso de 963 puestos. "
"The workers who are cooperative members (full share-owning members) reduced their salaries, accepted short-time working, were re-deployed to other Mondragon Group companies
and took early retirement. Of its total workforce of 7547 people, there was a drop of 963 people. "
That's over a tenth of the workforce made redundant.
http://www.noticiasdenavarra.com/20...perdidas-de-97-millones-en-el-primer-semestre
Alecop - the private training and apprenticing firm has expanded into Morocco to train a section of technicians for Japanese car multnationals transfering production from Europe to Morocco.
http://www.cincodias.com/articulo/e...trabajadores-automocion/20110905cdscdiemp_11/
In Spain the search is on for marketable opportunities leading to niche areas such as a Mondragon's Gestion de Servicios Residenciales offering a subscription scheme for elderly but active people to buzz on an alarm in case they fall at home. It's not a public service but a 'copago' one - 'co-payment' paid in part by government/social insurance schemes people have already paid into and in part by the user as 'user fees'.
http://www.elcorreo.com/alava/v/201...asistencia-amplia-todos-mayores-20110920.html
(This privatisation has been creeping into the Spanish health service for some time. The opponents are here http://casmadrid.org/includes/NO_AL_COPAGO.pdf)
I will reiterate this:
I mean the crucial early period for the firm/cooperative - the 1960s and 1970s. Mondragon grew at the expense of its capitalist competitors particularly with the recession of the mid-late 1970s. Mondragon became something of a strike-free haven in the 1970s, good labour relations were one factor and Basque nationalism was another: invest in your own'/'make something Basques can be proud of' philosophy of Basque small factory and workshop owners. I think some workshops incorporated on this basis. Infrastructural developments in the 1960s also helped the Basque factories compared to other 'backward regions'. Francoist regime was not slobbering and incompetent. It saw that by the 1960s the greatest threat came from Marxist Basque separatism. Its economic programme responded to the threat with new roads investment. The state mollycoddled Mondragon cooperativism and went hard against ETA. Mondragon supporters claim success was only due to Mondragon itself not to any wider social reality (i.e. other people's struggles).
One part of Mondragon I hadn't mentioned was Auzo Lagun - Spanishised to become 'Ausolan'.
http://www.ausolan.com/public_ausolan/ctrl_ausolan.php
It's an exclusively female firm (self-declared and self-imposed) that does cleaning and catering. Again working on the partners (i.e. full-time , shareholders, members of the economic democracy) and contractees 'eventuales' (short-term contracts, fewer rights, no pension, people who will 'eventually' become partners etc etc). When there was a strike in the cleaning side of the business by the contractees in 2002 what was noticeable was how little support there was from the partners for the contractees', and how management did not renew contracts for many trade union members. When in 2008 Polish workers in a Mondragon Fagor factory went on strike, again there were dismissals, Libcom has more on that.
Its supermarket cooperative wing Eroski is similar to LIDL, ALDI, Carrefour etc etc.
http://www.solidaridad.net/_articulo6262_enesp.htm (Spanish)
An analysis of Mondragon's expansion abroad - I touched on it above - a sizeable part of Mondragon's business and factories are in France
http://www.cnt-ait-montpellier.org/..._autogestion flirte avec le capitalisme.html#
( in French)
More French analysis about cooperatives including Mondragon here: http://1libertaire.free.fr/Autogestion68.html
A good history of the politics associated with Mondragon is here
http://gipuzkoa.cnt.es/IMG/doc/laexperienciademondragon.doc (Spanish)
mentions management's vicious anti-communism hounding out Trotskysist trade unionists in the 1980s and 1990s, I wish it had more detail.
Finally an interesting account here (in French) of Cuba's Raul reforms says people from Mondragon are advising the Cuban government on the new legal set-up.
http://www.polemicacubana.fr/?p=1064
articul8
Dishonest sociopath
Somewhat embarrassed to say I've only just read this (and Pt 1) - only 12 months later. Must say in terms of its ambition, its historical scope, and it's sober approach to what it means for any practical strategy it strikes me as very important - exemplary in fact of what any group committed to a pro w/c politics should be doing. I'm no great expert on Yugoslavia or Mondragon - but although the attempt to think through practical attempts to realise alternatives is welcome, I didn't find the examples given to be quite adequate to what was being asked of them. (I don't underestimate the difficulty of this).
One of my main frustrations in one of the better Leninist groups was the tendency to invoke "socialism" as an abstract principle that would magically follow from the seizure of state power - and somehow immanent to demands like "nationalise the top 250 monopolies". I remember the main theoretician quoting from Trotsky - without dissent - that the superiority of state socialist planning could be measured in increasing volumes of iron, steel and coal produced!
Anyway, some general reflections:
- I do understand the attempt to read economic democracy as a proper realisation of the Englightenment project articulated in classical liberalism (as opposed to a statist evacuation of notions of freedom and autonomy) - but all the same I think the piece is in danger of uncritically reproducing the distinction individual (good) /state (necessary? evil) rather than surpassing/ superceding it ie. pitting the liberated individual against repressive collectivities as opposed to seeing autonomous solidarity and collective institutional self-expression as a necessary pre-condition of individual liberty.
- Wholeheartedly agree with the point made that a purely industrial/workplace notion of economic democracy wouldn't have traction today - if it ever did. But the examples given don't really go very far into asking what this would mean in concrete terms. The implicit structure is still a scaled-up version of workers self-management of a single plant - supplemented by democratically accountable capital reserves. Not really clear how economic ownership dovetails with political control - what are the structures that would empower the wider community beyond the point of production?
- apart from the lines on the dangers of capital flight and prospect of de-globalisation (about which I'd have reservations) there is relatively little on the dynamics of a transition from a capitalist liberal democracy to a liberated economic democracy. Intriguing possibility that the latter might begin to emerge in contradistinction from the capitalist state - towards a dual power situation? But certainly not much in the way of a theory of transition at a political level. Which is important because - as I'm sure you're well aware - the original Leninist theory of state power under socialism was precisely that it was meant to be temporary and transitional - en route to Communism. Assuming you don't accept this is possible given greater democratic safeguards and accountability over the excercise of that state powerto achieve that transition, the onus is surely on you to map out a plausible alternative.
I'm minded to ask what if parked the reform/revolution divide and argued for the maximal democratic power over the institutions of bourgeois democracy *and* pursued an alternative model of democratic economic ownership as an emergent and incipient for a counter-power that could ultimately sweep away the need for the exercise of heteronomous political power? A model if you like of "in and against the state" which neither abandoned the field of struggle within the institutions of state power nor limited itself to them. Which again brings us back to the politics of the Labour party. You are no doubt right to point to a middle-class managerialism - and accompanying over reliance on control of the state - permeating the culture of the party leadership from the Webbs through Morrisson and Bevin onto Blair and Brown. But at the same time your own analysis points to a dissident current that has been both "in and out" of the party - from GDH Cole, ILP, IWC, Bennite left and relation to Upper Clydside/ Lucas Aerospace etc. As I pointed out on another thread, my old MP the late Audrey Wise was very interested in these ideas.
And one of the few institutional spaces at a national level where ideas of workers control/economic democracy has been discussed is Red Pepper - which has tried to develop a critical and analytical approach which doesn't take Fabianism or Leninism as the only options. - eg publishing stuff by the likes of Robin Archer and others on democratising pension funds etc.
One of my main frustrations in one of the better Leninist groups was the tendency to invoke "socialism" as an abstract principle that would magically follow from the seizure of state power - and somehow immanent to demands like "nationalise the top 250 monopolies". I remember the main theoretician quoting from Trotsky - without dissent - that the superiority of state socialist planning could be measured in increasing volumes of iron, steel and coal produced!
Anyway, some general reflections:
- I do understand the attempt to read economic democracy as a proper realisation of the Englightenment project articulated in classical liberalism (as opposed to a statist evacuation of notions of freedom and autonomy) - but all the same I think the piece is in danger of uncritically reproducing the distinction individual (good) /state (necessary? evil) rather than surpassing/ superceding it ie. pitting the liberated individual against repressive collectivities as opposed to seeing autonomous solidarity and collective institutional self-expression as a necessary pre-condition of individual liberty.
- Wholeheartedly agree with the point made that a purely industrial/workplace notion of economic democracy wouldn't have traction today - if it ever did. But the examples given don't really go very far into asking what this would mean in concrete terms. The implicit structure is still a scaled-up version of workers self-management of a single plant - supplemented by democratically accountable capital reserves. Not really clear how economic ownership dovetails with political control - what are the structures that would empower the wider community beyond the point of production?
- apart from the lines on the dangers of capital flight and prospect of de-globalisation (about which I'd have reservations) there is relatively little on the dynamics of a transition from a capitalist liberal democracy to a liberated economic democracy. Intriguing possibility that the latter might begin to emerge in contradistinction from the capitalist state - towards a dual power situation? But certainly not much in the way of a theory of transition at a political level. Which is important because - as I'm sure you're well aware - the original Leninist theory of state power under socialism was precisely that it was meant to be temporary and transitional - en route to Communism. Assuming you don't accept this is possible given greater democratic safeguards and accountability over the excercise of that state powerto achieve that transition, the onus is surely on you to map out a plausible alternative.
I'm minded to ask what if parked the reform/revolution divide and argued for the maximal democratic power over the institutions of bourgeois democracy *and* pursued an alternative model of democratic economic ownership as an emergent and incipient for a counter-power that could ultimately sweep away the need for the exercise of heteronomous political power? A model if you like of "in and against the state" which neither abandoned the field of struggle within the institutions of state power nor limited itself to them. Which again brings us back to the politics of the Labour party. You are no doubt right to point to a middle-class managerialism - and accompanying over reliance on control of the state - permeating the culture of the party leadership from the Webbs through Morrisson and Bevin onto Blair and Brown. But at the same time your own analysis points to a dissident current that has been both "in and out" of the party - from GDH Cole, ILP, IWC, Bennite left and relation to Upper Clydside/ Lucas Aerospace etc. As I pointed out on another thread, my old MP the late Audrey Wise was very interested in these ideas.
And one of the few institutional spaces at a national level where ideas of workers control/economic democracy has been discussed is Red Pepper - which has tried to develop a critical and analytical approach which doesn't take Fabianism or Leninism as the only options. - eg publishing stuff by the likes of Robin Archer and others on democratising pension funds etc.
Random
Ethnic nalgocrat
So the democratically owned businesses put the capitalist ones out of business by outcompeting them? Hard to see that veggie co-ops can bury capitalism tbh.
Random
Ethnic nalgocrat
Yes, exactly, that wonderful tradition of more direct workers' democracy connected within the Labour Party is now down to one tiny magazine.
articul8
Dishonest sociopath
Never said that - the IWCA piece does talk about emergent forms of workers control co-existing with capitalist forms of ownership. Clearly there is no way to bypass political struggle if the emergent is to be made dominant.
Random
Ethnic nalgocrat
If people are bargaining for maximum control over existing institutions, and setting up 'alternatives' then what will this political struggle you speak of consist of?
Down with this sort of middle class managerialist language btw.
Ah but it's a tiny mag that articul8 is associated with!
articul8
Dishonest sociopath
size is relative 
- circulation is bigger than the membership of any of the existing far left groups. (don't want to imply that Red Pepper is aligned to Labour btw - though not alone, I'm very much in a minority in that resepct). After the riots, our website was getting 30,000 unique visitors in a day...
- circulation is bigger than the membership of any of the existing far left groups. (don't want to imply that Red Pepper is aligned to Labour btw - though not alone, I'm very much in a minority in that resepct). After the riots, our website was getting 30,000 unique visitors in a day...
articul8
Dishonest sociopath
I didn't say "bargaining for" I said "demanding", whilst also establishing new forms which prefigure a different kind of power.
cheap shot, esp from an avowed fan of Zizek etc.
size is relative
Have you been asked to tippex a typo out of 7000 copies of Hilary's book yet?
articul8
Dishonest sociopath
Was thinking about this and wondered for a second whether "worker's control" or "economic democracy" was something only a Fabian or Blairite could really object to. I then I came across this piece by Scargill - published (ironically enough) in an IWC pamphlet sandwiched between two others:
But more fundamentally he sees that establishing workers control over plants/firms/sectors of the economy whilst the capitalist state is still in existence means "by its very nature it seeks to become involved in the process of capitalism itself".
The same pamphlet as a really powerful reply by Audrey Wise:
Amen to that.
Well you can't accuse old Arthur of pulling his punches (in a speech to the IWC!) he's plainly just mistaken workers' control for worker representation on boards and in any case thinks state planning is all you really need to deliver for the workers.
But more fundamentally he sees that establishing workers control over plants/firms/sectors of the economy whilst the capitalist state is still in existence means "by its very nature it seeks to become involved in the process of capitalism itself".
The same pamphlet as a really powerful reply by Audrey Wise:
Amen to that.
Smokeandsteam
Working Class First
The quote from Audrey Wise is spot on in my opinion in respect of the identifying the problem "If socialism is not achieved by extending the power and consciousness and confidence and self-respect of workers, it is not going to be socialism" but lame on ideas about the solution. Slogans and interventions ffs
What the IWCA isn't given enough credit for is trying to spark an ideas debate and to begin to answer the 'how' part of extending power, consciousness, confidence and also critically to re-claim ideas currently owned by the right. In the middle of the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression you could be forgiven for wondering why others on the left haven't even attempted to come up with something similar (bar the same tactics that have been tried and proven a failure time and again).
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