What on earth are you talking about?

Waitrose, Gore-Tex, and various Euro co-ops haven't been "captured by various management groups."

And they're certainly more economically effective than corporate welfare queens like Boeing.

But do please keep waving your concern trolling around in the vain hope that it's going to persuade someone.

If nothing else, It's a useful education in how not to do rhetoric successfully.

Gintis' argument is, however, drawn on evidence that mostly says that coops are not as good at extensive, material intensive growth as commercial corporations, since that is the dominant form of growth over the past fifty years.

This suggests that he is refighting the last war rather than fighting the next. Being good at extensive, material intensive growth is not going to be as handy a trait to have over the next fifty years.

And indeed, the "markets" that most of the very poorest low income nations need are not the "license for corporations to run amok" so-called "markets", but rather well regulated local food markets in agrarian producing areas, supported by grower cooperatives to maintain local roads to the markets and run credit unions and government job guarantee health clinics, schools, and agricultural proving fields and extension.


I've been accused of being a Marxist, yet while Harpo's my favourite, it's Groucho I'm always quoting. Odd, that.

   "But of course Gintis argument is that this is pious nonsense. That as much as some of us would like coops to be a real alternative to capitalist firms, they seem to not work so often and also to be easily captured by a management group - as the Comrade from Sweden's example makes clear. Perhaps there is no "real left" because we don't actually have a credible alternative to offer and all the angry signifying can't close the gap."

    Oh, of course, that would be Gintis's argument; but it wouldn't be yours, would it?  You'd disagree with Gintis, wouldn't you?  

    It's just that you sound so much like you're a tout for Gintis--especially when you seem to align yourself in "implying" that you subscribe to a view which has it that " as much as some of us would like coops to be a real alternative to capitalist firms, they seem to not work so often and also to be easily captured by a management group - as the Comrade from Sweden's example makes clear. Perhaps there is no "real left" because we don't actually have a credible alternative to offer and all the angry signifying can't close the gap.

   I have a different theory.  There is a "real left," and you are dedicated to its character assassination. By my theory, you consistently employ dishonest techniques which include shilling for dishonest arguments against real left-wing opinion (pretending to mildly criticize them).  You cite as worthy of our time and attention those who declare themselves so, so sorry that "we can't do better than Krugman," and who allow as how it's such a gosh darn shame that co-ops just don't really work.  In fact, co-ops work fine when they're allowed to.  You, however, aren't interested in their having a reputation for effectiveness.  You're dedicated to, in your puny way here, trying to discredit what is an emintently creditable idea.

   You don't approve of Krugman or Stiglitz or Naomi Klein.  They're just not something-or-other enough for you; and yet, they're at once the best of the lot and the best of a heart-breakingly small lot.  There should be more like them and it would help significantly if there were.  But, instead of championing all that is worthy about their work, you denigrate everything about them and meanwhile after damning them with faint praise, you tout the likes of Gintis here, with faint damning.

   As character-references for leftist opinion go, I'd rather take my chances with Rush Limbaugh and Bill O'Reilly than with you.  

  May every passing innocent reader who chances here beware of taking you as an actual advocate of left-wing principles.

   You specialize in diversionary sterile arguments, time-wasting nonsense, fatuous representations of respectable views which are actually worthwhile--as this thread so well shows.  You're a spoiler, pissing in the village well and then complaining about a shortage of potable water.

"In such an environment it is not surprising that the ills of technology should seem curable only through the application of more technology..." John W Aldridge

That was partly the legacy of Marx Engels, for whom the "means of production" were industrial.

FIFY.

(I'm increasingly convinced that what most Marxians represent as Marx's views are as much an unkind caricature as what most Liberals present Adam Smith's views to be.)

- Jake

Friends come and go. Enemies accumulate.

It is a broad (and from its origins pejorative) term for the pre-Marx and/or anti-Marx socialists.

My thoughts mainly went to the attemtps at communities to realise an alternative outside the realm of state power. But there is probably a lot more that has been downplayed by later socialists when the soc-dem/commie split became the major focal point.

Sweden's finest (and perhaps only) collaborative, leftist e-newspaper Synapze.se

I made the argument, following Polanyi, that the biggest Utopian experiment ever conducted was the implementation of Classical Economics in England in the 19th century. See WHO Are The Utopians? After all, based primarily on theory, the Classical Economists managed, with the not too surprising support of business, to convince politicians to totally restructure laws to make the society subservient to the economy -- a first in human history. In many ways this was more radical than what the Jacobins attempted in 18th Century France, and it largely succeeded. That success is the great grandfather of TINA!

"It is not necessary to have hope in order to persevere."

I'll note that labour's place at the table in Germany has been shrinking in both extent and importance since the reunification. Whether this is a cause or a consequence (or both?) of the increasing financialisation is an interesting (i.e. non-trivial) question.

But if our exchange over the last few days has done nothing else, it has at least motivated me to dig a bit deeper in DB and SG, since they seem to be running their own foreign policy.

- Jake

Friends come and go. Enemies accumulate.