It's kind of a funny question, because there probably has never been any $5B infrastructure investment which came from a rich person's pocketbook. They money comes from governments, which are institutions run by many people who don't personally control that money.
Anyway let's say you have a society where all the firms are worker self directed. It makes sense for firms to form broader organizations that represent different interests. So for example lets say you have an industrial zone on the edge of a geographic region. There's a shipping port, some bridges, electrical infrastructure, etc. All the firms in the area depend on this infrastructure to operate. And because they share this common interest, they have formed a regional cooperative made up of delegates from each firm in the region. When they need to make a decision about when to perform major infrastructure work, it is decided at one of their regular meetings. The delegates are not their to make their own decisions but to bring with them decisions made at their firm's meeting on the matter. If the delegate agrees to something their firm's people actually do not like, their people can recall them.
So the regional cooperative holds a regular meeting and there they decide they are going to build a bigger bridge and then decommission the old one. All the firms in this regional cooperative keep their money at a credit union which was set up specifically to represent these firms. They need to rustle up $500m to pay for this. They discuss how to raise the funds. There is a particularly big firm that will benefit substantially from the new bridge. They put up $50m on the condition that the bridge will have tolls and they will expect to be paid back $30m over 30 years. The rest of the firms together put in another $50m. The industrial zone regional cooperative takes their $100m to the broader regional cooperative which represents a large geographic region including several major cities which benefit from the industrial zone. The broader cooperative agrees to stake the other $400m for the bridge improvements with the agreement that the industrial zone regional cooperative will pay it back over 40 years.
So yeah. That's generally how you manage that. You can look up Murray Bookchin, David Harvey, and Richard Wolff if you want to know more. Also look up Zoe Baker on youtube.
If you don't like my made up scenario, maybe look up how ITER or LHC get their funding.
okay my issue wasn’t that worker controlled firms would be legally incapable of joint ventures for profit. My issue was - who makes the decision? Do the workers understand finance and supply chain management and commodity prices and political risks? No, so why should they make the decisions
yes representative democracy deals with this problem in a way that workers councils doesn’t. swarms of lobbyists (not evil) and aides are not industrial workers
It seems that you aren't familiar with the meaning of words that you are using. Workers councils are made up of delegates that are voted on by the workers i.e. they are a representative democracy.
I would expect that they would be more effective at advancing it's electorates interest than the owners would be at advancing their workers interests for the simple reason that the new elected body can be simply removed and a new one voted in.
Did anybody say there was anything magical about workers? Since you are asking this question you must think that there is something magical about owners so why don't you tell us about that first?
There is a large body of writing and historical practice on how to make decisions in this manner (communal organization and management of production). The anarchists Mikhail Bakunin, Peter Kropotkin, and Errico Malatesta wrote about this in the 1800's. Of course the Soviet Union was remarkably successful at growing from a very poor nation to a global superpower in 50 years. I absolutely oppose authoritarianism and that was their downfall, but they were an amazing economic success. Anarchists would say absolute centralization of planning was the failure, as perverse incentives developed until it fell apart. But decentralized planning seems extremely interesting. A more recent author who has written extensively on libertarian socialist decentralized planning and organization is Murray Bookchin. I think you would enjoy this 1994 piece on what Bookchin called "Communalism" [1]
But to provide you a basic answer to advance the conversation more immediately: People must be educated to follow any society. We've never expected the checker at Home Depot to understand logistics of her store. But this is due to the division of labor, not a limitation of the human mind. When people imagine a totally different society this tends to include schools which raise people for that society. And so every person would be taught more about how all the bits fit together and how to make decisions collectively. As I said, many different schemes have been proposed and tried for what system would work best. But someone like Murray Bookchin would suggest that different regional cooperatives can make their own decisions about how best to organize. I would be remiss not to mention the Mondragon Corporation in the Basque Region of Spain. They're a federation of cooperatives with a total revenue of 13B Euro ($16B) in 2013. They do big industrial stuff, finance, retail, and education. [2]
However I realize I am talking about how really big decisions get made. Maybe you're asking about individual firms. It's past my bed time but for that look at how cooperatives are managed. This history of a grocery coop in San Francisco is very interesting. [3] Here's a list of other Bay Area cooperatives. [4]
> Of course the Soviet Union was remarkably successful at growing from a very poor nation to a global superpower in 50 years.
In XIX century, Russia was already THE superpower in Europe (which was everything that counted back then). Everyone else was afraid of her. She was poor, but it's possible to be poor and a superpower at the same time - you just need huge population to milk, and spend the bulk on your budget on military. Having a massive territory that's basically impossible to conquest and occupy no doubt helped as well. It meant that even if they lost a serious war, like they did against the Japanese, it was ultimately without major consequences.
Communists just continued with that modus operandi. They built oversized military, nuclear arsenal, top-notch global spying and propaganda aparatus, while the population supporting it was forced to work for peanuts - not to mention tens of millions who worked in concentration camps for free, and who either died there or had their lifes broken because of it. Even with all this ruthless inhuman exploitation, the Soviet model was just inferior and ultimately couldn't keep up with Western market-based democracies.
the soviets had expert top down control, not worker control. we currently have decentralized (by a bunch of experts who own stuff and pay each other and publish papers and legislate) control
let’s say workers now control Amazon. all of Amazon workers. But it turns out Amazon AWS is a big part of Amazon revenue, the workers know jack about that, they either delegate authority to some aws experts and now as bans the same problem again if they ruin it. And you’re also assuming worker cooperatives wouldn’t follow profit motives - wouldn’t they? Workers want money. You want to abolish profitmotive but won’t do that. Workers could totally abuse monopoly or regulatory capture by vote
First: You do not snap your fingers and hand Amazon over to the workers. I am discussing a direction we could move society over time. My position is that it is in principle perfectly plausible to train people to manage something like Amazon. I am not suggesting we put warehouse workers in charge of AWS tomorrow.
Second: It is my bed time and I regret that I cannot continue to answer by way of conversation, but I would suggest reading link [1] in my above comment if you want to see an overall picture of how such a society might be organized.
and we could transition to a nuclear wasteland too, slow doesn’t mean the end can’t be bad. Amazon has people trained to manage Amazon and they currently do so. why would their interest be any more aligned with workers
just google the phrase “five billion dollar joint venture”. They don’t come from rich peoples’ pocketbooks, but they do from other areas and are important. And don’t come from governments. They come from the businesses lol.
Similarly, early and late stage venture funding and other forms of funding different companies would also take a haircut, probably (not much with a 10% tax above 100M, yes with a 100% above 100M). Which would suck for people who like medicine and electricity
> ITER and LCH
Yeah governments absolutely can fund things. The question is should they fund everything. And you should note that they weren’t funded by “workers councils”.
dude we have regional workers councils it’s called state legislatures and they absolutely do fund stuff. We even have decentralized hierarchical councils - city and county govt! And they do make infrastructure decisions! What they don’t do is fund chip development or factory scaling. And even the things they do fund they offload the decision work to experts (not workers).
Yes I added an edit after your comment to clarify that the point about ITER and LHC was just about how people could allocate funds for big projects, but of course there are innumerable examples for that.
My point is not that The State should fund everything. It is that groups of people can elect delegates and those delegates can make decisions for us. I don't want them to be made by a centralized state but instead by voluntary collectives. Basically I advocate for worker owned collectives to manage the production that those same workers depend upon. This would I think lead to more freedom with less exploitation. Those workers would have dominion over the profits they generate, rather than the current arrangement where that control is traded for a wage. I believe this could lead to a world where all people accumulate enough wealth that they no longer need to work to survive. But that can never happen if an elite class siphons off all the workers' profit to spend billions on pet projects for amusement.
Anyway let's say you have a society where all the firms are worker self directed. It makes sense for firms to form broader organizations that represent different interests. So for example lets say you have an industrial zone on the edge of a geographic region. There's a shipping port, some bridges, electrical infrastructure, etc. All the firms in the area depend on this infrastructure to operate. And because they share this common interest, they have formed a regional cooperative made up of delegates from each firm in the region. When they need to make a decision about when to perform major infrastructure work, it is decided at one of their regular meetings. The delegates are not their to make their own decisions but to bring with them decisions made at their firm's meeting on the matter. If the delegate agrees to something their firm's people actually do not like, their people can recall them.
So the regional cooperative holds a regular meeting and there they decide they are going to build a bigger bridge and then decommission the old one. All the firms in this regional cooperative keep their money at a credit union which was set up specifically to represent these firms. They need to rustle up $500m to pay for this. They discuss how to raise the funds. There is a particularly big firm that will benefit substantially from the new bridge. They put up $50m on the condition that the bridge will have tolls and they will expect to be paid back $30m over 30 years. The rest of the firms together put in another $50m. The industrial zone regional cooperative takes their $100m to the broader regional cooperative which represents a large geographic region including several major cities which benefit from the industrial zone. The broader cooperative agrees to stake the other $400m for the bridge improvements with the agreement that the industrial zone regional cooperative will pay it back over 40 years.
So yeah. That's generally how you manage that. You can look up Murray Bookchin, David Harvey, and Richard Wolff if you want to know more. Also look up Zoe Baker on youtube.
If you don't like my made up scenario, maybe look up how ITER or LHC get their funding.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ITER#Funding
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Large_Hadron_Collider#Cost
EDIT: Of course ITER and LHC are not workers cooperatives, just examples of how people delegating funds could make decisions.