When I was assembling my last book (Corporations: A research agenda), I became quite interested in Mondragon in Spain as an alternative way of organising businesses (and featured them in the book).
Somehow I missed this recent profile on the Spanish Cooperative conglomerate. It make for an interesting read when we are told there is no other way of running firms in capitalism.... because clearly there is!
What obligation do #platformcoops have to operate at the same scale as or even outperform their venture capital funded corporate counterparts? If a #platformcoop does not succeed in having a similar reach as major corporations with comparable features, should it be considered "low quality" or are there other standards of success worth considering?
i see so many people today fired from jobs and immediately looking to go wage slaving for some other corporation.
please consider alternatives. band together, build cooperatives. let's claw back some amount of control over our lives. i, for one, am sick of corporate feudal lords and am looking for accomplices for an escape.
Autonomic is delighted to announce our radical anti-competitive partnership with http://collective.tools/ 🤝
We helped migrate collective.tools services from an intricate menagerie of separate VPSs and corporate mail hosting, to an updated, integrated, #CoopCloud deployment – lowering their operating costs and making the stack easier to manage.
If you’re looking for a right-on data/e-mail/forum hoster (and you should be, in these times of intense surveillance capitalism!), and you’d like to be part of an established multistakeholder coöperative, head on over to https://collective.tools/product/collective-tools-personal/
Happy that a local project I've been involved with is gathering steam: Forming a co-operative to try and purchase a local community hub here in Castlemaine.
La meva bici està feta per una #cooperativa. La marca #Orbea és molt coneguda després de moltes dècades però el que poca gent sap és que a darrera hi ha ha una cooperativa de #treball amb més de 1.000 persones fent-hi feina i més de 400 milions d'euros d'ingressos anuals.
Un punt més per fer coherent el consum amb l'objectiu de fer una economia més sostenible.
This is a little shop in Rochdale, near Manchester in the UK. It’s a special place because it was here that the Rochdale Pioneers went into business in 1844, kickstarting the modern cooperative movement. They were 28 working-class people, put their savings together and started selling essential products like butter and flour at fair prices to other folks. Ridiculed at first, their business quickly expanded and the rest is history: Today a billion people worldwide are members of cooperatives and 100 million are employed by them. The Rochdale Pioneers didn’t start the first cooperative, but they were one of the first successful ones, inspiring people (myself included) to this day. Today the shop is a museum and I was lucky to visit it last week! #GameBoyCamera#Cooperatives
Are their #news agencies out there which are structured as consumer #cooperatives?
I see (and agree with) people complaining that news agencies are profit-driven, and that this introduces inherent biases in what gets reported, and how it gets presented. If we want our news to tell us what we need to know, they should get paid for doing precisely that, rather than getting paid for grabbing and holding our attention any way they can manage to do so.
Does anyone have reading recommendations for the incorporation process of cooperatives or the legal structuring of bylaws in co-ops and multi-stakeholder enterprises?
Bougie neighbors try to get Bluestockings (one of the best bookstores/community centers in NYC) evicted for distributing Narcan. Shameless and horrible, these people are. Socially-engineered sociopathy.
You can get a book subscription here if you want to support the Bluestockings coop.
Software requires hours of specialist labour to develop and maintain. If co-ops want Free Code software designed for the specific needs of co-ops, at a range of scales, we're going to need to come up with systems for funding both initial development and ongoing maintenance of co-op software. Fortunately for us, much of the initial development work can be done by customizing off-the-shelf Free Code, which speeds up development and reduces costs.
:TwinPines: "People do not know about cooperatives because of two things. First, a lack of information concerning cooperation, and second, the fact that its principles are opposed to privilege. Cooperatives have two things working against them; ignorance and selfishness." ~James Peter Warbasse (quoted by Cathy Statz). #cooperatives#coops
#Cooperatives#Coops#Socialism#SolidarityEconomy#WorkerOwnedFirms: "Fast forward to 2024. Once again, the Left is discussing strategies for political advance. It is clear that electoral campaigns on their own and short-lived protests are not enough to win durable victories. But unlike socialists of the past, the contemporary left’s discussions have largely ignored the strategic role that cooperatives — and the solidarity economy more generally, i.e., enterprises geared to serving the needs of workers and achieving broader social goals — can play in building up the Left’s power.
This is a mistake. History shows that a flourishing solidarity economy can provide a distinctive set of material and social benefits for the Left, benefits that can play a key role in socialism’s broader political revival. This is not to say that supporting cooperatives and other kinds of worker-owned firms should supplant our other political tactics — but neither should they be ignored. Rather, cooperatives can and should complement the Left’s other strategic efforts, as the Second International recognized long ago."