Why Market Socialism?: Voices from Dissent

This book argues in favor of systems which are neither traditional socialism nor traditional capitalism. It presents numerous alternatives that circumvent the major problems of both systems. The most promising of these is the cooperative model. There are over three quarters of a billion members of co-ops worldwide, including over 40% of Americans, and the movement continues to grow. Contrary to what some people think, United Airlines was not a cooperative, but an Employee Stock Ownership Program (ESOP). The company was never more than 55% employee-owned.* This is no proof that employee-ownership can't work. A more accurate example is the Mondragon Cooperative Corporation in the basque region of Spain. Mondragon is the seventh largest corporation in Spain, composed of over 160 different companies including factories, housing co-ops, schools, a credit union, a social security and medical cooperative, a 4,000-student university, and Spain's largest supermarket chain, Eroski. It is collectively owned and democratically controlled exclusively by its over 60,000 worker-members. No non-worker can own any part of the company, and every worker has an equal vote, regardless of amount of investment. Earning a substantial dividend on profits, workers have an incentive to work hard, and they do. They are rarely fired, and if hard times require temporary cutbacks, they receive unemployment compensation equal to 80% of their salary while being sent back to the university to improve their skills. Even while receiving the best medical insurance and social security imaginable, they manage to bring in over $9 billion in annual revenues. The Mondragón Co-op has brought amazing prosperity to its once war-torn, poverty-stricken town.This is only one of many examples of how cooperation and employee-ownership can work fantastically. A few other familiar co-ops are REI, Ace Hardware, Land O' Lakes, The Associated Press, Oceanspray, and Sun Maid. Some economists and political theorists have called co-ops a utopian "Third Way" that defies both the constraints and mediocrity inherent in communism and the poverty and oppression that tend to accompany capitalism. The fact that there are more than two possible economic systems seems to be completely missing from modern economic dialogue. There should be more books like this, books that challenge this sort of dualism and show us that there really are other alternatives. *Source: Wikipedia Encyclopedia article on United Airlines.