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In 1997, the inhabitants of the tiny Hebridean Isle of Eigg finally succeeded in taking collective control of their island. Tensions had been running high for years: everything from the islanders' homes to their jobs to their electricity supply depended on the whims of the wealthy businessman who owned it. Sick of putting up with crumbling buildings while he took rich friends for picnics and jaunts in his Rolls Royce, they launched what today would be called a crowdfunder, and eventually raised enough money to buy him out.
[...] Today, Eigg is thriving. A community housing association has refurbished the islanders' homes and made rents more affordable. The island is 95 percent powered by community-owned renewables, giving islanders 24-hour electricity for the first time. The landscape, previously scarred by damaging spruce tree plantations, has been restored. There is even a community-owned broadband network. Decisions about the island's future are made democratically by the trust that owns it on behalf of all who live there.
Can collective ownership work in the rest of the UK?
(Score: -1, Flamebait) by ChrisMaple on Sunday May 31 2020, @05:13AM (10 children)
Imagine having nothing you can call your own, that everything you make is immediately taken from you. You have no right to purchase or keep food, medicine, clothing or shelter. That's collective ownership, hell on Earth.
Does it "work"? If "work" means my gang sets the rules, it works just fine.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Kalas on Sunday May 31 2020, @07:28AM (2 children)
FTFY
(Score: 2) by Bot on Sunday May 31 2020, @03:05PM
po-tay-to, po-tah-to.
Account abandoned.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday May 31 2020, @05:04PM
No you didn't.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday May 31 2020, @03:23PM (4 children)
You must have read a different Marx than the rest of us.
Socialists aren't opposed to people having private property, and they're not opposed to people getting resources (food, money, clothing, shelter, entertainment) based on their work. Socialists are opposed to people getting resources based on what they own. If you and I work in a factory, or as plumbers, or doctors, or cleaners, or fruit harvesters and you do more work than me, you deserve more than me. That's fine. If I work in a factory, or as a plumber, doctor, cleaner, or fruit harvester and you are a person that owns the factory, plumbing business, medical office, cleaning service, or farm and you sit on a beach with booze and hookers while I work, and you get some of the money from my work, that's wrong.
Capitalists flip their lids at the thought of people getting free stuff that they didn't earn, but somehow pay no attention to the fact that the average family in the 1% of wealthiest American families inherited more than 4 million dollars. The sky is falling if a Millennial gets food stamps, and it's even worse, a hell on earth, if someone from the Honduras is getting an appendectomy paid for by Medicaid. But somehow it's totally fine if a million Americans never worked a day in their lives and enjoy more luxury than 300 million other citizens will ever experience just because they got leftover money from motivated grandparents. Explain that.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday May 31 2020, @05:53PM
"some" is OK. it is just that the owner or executive suite or investors is in charge of defining that "some". and human nature being what it is, their "some" will be much greater than the rest's "some". They have lots of good-sounding rationalizations for that and keeping it that way, also. like, "executive salaries account for only 1% of corporate revenue while employee health care costs 20%". and we eat up that false equivalence and say, give me more, sir!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday May 31 2020, @09:38PM
It's not just that the owner gets a cut of your work, he pays significantly lower tax on it than you do.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 01 2020, @12:11AM
Marx said, "From each according to his ability, to each according to his need." So that coupling is explicitly not there. If you produce 10 apples but only need 1 apple, you don't get to keep the extra 9 apples you produced. The State takes them from you and gives them to 9 other people who decided to slack that day. Well, that's at first. Later the commissar realizes he has the power of life and death over you, so why not keep 5 apples for himself and hand out 3 to others and sell 1 on the black market to support that hot little number in an apartment in Moscow. Then, when the secret police come around asking impertinent questions about the drop in his quota, he fingers you as a lazybones and possible capitalist wrecker and recommends they pick you up for enhanced interrogation about what happened to the other 6 apples you didn't surrender.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday June 02 2020, @12:24AM
Marx != Socialists. The dude and his cult were crazy. You can pick that vibe up, if you actually read his stuff (for example, loopy nomenclature like "commodity fetishish" or the woo of labor theory of value which in Marxist hands becomes a taint that goods and workers can't be rid of). Socialists aren't usually that crazy.
Sounds like you already went off the rails. What happens when I acquire ownership of resource production with my labor? "Socialists are opposed to people getting resources based on what they own."
What's wrong about that? Sounds like a case of monkeys wanting grapes instead of cucumbers. Given that the person who owns the factory, plumbing business, medical office, cleaning service, or farm is employing you, indicates that there's more to this story than merely that it's not fair that they don't have to work as much (allegedly).
Using the power of the state to get free stuff they didn't earn versus private capital in private hands passed on to other private hands by choice? There is a difference here. I get that a pseudo-aristocracy, generated by inheritance, can cause problems - which haven't been discussed here. Ultimately, I don't see those problems as important enough to eliminate inheritance.
This is classic internet - refusal to acknowledge at all that there's a problem. You know, if we could get the perfect capitalist paradise by giving one Millennial food stamps and someone from Honduras an appendectomy, I think most hardcore capitalists would think that is a great deal. Because average food stamps averages roughly $1400 per year per person and average appendectomy bills of $33,000 [cbsnews.com] (Medicaid is actually "slightly higher"). That's orders of magnitude below round off error in a budget like the federal government.
The catch is that there's 72 million Millennials and over 9 million Hondurans. So crudely, $100 billion per year to feed Millennials and $300 billion to do appendectomies on every Honduran (don't forget Honduras was just some country pulled out of the ass, there are seven billion other people out there in the world). There is this supreme lack of awareness of consequences of the toxic combination of generous social programs and open immigration policy, and how things can balloon out of control. Meanwhile, we have that the vast majority of Millennials can buy their own food, and we can keep the vast majority of the world from immigrating for that free stuff - what we do today.
Keep in mind that there are two huge reasons that heavy anti-immigration sentiment exists: first, that the immigrants are competing for the same low income jobs (which I might add, socialist policies tends to make more scarce), and second, immigrants are competing for the same safety net dollars. It's too easy to characterize this as mere racism, when one ignores the dynamics at play. But anti-immigration people don't care about people they never see.
Finally, I think it's telling that this whole argument is wholly cast as it being unfair that people have to work while someone else sits on a beach. In other words, we have to do this thing because rich people are getting off easy. There's no problem here to fix.
(Score: 2) by Mykl on Sunday May 31 2020, @11:28PM (1 child)
You forgot the other side of the coin - that everything everyone else in that community (including you) produces is partly yours.
Big difference.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday June 02 2020, @12:35AM
Sorry, that's not the other side of the coin. The other side is the tragedy of the commons [wikipedia.org]. What you can use up before someone else gets to it is yours.