You and Ketchim are funny. You're an idealist, Ketchim is a realist. I'm a kind of cynical idealist, bouncing between you.
It took about 500 years for capitalism to replace feudalism. Imagine that. For 500 years, humans accepted and saw little wrong with something as obviously rediculous as feudalism. Feudalism was deemed natural. It was normal. There was no alternative. Kings and Queens might be bad, the serfs said, but it's the best we can do!
In the same way, nobody can imagine an alternative to today's world. And you can't force them to. Humans are just damn retarded.
So Ketchim is right. Imagine trying to organise a cricket co-op in the West Indies. The rastamen wouldn't see the point. The Trinis would be suspicious of the Guyanese. The Guyanese would want to all the sweet admin jobs and the Yardies would be busy planting weed. You'd need a genius to organise this and convince people to help get the ball rolling. It's impossible.
But of course Mapoui is also right. Historically, demanding the impossible is what gets things done. The reasonable man adapts himself to the world. The unreasonable man tries to adapt the world to himself. So all progress depends on the unreasonable man. We need a world with more goofy, unreasonable Mapouis.
Anyway (ignore the following if you're uninterested in theory) Marx wrote extensively about co-ops like Mondragon. He said:
"However excellent in principle and however useful in practice, co-operative labour will never be able to arrest the growth of monopoly, free the masses, or even perceptibly lighten the burden of their miseries. To save the masses, co-operative labour ought to be developed to national dimensions and, consequently, be fostered by national means."
So Marx was cynical about isolated co-operatives. He said:
1. They don't abolish the money-value form
2. They are subject to the economic and political subordination of the capitalist economy and its state
3. They become an exploiter of their suppliers, who are capitalist in nature
4. They are forced to expand infinitely, gobbling up all of society, if they are to fix the problem stated in 3.
5. And if they do 4, they get crushed by 2, leading to mayhem and worse conditions
Yet Marx said that they should nevertheless be developed. He was cynical and pessimistic, but still thought that isolated co-ops served a function. He said they were, quote, "a transformative force. Their great merit being that they practically show that the present system can be superseded by a beneficent system".
So he thought co-ops represented a kind of symbolic alternative; as a system driven by the needs of communities and not by profit, they served as way to inspire people. A way to get people thinking of practical and living example of alternative systems.
Burnham was installed to stop Jagan, an avowed Marxist. The Guyanese wanted Jagan. He captured most of the votes, but Eisenhower freaked out and the Americans had him removed with the help of the Brits, who suspended the Guyanese constitution after elections were held. Still Jagan kept winning votes. The Guyanese loved him. They wanted him. Then the CIA and the Brits engineered strikes and pumped money into Burnham. Burnham got power, the Guyanese realized they hated him, so he pretended to be Jagan, and so socialist, to placate them.
No "attempt at socialism" will be allowed by the big nations, because such things cut into profits. In a similar way, few "attempts at capitalism" were allowed in the 1600s-1700s, because they cut into the rights of Kings and monarchs.
Which is not to say that Guyanese socialism would have worked. In an alternative universe, a super lefty Jagan may have got power and been ignored by the world, and yet still run Guyana into the ground. Organising entire countries is a very big, almost impossibly science fictional thing. Something as small as Mondragon took almost half a century to figure itself out.
Why did the Guyanese run backwards?
He wanted to gain weight.
F**K GUYANA.
TRINIDAD FOREVER.
USA USA USA.
