Any company with more than five employees had to be run as a worker-run coop. The board and execs were elected by the workers. Companies still competed on the market.
This would solve for the problem of alienation while still having an environment of competition.
I'm kind of tired of being an economic powerhouse where most people live in misery.
But given the high levels of dysfunction/conflict that led to the breakup of the country, I doubt they'd meet whatever bar you set for "economic powerhouse".
Do you prefer living in a mud hut to a house with air conditioning, central heat, hot and cold running water, electric lighting and flush toilets? All courtesy of economic powerhouses.
Maybe you'd prefer spending your free time spinning thread with your spinning wheel, making cloth, and sewing all your clothes? (The first industrial target was textiles.)
Doesn't sound like Yugoslavia had a successful model.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_of_the_Socialist_Feder...
High unemployment, billions in US foreign aid, etc.
I'm not sure we're reading the same article then.
Here's some archive footage from 60's Yugoslavia for your reference: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YXr5aKZ8mps
Sure doesn't look like people living in squalor in their mud huts.
This. What's the point of being an economic powerhouse when most people end up living poor quality lives?
People live in unimaginable luxury compared with what people had in Yugoslavia.
That exactly what will happen. In the best case, if you lacky enough, you will be live in a mud hut. The rest will envy those who can afford to live in a mud hut.
Workers can start running companies at any time, no one restricts them from running their companies. The only reason they don't do this is that this will be worse for workers.
So you are being hypocritical. You don't want workers to run companies (they can do that now), you want workers to have no alternative.
Usually the sign of the fairest and most humane systems of government and economy is when people get shot in the back by border guards if they try to escape.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iskra_Delta
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iskradata_1680
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ei_Ni%C5%A1
[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gorenje_Dialog
[5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_computer_systems_from_...
This is absolutely not true. In absolute numbers, the cost of starting a business is quite low, and workers have a lot of money, much more than their employers. And if workers collectively stop spending their salaries on unnecessary things, and instead organize a fund - on average, in 2 years they will have enough money to buy out the entire company they work for, or organize a comparable one.
There are no problems with capitalism, capitalism just allows you not to do all of this, not to suffer 2 years of poverty for the sake of living in a mud hut (if you're lucky enough).
PS. You're arguing with people who lived there. How can you be so certain you know better than those of us who saw it first hand? And I'm in no way saying it was a perfect system, btw.
What made 99% of things run in the 20th century. Things like plants, foundries and what have you.
And no, you didn’t have to live in a mud hut for it. In fact, it was more affordable for the regular worker to build a house than it is now. Those houses were/are comparable to what you see in Germany today. Go check out the real estate market in Slovenia if you don’t believe me, look for houses built 1950-1990.
You should change your name to Walter Dim.
Those all come from economic powerhouses.
The steps from mud huts to modern buildings came from economic powerhouses.
I skipped all the hard parts, like designing the chips and building a chip fab plant.
Building a computer from parts out of a catalog is commonplace.
You're using the past tense. Is that intended?
I couldn't find any statistics of Americans leaving for Yugoslavia.
Karl Popper, himself an Austrian that saw the rise of the Nazis and had to live in exile as a result famously formulated it as the paradox of tolerance.
Nobody would've thought the rise of MAGA in the US was gonna be feasible two decades ago.
Maintaining ideological blinders for what is feasible is how entrenched interests prevent systemic change.
I doubt you work 20+ hours a day. You probably realize there are diminishing or outright negative returns on quality of life for trying to maximize productive output. I would say we should apply the same logic to the economy as a whole; focus production on the things that actually improve society instead of operating on the assumption that “more production is always better.”