That is flatly false. Worker cooperatives are every bit as innovative as any other form of private corporation. These are owned by workers not a centralized government. There are quite a few of them and you may well have purchased their products with it even realizing it. Two additional examples you may have encountered are Equal Exchange and King Arthur Flour.

There aren't more of them because they have a hell of a time securing financing when most businesses are financed through equity sales which they can't do.

Example of innovation please. I’ve seen first hand that no collective farm is able to produce nor SpaceX nor even EV nor even plant in time and harvest in time.

I'm not close enough to manufacturing to evaluate how innovative their approaches to factory automation are, but it's not like they're based solely on turnips:

https://www.mondragon-assembly.com/automotive/

The collective farm that produced SpaceX is the United States Government. It carried out all the research and development necessary to create and further the North American space program. And it is existential in furthering it to this day. Without this source of contracts, research projects and income SpaceX would not be able to produce its commercial spin-off products.

You obviously never been to a collective farm.

Despite government support to the extent much larger than that for SpaceX collective farms have nothing to show for it.

Maybe because they are farms and not rocket makers

Why they are farms and not rocket makers? Because collective.

But there are very successful rocketry collectives! They just typically aren't called "farms".

Things like Friends of Amateur Rocketry have all the characteristics of a collective (including legal status) https://friendsofamateurrocketry.org/

The constraining factor is typically budget (as mentioned up-thread).

By this logic capitalism is the thing holding back capitalist farms from being rocket makers too? Or do you only apply it when you get to use the word "collective"?

Of course it is the logic of collective. In capitalism you decide how you'd want to spend your resources, on a farm or on a rocket. In collective it is collective who decides.

Capitalist farms - why are they farms and not rocket makers? Is capitalism holding them back?

In capitalism it is your choice how to spend your resources - on the farm or on a rocket shop.

That's not an excuse. In socialist Czechoslovakia, a coop farm produced computers.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JZD_Slu%C5%A1ovice#TNS_Compute...

It looks like this system was created out of necessity; there was no viable product for what they needed. Necessity is the mother of innovation after all, and we find this sorts of innovation frequently in non-collectivized entrepreneurships as well. Still, very cool!

If it weren't for the Wright Brothers, NASA would never have existed.

Maybe so but I am not arguing with that. The original claim is much weaker: No "collective" produces innovation.

Open source software

There are multiple Kibbutz in Israel that plant and harvest on time and are the major source of innovation for Israel's AgTech sector (which is only behind the US in terms successful startups).

    > most businesses are financed through equity sales

Can you explain this more? As I understand, after equity IPO, most companies use debt capital markets to raise money to expand their business.

You've just changed my brand of flour, thanks.

It seems a bit premature to speak so generally about collectivism. It's quite possible that the USSR failed for reasons that do not apply to Mondragon.

Maybe once we've seen a few hundred of these come and go it'll be time for a general theory of their kind.

>It seems a bit premature to speak so generally about collectivism

2B people spent better part of 20th century doing the experiment, killing tens of millions of those who didn’t completely shared the ideas of the collective, and you think it is premature?

General theory is in the Das Kapital. So far the things have worked as described. People by mistake ascribed happiness to the outcomes calculated there while there is no such happiness was predicted by that theory. Ie communism isn’t a happy place like some naïve readers think, communism is prison and oppression.

Wasn't the USSR quite open about not being communist and at best working towards "socialism" as a pathway towards communism?

Surely the USSR is an example of the pigs pulling a bait and switch rather than communism.

The failure of the USSR to achieve communism is a side show to all the variations on worker | producer collectives that didn't fall to Stalinism.

Totally. The USSR had no worker-owned companies. They all belonged to the state. There was no economy which is based on cooperatives in a free market, yet.

I think we can also say that the former USSR has also failed to achieve capitalism despite having 30 years to do it. So maybe there's some other factors at play.

Compulsory participation is quite a separate thing. Everyone who works at Mondragon could just go work somewhere else if they wanted.

Mondragon has lasted 68 years and I believe the USSR had lasted 69 years. Why do you think they will fail in the next year? Also given the speed of advancement has increased in the past 30+ years, it seems like they have kept pace a lot better than the USSR (or it's successor Russia)

Or have you worked there and this is first hand?

I don't think the USSR is a great example. The region has been under the thumb of authoritarian dictators for a 1000 years and those who most strongly disagreed with this have for that millennium either left or died leaving behind a nation largely populated by the children of people willing to go along to get along under such a system. Cultures and circumstances leave a mark on a people not least by the process by which survivors are selected.

If anything the current situation stands to worsen that situation with smart young people who might contribute to a better future dying or fleeing.