The Elysian Dispatch

Companies are wealthier than nation-states. They don't have borders. They pioneered workers’ rights before governments mandated them, and are often more inclusive than nations. Companies are smaller and more nimble than nation-states. They are more efficient and less polarized than countries. Company campuses are already a lot like city-states. A Google employee is better cared for than a United States citizen. Companies will reshape our future, that's why we need to build better ones. This is a

A century after Karl Marx argued for a more fair and just society, José María Arizmendiarrieta started building one. Here's the story of the Catholic priest that inspired the world's biggest worker cooperative. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.elysian.press/subscribe

Mondragon is the largest group of worker cooperatives in the world. With 92 cooperatives in the industrial, financial, retail, and educational sectors, the group earned €11 billion in revenue last year with more than 70,500 workers. Each of those cooperatives are owned and democratically run by their workers, who vote their leadership into office and share in the profits when their cooperatives do well. In fact, Mondragon works a lot like a federated nation-state made up of smaller city-states

There are 47 millionaires working for Central States Manufacturing and they’re not all in the C-Suite. Many of them are drivers or machinists—blue-collar workers for the company. This is a blueprint for the future of all companies. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.elysian.press/subscribe

NATO is a pact between countries that if one is attacked, all will defend. Is there a future where eventually the whole world is part of NATO? If so, then all countries would be joined in a pact of not harming each other and defending one another. If one country decided to break the pact and attack another country they’d have the military might of the entire world against them. In this case, NATO would become a “world government” that protects world peace. This is a public episode. If you'd like to

The United States and other federal governments should decouple federal governance into several independent government layers that city-states can join ad hoc. Think: A human rights layer, a military layer, an economic layer… A world of city-states could join those federal governments à la carte, rather than be stuck with the whole menu. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.elysian.press/subscribe

Plato, Thomas More, and Aldous Huxley all place utopia on an island—a small city-state that self-governed. For a long time, the city-state was our best and only form of government. But eventually, they went wrong where the state in Plato’s Republic did: they grew, consuming more land and more people and requiring an even bigger body of government to manage them all. Eventually, they were no longer city-states, they became nation-states. Maybe that wasn't a good thing. This is a public episode. If