An #EconomicDemocracy is a market economy where most firms are structured as #WorkerCoops.
I agree that employment is voluntary in the legal sense. Voluntary transaction occur if both parties perceive that they will benefit from the arrangement. The problem is that responsibility can't be transferred.
You know that there is no de facto transfer of de facto responsibility happening in the employment contract. If you thought that a transfer of de facto responsibility occurs in employment, you would think that the employer is solely legally responsible for crimes committed
Employment is a voluntary transaction, but there has to be some corresponding factual transfer to actually fulfill the contract. No such de facto transfer of de facto responsibility occurs to match the assignment of legal responsibility in the employment contract. The contract is not ever fulfilled nor is it, in principle, fulfillable. The only arrangement where legal and de facto responsibility match is a worker coop. Labor is nontransferable at a factual level. You accepted as much
100% land value tax would solve this @asklemmy
The tenet that legal and de facto responsibility match, when applied to property theoretic questions, is the tenet that people have an inalienable right to appropriate the positive and negative fruits of their labor. The latter is the principled basis of property rights. Since employment violates the former principle, it also violates the latter. Employment contracts violate property rights' principled basis.
Labor isn't transferable.
The foundations of capitalism need destroying
Thank you for making my argument for me. Now, what morally relevantly changes when workers cooperate to produce a widget on behalf of the employer instead of committing crimes for the employer? Do they become non-conscious non-responsible robots? No.
Legal responsibility matching de facto responsibility implies that all firms should be mandated to be worker coops, and rules out employer-employee contracts. In worker coops, the workers are jointly legally responsible for the results
Not quite. Voting rights over firm governance are non-transferable/inalienable. The employer-employee contract is abolished, and everyone is always individually or jointly self-employed.
Incorporating social objectives should be done at the level of associations of worker coops
Things are even more complicated than that due to the existence of liberal anti-capitalists that interpret the liberal theory of inalienable rights, which originated in the abolitionist, democratic and feminist movements, as also invalidating the employer-employee contract.
In other words, there is overlap between liberals and leftists as well
While many socialists supported worker coops in the interim, an economy of exclusively worker coops comes more so from the classical laborists such as Proudhon.
I'm aware of the standard line.
De facto responsibility can't be transferred from the employees solely to the employer to match the legal responsibility assignment in the employer-employee contract. A thought experiment showing this is to consider an employer and employee cooperating to commit a crime. The employee can't argue that they sold their labor, and are not responsible. The law correctly applies the principle of legal and de facto responsibility matching. Both are criminous
An employer, in principle, can hire both labor and capital, so they don't have to own capital. In practice, employers tend to be corporations that own capital due to bargaining power.
Workers consent to employment terms, but they can't fulfill them. The problem is that consent is not a sufficient condition to transfer de facto responsibility.
Abolishing employment doesn't infringe on property rights. Employment contracts infringe on labor's property rights to the fruits of labor
@politics
Workers are de facto responsible for creating the opportunities that employers gate keep. Employers violate workers' inalienable rights. The workers are de facto responsible for using up inputs to produce outputs, but the employer gets sole legal responsibility for the positive and negative results of production. This violates the principle that legal and de facto responsibility should match.
No one is responsible for creating land. Landlords deny everyone's equal claim to land
Intellectually honest people that for whatever reason started out on the center-right can be convinced to support worker coops. The arguments in favor of them are personal responsibility arguments that center-right people tend to favor. I actually posted one such moral argument for worker coops in this community. Here is a link to that post:
I agree that it is not capitalism as it abolishes the employer-employee contract, but it isn't quite socialism either because it is technically compatible with private property.
In terms of expanding the worker coop sector, I actually have some ideas for getting startup funding for worker coops, and creating economic entities that would buy up capitalist firms and convert them into worker coops
There are 2 risk reduction strategies commitment-based and diversification based. The diversification-based strategy is the usual spread your eggs across many baskets strategy, but there is also a commitment-based dual strategy where you put your eggs in a few baskets and watch over them carefully.
Workers in coops can share risks with investors with non-voting preferred shares and other financial instruments. They can diversify by investing in other worker coops non-voting shares
There would still be limited liability. Furthermore, they can share risks with investors, and self-insure against risk as well @general
A moral argument for why all firms should be employee-owned - "Inalienable Right: Part 1 The Basic Argument"
A moral argument for why all firms should be employee-owned - "Inalienable Right: Part 1 The Basic Argument"
https://www.ellerman.org/inalienable-rights-part-i-the-basic-argument/
On a fallacy in the Kaldor-Hicks efficiency-equity analysis
On a fallacy in the Kaldor-Hicks efficiency-equity analysis
"This paper shows that implicit assumptions about the numeraire good in the Kaldor-Hicks efficiency-equity analysis involve a “same-yardstick” fallacy (a fallacy pointed out by Paul Samuelson in another context). These results have negative implications for cost-benefit analysis, the wealth-maximization (e.g., “Chicago”) approach to law and economics, and other parts of applied welfare economics"
https://www.ellerman.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/Kaldor-Hicks-FallacyReprint.pdf
A worker coop is a firm. A pure market is trade between people that have no direct social ties prior.
Weyl's mechanisms become relevant in larger communities where Elinor Ostrom's method doesn't work as well. Currencies can be community oriented by having build in fees that go into the community fund that scale with social distance. They can emphasize a logic of commitment
Capitalism emphasizes the logic of exit to the exclusion of the logic of commitment. This is dehumanizing
Yeah, we are using "community" differently. I agree that with strong ties this would be irrelevant. There are degrees of how coordinated actors can be. Capitalism misses that with its false dichotomy of total economic planning as in the firm, and full autonomous action as in the market. What we want is a gradient
The spectrum is:
pure market → large-scale communities with collective ownership using PCO → Ostrom-style CPR → firms
Here is the voucher stuff:
As I mentioned in my other comment, there are situations that Ostrom acknowledges where conventional models make sense. We can just take the proposal to be addressing those sorts of larger-scale low interaction communities where agents are relatively autonomous
Your second objection is acknowledged in the article, and the authors actually address it in another article. A solution is not to use money, but rather non-trasnsferable vouchers
If you read their work, they emphasize that the residual rights should belong to a democratic community. The whole idea is to share wealth with communities that help generate it and collectivize property at the community level rather than capitalists owning it. The funds are for facilitating cooperation.
Ancaps are opposed to common ownership.
What does AI have to do with ancap.
Your statement is a genetic logical fallacy.
Describe why you disagree with the proposed structure
Partial Common Ownership: A New Model for Ownership - A new alternative to capitalist private property that addresses scarcity in the small
Partial Common Ownership: A New Model for Ownership - A new alternative to capitalist private property that addresses scarcity in the small
Partial Common Ownership (PCO) is a flexible template for reconfiguring property relations, which has inspired many of us at RadicalxChange because it opens the door to a different kind of conversation about capitalism.
https://www.radicalxchange.org/media/blog/pco-a-new-model-of-ownership/
The ancap vision lacks necessities for stable stateless societies besides the dual logics of exit and commitment. By having some rights be non-transferable, it prevents them from accumulating and concentrating maintaining decentralization and preventing collusion to form a state. There is no middle ground, in the ancap vision, between full economic planning of the firm and completely uncoordinated atomized individuals in the market. The groups I describe provide that.
@technology
"Inalienable Rights: Part I The Basic Argument" - the liberal theory that both Nozick and Rawls missed
"Inalienable Rights: Part I The Basic Argument" - the liberal theory that both Nozick and Rawls missed
https://www.ellerman.org/inalienable-rights-part-i-the-basic-argument/
"An inalienable right is a right that may not be ceded or transferred away even with the consent of the holders of the right. Any contract to alienate such a right would be an inherently invalid contract, and, vice-versa, a right such that any contract to alienate it was inherently invalid would thus be an inalienable right."
Partial Common Ownership: A New Model for Ownership - A new alternative to capitalist private property
Partial Common Ownership: A New Model for Ownership - A new alternative to capitalist private property
https://www.radicalxchange.org/media/blog/pco-a-new-model-of-ownership/
The main disagreement I have with the article is that voting rights over management of firms should lie exclusively with workers. Besides that, the alternative described should be interesting to anti-capitalists.
The revenue from partial common ownership could be allocated using non-market mechanisms in democratic communities
Plural Money, Socially-Provided Goods, and the Principal-Agent Problem
Plural Money, Socially-Provided Goods, and the Principal-Agent Problem
Vouchers and local currencies to extend the marketplace with the logic of commitment as well as the logic of exit that markets are based on.
The Philosophy of Liberty – On Liberalism
The Philosophy of Liberty – On Liberalism
https://acoup.blog/2024/07/05/collections-the-philosophy-of-liberty-on-liberalism/
The Problems with Money and Without Money, and Communal Currencies and Vouchers - "Plural Money, Socially-Provided Goods, and the Principal-Agent Problem"
The Problems with Money and Without Money, and Communal Currencies and Vouchers - "Plural Money, Socially-Provided Goods, and the Principal-Agent Problem"
"The Two Institutional Logics: Exit-Oriented Versus Commitment-Oriented Institutional Designs" - The Duality Economics Misses
"The Two Institutional Logics: Exit-Oriented Versus Commitment-Oriented Institutional Designs" - The Duality Economics Misses
https://www.ellerman.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/12/Two-Logics-Reprint.pdf
"Economics focuses almost exclusively on the logic of exit and questions of institutional design are seen through that lens." It misses out on the other half of the duality with the logic of commitment
"Inalienable Rights: Part I The Basic Argument" - How personal responsibility, contra-capitalists, actually implies anti-capitalism
"Inalienable Rights: Part I The Basic Argument" - How personal responsibility, contra-capitalists, actually implies anti-capitalism
https://www.ellerman.org/inalienable-rights-part-i-the-basic-argument/
Can Land Value Tax Be Passed On To Tenants?
Can Land Value Tax Be Passed On To Tenants?
https://gameofrent.com/content/can-lvt-be-passed-on-to-tenants
We Don't Agree on Capitalism: Demarcating the Red and Black
We Don't Agree on Capitalism: Demarcating the Red and Black
The case for employee-owned companies
The case for employee-owned companies
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/economy/column-the-case-for-employee-owned-companies
In the sidebar, it asks for recommendations such as reading lists. I propose that David Ellerman's work be included in the reading list. He makes a unique argument in favor of workplace democracy
The Philosophy of Liberty – On Liberalism
The Philosophy of Liberty – On Liberalism
https://acoup.blog/2024/07/05/collections-the-philosophy-of-liberty-on-liberalism/
The Telekommunist Manifesto
The Telekommunist Manifesto
https://www.networkcultures.org/\_uploads/%233notebook\_telekommunist.pdf
"Proposing ‘venture communism’ ... for workers’ self-organization, Kleiner spins Marx and Engels’ ... Manifesto ... into the age of the internet. ... [V]enture communism allocates capital that is ... needed to accomplish what capitalism cannot: the ongoing proliferation of free culture and free networks.
In developing [this] concept ..., Kleiner provides a critique of copyright."
"Inalienable Rights: Part I The Basic Argument." How the capitalist employer-employee relationship violates fundamental rights
"Inalienable Rights: Part I The Basic Argument." How the capitalist employer-employee relationship violates fundamental rights
https://www.ellerman.org/inalienable-rights-part-i-the-basic-argument/
Solarpunk should emphasize democracy in the workplace and not take something like the employer-employee contract as part of the furniture of the universe
"Economic Democracy: arguments from the US" for workers' self-management and against the employer-employee contract
"Economic Democracy: arguments from the US" for workers' self-management and against the employer-employee contract
Economic democracy is a philosophy that shows that all workers have an inalienable right to workplace democracy/workers' self-management/worker coops. The employer-employee contract violates that right even if employment is fully voluntary. An inalienable right is a right that can't be given up or transferred even with consent
Capitalist Markets Aren’t “Free.” They’re Planned for Profit.
Capitalist Markets Aren’t “Free.” They’re Planned for Profit.
Neoliberalism was never about shrinking the state to unfetter markets and enhance human freedom. In her new book, Vulture Capitalism, Grace Blakeley argues that neoliberalism has always sought to wield state power to maximize profits for the rich.
https://jacobin.com/2024/03/neoliberalism-markets-planning-vulture-capitalism/
Directly Valuing Animal Welfare in (Environmental) Economics
Directly Valuing Animal Welfare in (Environmental) Economics
https://hal.science/hal-02929260/document
"Research in economics is anthropocentric. It only cares about the welfare of humans, and usually does not concern itself with animals. When it does, ... animals only have instrumental value for humans. Yet unlike water, trees or vegetables, and like humans, most animals have a brain and a nervous system. They can feel pain and pleasure, and many argue that their welfare should matter."
Property in land - What are your thoughts on Georgist libertarianism?
Property in land - What are your thoughts on Georgist libertarianism?
The basic idea behind Georgism is that land and natural resources are not the fruits of anyone’s labor, so no one has a natural right to it. Georgism proposes based on this that collective ownership arrangements be applied to such resources. Geolibertarianism supports full private property rights in the products of labor.
What are your thoughts on this approach to natural resources?