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3 days agoThe statement being false implies that it is true, which is why this statement is contradictory if there are any omniscient beings
J Lou
An #EconomicDemocracy is a market economy where most firms are structured as #WorkerCoops.
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Cake day: July 18th, 2023
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Today’s legal systems mandate that legal responsibility be non-transferable for crimes. The economic democracy position argues that legal responsibility should be generally non-transferable matching general non-transferability of de facto responsibility due to the principle of justice that legal and de facto responsibility should match. Not all mandates are authoritarian (e.g. a mandate that one must respect others’ personal property). Employment violates workers’ property rights
Political democracy also mandates legal non-transferability for voting rights. Would you allow people to sell or transfer their voting rights?
People prefer democratic firms: https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/american-political-science-review/article/what-do-americans-want-from-private-government-experimental-evidence-demonstrates-that-americans-want-workplace-democracy/D9C1DBB6F95D9EEA35A34ABF016511F4
A mandate doesn’t restrict any non-institutionally-described action as labor is de facto non-transferable. It only prevents fraudulently treating de facto responsible persons as legal non-responsible things.
Are we free when we can sell our freedom or when we can’t even if we want to?
The idea is to mandate worker coop structure on all firms.
It’s not that telling. Without a worker coop mandate, there are collective action problems and market failures. It’s harder for all the workers to cooperate to form a worker coop than an employer to hire up all the workers.
No society has a full worker coop mandate because the modern arguments for it were published in the 90s. Some countries do mandate some worker board representation and codetermination though
@canada
12·5 days agoOr we could abolish the employer-employee contract and mandate that all firms be worker coops, so that no one could appropriate the positive and negative fruits of other people’s labor
The statement is only generates a contradiction if there is an omniscient being. If there are no omniscient beings, it is consistent.
The idea is that it is impossible for a being to both know and not know something. Knowable is not the same as known to a particular being
Article: https://www.ellerman.org/inalienable-rights-part-i-the-basic-argument/
Video: https://youtu.be/c2UCqzH5wAQ
Either one introduces the argument against capitalism based on the liberal principle of imputation.
Economic democracy, a market economy where worker coop is the only firm legal structure, maximizes liberty much better than capitalism
Capitalism is indefensible from a libertarian perspective. A central libertarian tenet is that legal and de facto responsibility should match. However, the capitalist employer-employee contract inherently involves a violation of this tenet. The employer gets 100% of the legal responsibility for the positive and negative results of the enterprise. Despite workers’ joint de facto responsibility for using up inputs to produce outputs, workers as employees get 0%
Classical laborists and mutualists were anti-capitalists. Some of whom predated Marx.
As I said, a mutualist economy or economic democracy has never existed. The modern arguments for economic democracy were first published in a book released in the 1990s. However, we have plenty of examples of worker coops and employee-owned corporations working well under capitalism. An economic democracy or mutualism differs from capitalism in that all firms are mandated to be worker coops
I know what capitalism is. My analysis of capitalism comes from a mutualist perspective and is inspired by the classical laborists rather than Marx
There has never been a worker-cooperative-dominated market economy, but actually existing worker coops and employee-owned corporations don’t seem to create billionaires, and have more equitable distribution of wages.
Why does mandating all firms to be worker coops not abolish capitalism in your view?
It seems to me that they’re hinting at abolishing capitalism.
One way to do that would be to
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Mandate worker coop structure on all businesses
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Institute a 100% land value tax
Taxing the rich doesn’t really solve the root of the problem. Abolishing capitalism pre-distributes wealth so that people don’t become billionaires in the first place. 100% land value tax encourages efficient use of land.
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That sentence has a presupposition. The sentence I used can be fully formalized in a logic with predicates for knowledge of an entity and truth
Being logical doesn’t imply knowing every true sentence.
Also, see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knower_paradox
I am a mutualist as well. I just use the term, economic democracy as David Ellerman calls it, instead because mutualism doesn’t seem as clear. Also, mutualism has anarchist connotations, which I am sympathetic to, but I believe the movement to abolish capitalism should be broader than anarchism.
In other words,
anarchist economic democracy = mutualism
I am an anti-capitalist.
To get rid of capitalism, you don’t have to abolish absentee ownership of capital. A worker coop can lease capital from third parties and remain a non-capitalist democratic worker coop. Abolishing capitalism just requires abolishing the employment contract and common ownership of land and natural resources. Without the employment contract, everyone is either individually or jointly self-employed, so every firm is a worker coop
Your reforms sound good, but aren’t pragmatic. Today’s system requires you to have lobbyists to push an agenda through. Who is going to fund the lobbyists to make these reforms happen.
Also, even in an ideal capitalism, there is still an injustice at the heart of the system. The employer-employee contract violates the tenet of legal and de facto responsibility matching. The workers are jointly de facto responsible for production, but employer is held solely legally responsible.
@technology