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

Thanks for the feedback. Will try to keep that in mind when coming up with post titles

@solarpunk

I have never found a meme that suitably emphasizes the responsibility aspect. Responsibility plays an essential role in the underlying argument due to the peculiarity that responsibility can’t be transferred from person to person even with consent. You find memes about workers deserving the entire value of their labor, but none that emphasize responsibility and workers’ property rights to the literal produced outputs and liabilities for the used-up inputs rather than just their value

@solarpunk

The entire video isn’t required to understand the argument. The first 15 minutes are sufficient

This argument probably can be explained in a 4 panel comic.

Probably, something like:
1 side: an employer and employee cooperating to commit a crime, which results in both being held responsible
Other side: an employer and employee cooperating to produce a widget resulting in the employer solely appropriating 100% of the property rights to the widget and liabilities for used-up inputs

@solarpunk

A variant of this should replace non-profit tax exemptions and all campaign finance rules.

The way to prevent bribing is secret and anonymous contributions. You could, for example, imagine including these contributions to your favorite media and FOSS organizations as part of your ballot.

This could be implemented by a federation of worker coops to fund local public goods that all the member coops benefit from with the matching pool coming from membership fees and Harberger leases

@socialism

Any company that receives government subsidies or is bailed out because it’s too big too fail or whatever the reason should be mandated to become a worker coop

@politics

The founders can hold more or all non-voting preferred stock in the worker coop to represent their larger stake and investment. They can also use a separate corporation, which only the founders own, with no employees to hold their capital and then lease it the worker coop

@politics

It would definitely be easier in an economy where this was the only way of doing things.

I am not a lawyer.

Based on the underlying economic theory and ethical arguments for worker coops/employee-owned companies, what you could do in such a situation is make a separate legal entity for the worker coop, and then lease the assets of the current legal entity to the worker coop. You and your partner maintain exclusive ownership of the original legal entity

@politics

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

@canada

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?

@canada

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

https://www.nceo.org/articles/employee-ownership-100

https://www.usworker.coop/en/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mondragon_Corporation

@canada

Or 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

@news

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

@canada

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%

@canada

Here is a short introduction to the core argument against capitalism based on liberal principles: https://www.ellerman.org/inalienable-rights-part-i-the-basic-argument/

@socialism

The root of the loss of community that everyone feels is capitalism’s total emphasis on institutional logics of exit that make everything extremely transactional while completely ignoring the dual institutional logic of commitment, cooperation and voice. Community emphasizes the latter. We need communities based around shared property, mutual aid and collective action. Incidentally, having such communities could help solve some public goods problems in a non-state manner and be more egalitarian

I’ll write one. The talk argues that employment contract is invalid due to inalienable rights. Inalienable means can’t be given up even with consent. Workers’ inalienable rights are rooted in their joint de facto responsibility in the firm for using up inputs to produce outputs. By the norm that legal and de facto responsibility should match, workers should get the corresponding legal responsibility, but in employment, workers as employees get 0% while employer gets 100% of results of production

Because most liberals don’t consistently apply their own principles. A principle that liberals are inconsistent with is the juridical principle of imputation, the norm of legal and de facto responsibility matching. They ignore this norm’s routine violation in the capitalist firm. Here, despite the workers joint de facto responsibility for production, the employer is solely legally responsible for 100% of the positive and negative results of production while workers as employees get 0%

@asklemmy

"We all declare for liberty; but in using the same word we do not all mean the same thing. With some the word liberty may mean for each man to do as he pleases with himself, and the product of his labor; while with others the same word may mean for some men to do as they please with other men, and the product of other men’s labor.” – Abraham Lincoln

This quote captures the differing understandings and notions of liberty between these different political groups

@linux