What would be a more appropriate community?
jlou
joined 2 years ago
Private property rests on the principle of people getting the fruits of their labor. In other words, private property appropriation has a labor-basis that capitalism denies. Capitalism violates the very principle behind private property by giving workers 0% joint claim on the positive and negative fruits of their labor
"Property is theft!" -- Proudhon
The employment contract is what really enables capitalist appropriation.
I agree with your critique of capitalist liberal democracy
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%
Private property isn't as supportive of capitalism as it initially seems. Classical laborists (e.g. Proudhon) and their modern intellectual descendants (e.g. David Ellerman) argue that the positive and negative results of production are the private property of the workers in the firm. This argument immediately implies a worker coop structure mandate on all firms and rules out capitalism. Capitalism is so indefensible that even private property requires the abolition of capitalism
The academic definition would be the systems of the historical Eastern Bloc countries or a hypothetical society that has somehow completely abolished commodity production
Consent isn't sufficient to transfer de facto responsibility from employees to employer. Employees (and a working employer) are jointly de facto responsible for using up inputs to produce outputs regardless of contract. Since there is no transfer, there is an inherent mismatch here
Employment isn't a contract to sell the product of labor because to sell something you must first own it, and workers never own it.
(The workers jointly own the product of their labor) → democratic firm
It would be unconvincing if the article was really arguing against slavery and then ruling out employment contract by equating it with slavery. That would be a false equivalence fallacy. The employment contract is a voluntary self-rental while slavery involves coercive ownership of people. However, that isn't what the paper is doing. The reference to self-sale contracts is to recover the underlying principles of inalienable rights, and demonstrate that they apply to employment
There are plenty of examples today of companies with similar structures that seem to work:
https://www.nceo.org/articles/employee-ownership-100
It is important to note the argument is that the employer-employee contract is invalid not that the people will benefit from this change (although they probably will)
It is important to consider the political implications of a move in this direction. Having a more powerful democratic firm sector would result in more lobbyists that have an eye on workers' interests
The liberal norm of legal and de facto responsibility matching determines which party should be held responsible. It doesn't determine the degree of personal liability or risk to personal assets. There is no conflict between limited liability and democratic firms.
The pure application of the liberal principle of justice is to deliberate actions.
A group of people is de facto responsible for a result if it is a purposeful result of their deliberate and intentional joint actions
Capitalism includes the employment contract where the employer gets 100% of the property rights to produced outputs and liabilities for used-up inputs while workers as employees get 0% of that. That's a descriptive point. Morally, this assignment violates the liberal principle of justice that legal responsibility should be assigned the de facto responsible party since workers are jointly de facto responsible for using up inputs to produce outputs but aren't legally responsible
Democracy in the workplace doesn't mean that every decision would be subject to a collective vote. At a bare minimum, the board of directors must represent those governed by management, the workers. There can still be a managerial structure to support nimble decision-making. Critiques of worker representation on the board of directors would much more significantly apply to widely held corporations with far-flung shareholders. Worker can monitor management rent-seeking better
You just mention the community in the post
@politicalmemes