jlou

joined 2 years ago
[–] jlou@mastodon.social 22 points 1 year ago

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.

@general

[–] jlou@mastodon.social 2 points 1 year ago (8 children)

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

@politics

[–] jlou@mastodon.social 2 points 1 year ago (10 children)

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

[–] jlou@mastodon.social 4 points 1 year ago (12 children)

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

@politics

[–] jlou@mastodon.social 2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

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:

https://lemmy.world/post/17963706

[–] jlou@mastodon.social 1 points 1 year ago

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

@general

[–] jlou@mastodon.social 3 points 1 year ago (9 children)

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

@general

[–] jlou@mastodon.social 6 points 1 year ago (5 children)

There would still be limited liability. Furthermore, they can share risks with investors, and self-insure against risk as well @general

[–] jlou@mastodon.social 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

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

[–] jlou@mastodon.social 1 points 1 year ago (2 children)

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:

https://www.radicalxchange.org/media/blog/plural-money-socially-provided-goods-and-the-principal-agent-problem/

@anarchism

[–] jlou@mastodon.social 2 points 1 year ago

I guess that's fair for the situations where she says conventional models aren't useful.

We don't have to treat the described institutions in the article I linked as one-size fits all model, but rather as an example of solutions that make sense under a certain set of conditions for large-scale communities.

Glen Weyl is aware of Elinor Ostrom's work:
https://www.radicalxchange.org/media/blog/2019-01-14-j73qnz/

@anarchism

[–] jlou@mastodon.social 1 points 1 year ago

It's all good. You sent me a great article that reignited my desire to a deep dive on Elinor Ostrom and raised good points

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