J Lou @ jlou @mastodon.social

[\#liberal](https://mastodon.social/tags/liberal) [#anticapitalism](https:/

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2 yr. ago

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/MondragonCorporation

@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

There is information in it. Namely, that it itself is false. It is fully grammatical. Similar sentence are obviously valid such as:

This sentence has five words.

That is a true valid grammatical sentence.

I didn't invent the paradox. Philosophers have been contemplating this paradox for a long time.

The problem it gestures at is very deep and similar paradoxes showed up in the foundations of mathematics in the 20th century. It can't be dismissed easily.

@general

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

@whitepeopletwitter

I know what capitalism is. My analysis of capitalism comes from a mutualist perspective and is inspired by the classical laborists rather than Marx

@whitepeopletwitter

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?

@whitepeopletwitter

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

@whitepeopletwitter

It seems to me that they're hinting at abolishing capitalism.

One way to do that would be to

1. Mandate worker coop structure on all businesses
2. 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.

@whitepeopletwitter

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

@sciencememes

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

@196

"This sentence contains 2 words" is a sensible sentence. It has 5 words, so what the sentence says is false.

The self-reference in the sentence is similar to that of the Liar's paradox. Cousins of that paradox have been used to prove major limitative results in mathematical logic such as

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tarski%27sundefinabilitytheorem

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gödel%27sincompletenesstheorems

In usual logic, a false sentence implies every sentence.

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

Also, if sentence P is false, then "P is false" is true

@sciencememes

It is a paradox if you believe there are omniscient beings. If there are no omniscient beings, there is no paradox. The sentence is either true or false. If the sentence is true, we have an omniscient being that lacks knowledge about a true statement. Contradiction. If it is false, there is an omniscient being that knows it to be true. This means that the statement is true, but the statement itself says that no omniscient being knows it to be true. Contradiction.

@sciencememes