If the employer has the legal right to appropriate the positive and negative fruits of their labor, then the workers have legally alienated their right to appropriate the positive and negative fruits of their labor to the employer violating their inalienable rights. The workers have to first jointly appropriate the positive and negative fruits of their labor. This appropriation essentially implies a worker co-op mandate

@noncredibledefense

An inalienable right is one that can’t be given up or transferred even with consent. This is because the right is tied to the person’s de facto personhood. Like political voting rights, workers’ right to appropriate the fruits of their labor is inalienable. Workers can’t exchange their labor for a paycheck because, at a non-institutional level, labor is de facto non-transferable even with consent. What really happens is that inputs are transferred to workers

@noncredibledefense

A country where worker coops aren’t legally mandated is illiberal because it violates workers’ inalienable rights. It denies workers’ private property rights over the positive and negative fruits of their labor.

The government is already involved in the legal structure of firms, so I don’t see how a worker co-op mandate could be considered as more government involvement. It seems to me like different government involvement

@noncredibledefense

Worker co-ops don’t necessarily involve the workers owning the means of production as worker cooperatives can lease means of production from third parties. Who owns the means of production doesn’t determine which legal party is the firm. The firm is a contractual role determined by the direction of the hiring contracts.

A market economy where all firms are legally mandated to be worker co-ops is not capitalism

@noncredibledefense

Remember: anti-capitalism ≠ socialism

Democratic worker co-ops are postcapitalist, but are also non-socialist because they are perfectly compatible with markets and private property. I’m suggesting that Sanders is authentically anti-capitalist, but he conflates his anti-capitalism with being socialist in a category error and thus buys into a false dichotomy.

All firms must be legally mandated to be worker coops on classical liberal inalienable rights theory grounds

@noncredibledefense

I agree that giving alienable voting shares to workers isn’t anti-capitalist. It becomes anti-capitalist when the voting rights over management and corporate governance are inalienable meaning they are legally recognized as non-transferable even with consent.

Here is a talk by people involved with Bernie Sanders politically about how all companies should be democratically controlled by the workers: https://youtu.be/E8mq9va5_ZE

Sanders supports worker co-op conversions

@noncredibledefense

I agree he is not a socialist in the 20th century sense, but he clearly says that workers should have ownership stake in companies, which is not a capitalist sentiment. He advocates for employee ownership of companies. I also am aware of who his economic advisors on these issues are and they are very much anti-capitalist

@noncredibledefense

Bernie Sanders is a proper anti-capitalist not just social democratic capitalist. See: https://berniesanders.com/issues/corporate-accountability-and-democracy/

@noncredibledefense

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

@196

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

Capitalism and authoritarian Marxist-Leninist states are not the only alternatives. There are other alternatives like Georgist economic democracy. In such a system, everyone would be either individually or jointly self-employed while receiving their share of the value derived from natural resources

@196

Econ 101 is designed to obfuscate the real issues. Even talking about specific wealth distribution ratios is falling for the misframing of the issues that Econ 101 wants to lead people into with the pie metaphor. In the capitalist firm, the employer holds 100% of the property rights for the produced outputs and liabilities for the used-up inputs while workers qua employees get 0% of that. The entire division of the pie metaphor in Econ 101 is based around hiding this fact

@196

"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

A moneyless society that scales up to billions of people is unlikely to be possible

Postcapitalist alternatives that use currency to facilitate trade between actors without social ties seem much more plausible
@asklemmy

This would be joint self-employment as in a worker coop

@asklemmy

I would argue that all employment contracts are terrible due to their violation of the principle that legal and de facto responsibility should match. De facto responsibility is de facto non-transferable, so there is no way for legal and de facto responsibility to match in an employment contract. Instead, workers should always be individually or jointly self-employed as in a worker coop

@asklemmy

The employer-employee contract

It violates the theory of inalienable rights that implied the abolition of constitutional autocracy, coverture marriage, and voluntary self-sale contracts.

Inalienable means something that can’t be transferred even with consent. In case of labor, the workers are jointly de facto responsible for production, so by the usual norm that legal and de facto responsibility should match, they should get the legal responsibility i.e. the fruits of their labor

@asklemmy

Not yet.

Copyfarleft has not had a whole movement built up around it, and no one has standardized the licenses.

@linux

Such a license would allow commercial use by worker cooperatives. I understand that software freedom as it has been defined excludes such licenses, but I would argue that this position is wrong. There is nothing unfree about preventing firms based on workplace autocracy from exploiting the commons and the workers that work on the commons and the workers in their own firms @linux

@drwho The difference in my mind is that AGPL doesn’t come with a builtin business model to fund the legal fights when they become necessary. Such a copyfarleft license does by charging capitalist firms a licensing fee for using the software. These funds can then be used for paying project developers and funding license enforcement for those that choose to use the software without paying the licensing fee @linux