An #EconomicDemocracy is a market economy where most firms are structured as #WorkerCoops.
"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
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
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
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
Capitalism is a system of property relations and labor relations. It is conceivable to not have those property relations and labor relations in a firm. However, a corporation doesn’t do that as the employer solely appropriates the entire positive and negative result of production i.e. the property rights to the produced outputs and liabilities for the used-up inputs. In a worker coop, the workers jointly appropriate the fruits of their labor. Capitalist property relations aren’t present @memes
Huh, there are worker coops and 100% ESOPs as alternatives to capitalism that can exist within capitalism @memes
Include, in your politics, actionable steps. The most important step is to create worker coops and supporting institutions, so you aren’t giving the fruits of your labor to capitalists with what you do everyday @memes
I have a specific theory of rights in mind. This theory of rights proposes worker coops as the only rights respecting way of organizing labor relations based on the inalienability of responsibility. I’m not using rights in a general vague sense to refer to harm.
Worker coops view workers differently than capitalist firms. They see labor as a fixed factor e.g. worker coops cut wages not jobs during economic, downturns.
The theory of rights I have in mind can fit in a license @programming
Far left as in explicit restrictions on capitalist firms using the software without paying for it while still allowing full software freedom for worker coops, which don’t violate workers’ rights.
Copyfarleft should set up a whole family of licenses of varying strengths and its own alternative ideology from the FSF. The first principle is an almost complete rejection of permissive open source licenses as enabling capitalist free riding @programming
I wouldn’t say FSF is too ideological. They just don’t have a political strategy for how they will bring about the changes they desire. To really change things towards a new mode of production, you need a way for people in the new mode of production to earn a living. Also, their ideology is wrong in its lack of emphasis on software workers’ rights and the relations of production
If you look at property rights, the contrast is even stronger. The employer owns 100% of the property rights to the produced outputs and owes 100% of the liabilities for the used-up inputs. Meanwhile, workers qua employee receive 0% of both. This is despite their joint de facto responsibility for producing those results violating the basic principle of justice.
We need to move towards a copyfarleft model that considers the rights of both software users and developers unlike copyleft
Not yet.
Copyfarleft has not had a whole movement built up around it, and no one has standardized the licenses.
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
What I am suggesting is using a license that disallows capitalist firms completely from using the software not AGPL, which still allows them to use the software as long as they provide source code. In other words, copyfarleft that only extends use rights to non-capitalist commons-based economic entities-like worker coops. The project can then dual license to capitalist firms charging them for the right to use the software. This would give them a source of funding to fund any legal fights @linux
Why not use a license that prevents capitalist firms from even using the software?
Perhaps, but there isn’t a good reason to place such a restriction on worker co-ops. Worker co-ops shouldn’t be forced to buy the entire thing when a segment of its services would do.
Liberals as a group tend to support capitalism. Liberalism as a political philosophy can have implications that claimed adherents don’t endorse. After mapping out all the logical implications of liberal principles, it becomes clear that coherent liberalism is anti-capitalist @asklemmy
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