jlou 3mo ago • 100%
Capitalist free markets and liberalism broadly abolishes many mutually voluntary contracts such as coverture marriage contracts, self-sale contracts and non-democratic constitutions on grounds of inalienable rights. Inalienable means can't be given up even with consent. Employment violates the liberal norm that legal and de facto responsibility should match. Consent can't transfer workers' joint de facto responsibility for production to solely the employer.
Did you read the articles I linked?
jlou 3mo ago • 100%
Here is a short introduction to the core argument against capitalism based on liberal principles: https://www.ellerman.org/inalienable-rights-part-i-the-basic-argument/
jlou 3mo ago • 85%
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
What are your thoughts on liberal anti-capitalism and reclaiming liberalism for the radical left? Liberal anti-capitalists typically show that capitalism is illiberal through demonstrating how it violates liberal principles. An example would be David Ellerman in: [https://www.ellerman.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/03/Article-from-ReclaimingLiberalismEbook.pdf](https://www.ellerman.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/03/Article-from-ReclaimingLiberalismEbook.pdf) He argues that capitalist employment violates liberal principles of justice such as the norm that legal and de facto responsibility should match implying a theory of inalienable rights [@socialism](https://beehaw.org/c/socialism)
jlou 3mo ago • 100%
I'll write one. The talk argues that employment contract is invalid due to inalienable rights. Inalienable means can't be given up even with consent. Workers' inalienable rights are rooted in their joint de facto responsibility in the firm for using up inputs to produce outputs. By the norm that legal and de facto responsibility should match, workers should get the corresponding legal responsibility, but in employment, workers as employees get 0% while employer gets 100% of results of production
Why the employer-employee relationship is based on theft and all companies should be worker-controlled - “Neo-Abolitionism: Towards Abolishing the Institution of Renting Persons” [https://youtu.be/c2UCqzH5wAQ](https://youtu.be/c2UCqzH5wAQ) [@workreform](https://lemmy.world/c/workreform)
jlou 3mo ago • 100%
You called centrists framing the debate about capitalism as one of consent vs. coercion a strawman then accepted the framing. Democratic theory requires consent. It just also requires consent to delegate ruling out consent to alienate management/governenance rights justified by inalienable rights.
Stable employee-owned firms:
https://www.nceo.org/articles/employee-ownership-100
A country that lets people sell voting rights wouldn't be democratic for long. Does democracy not work? Is it undesirable?
jlou 3mo ago • 100%
David Ellerman's modernization of the classical laborists' argument against capitalism is significantly more powerful than modern Marxism.
Marx's claim that private property is the root of capitalist appropriation has been disproven in modern theories of capitalism's property rights structure. Private property plays a role in giving bargain power to get favorable terms, but the ultimate legal basis of capitalist appropriation is the employer-employee contract
jlou 3mo ago • 100%
Postcapitalist systems can use market prices and, in principle, be Pareto optimal on non-institutionally described states of affair
"Governing the Commons" - Economist Elinor Ostrom's approach to collective action problems [https://neilhacker.com/2021/03/25/governing-the-commons/](https://neilhacker.com/2021/03/25/governing-the-commons/) [@neoliberal](https://lemmy.world/c/neoliberal)
A case for universal worker democracy and why capitalism is theft - "Neo-Abolitionism: Towards Abolishing the Institution of Renting Persons" [https://youtu.be/c2UCqzH5wAQ](https://youtu.be/c2UCqzH5wAQ) David Ellerman makes a unique argument for workers' control that is significantly stronger than the usual arguments the left makes as it implies that capitalism is invalid even when it is fully voluntary [@breadtube](https://lemmy.world/c/breadtube)
jlou 3mo ago • 100%
Not a strawman. There are tons of examples of framing the capitalism issue in terms of consent vs coercion. Nozick talks about capitalist acts between consenting adults etc.
Many worker coops and majority employee-owned ESOPs exist today. It works.
Democratic theory argues that contracts based on consent to alienate are inherently invalid. Since the employment system is on the "wrong" side, the original theory invalidating these contracts is ignored and forgotten
jlou 3mo ago • 100%
Alienist vs inalienist refers to whether voting/control rights are transferable (alienable).
Better to say institutions based on consent to alienate vs delegate
Voting rights' transferability with alienist systems implies inequality, but the core point is consent to alienate vs. delegate.
The employment contract is inherently an alienation contract. The workers give up and transfer the management rights to the employer and the employer manages in their own name
jlou 3mo ago • 66%
Alienist refers to alienation of rights.
Alienist = completely give up and transfer control rights with the recipient ruling in their own name and not in the name of the people governed
Inalienist = revocable delegation where the people retain control rights with the delegates governing in the name of the people governed
Democratic theory draws a distinction between these 2 types of contracts, and invalidates the former
The diagram should say alienation vs. delegation
Economic Socialism is Teaching Me What a Free Market Actually Looks Like [https://joelleichty.com/2024/03/18/economic-socialism-is-teaching-me-what-a-free-market-actually-looks-like/](https://joelleichty.com/2024/03/18/economic-socialism-is-teaching-me-what-a-free-market-actually-looks-like/) [@socialism](https://beehaw.org/c/socialism)
The diagram centrists don't want you to see Centrism frames the debate about capitalism as one of consent vs. coercion and argue that capitalism is fine because workers consent in the legal sense to the labor contract. Democratic theory recognizes a distinction among voluntary contracts i.e. consent to alienate vs. consent to delegate. A centrist can't appeal to this distinction because capitalism and political democracy are on opposite sides [@progressivepolitics](https://lemmy.world/c/progressivepolitics)
jlou 3mo ago • 100%
You just mention the community in the post
jlou 3mo ago • 100%
What would be a more appropriate community?
The diagram capitalist liberals don't want you to see Capitalists frame the debate about capitalism as one of consent versus coercion and argue that capitalism is acceptable because workers consent in the legal sense to the employment contract. Democratic theory recognized a further distinction among voluntary contracts i.e. consent to alienate vs. consent to delegate. Capitalists can't appeal to this distinction because capitalism and political democracy are on opposite sides [@politicalmemes](https://lemmy.world/c/politicalmemes)
jlou 3mo ago • 100%
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
jlou 3mo ago • 100%
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%
jlou 3mo ago • 50%
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
jlou 3mo ago • 100%
The academic definition would be the systems of the historical Eastern Bloc countries or a hypothetical society that has somehow completely abolished commodity production
jlou 3mo ago • 100%
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
jlou 3mo ago • 100%
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
jlou 3mo ago • 100%
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
jlou 3mo ago • 100%
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
Does economic education spoil students’ morality? Economists and the Trolley problem [https://www.economics-sociology.eu/?1030,en\_does-economic-education-spoil-students’-morality-economists-and-the-trolley-problem](https://www.economics-sociology.eu/?1030,en_does-economic-education-spoil-students’-morality-economists-and-the-trolley-problem) [@humanities](https://beehaw.org/c/humanities)
What is your view on liberal anti-capitalism? This perspective's representatives are David Ellerman, and E. Glen Weyl. They that capitalism is incompatible with liberalism for various reasons such as violating liberal principles of justice, being inefficient or over-emphasizing diversification/exit-oriented risk reduction strategies to the detriment of commitment-based ones. David Ellerman's case for capitalism being illiberal is discussed in: [https://www.ellerman.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/03/Article-from-ReclaimingLiberalismEbook.pdf](https://www.ellerman.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/03/Article-from-ReclaimingLiberalismEbook.pdf) [@neoliberal](https://lemmy.world/c/neoliberal)
The Problem of Collective Harm: A Threshold Solution [https://ejpe.org/journal/article/view/798](https://ejpe.org/journal/article/view/798) "Many harms are collective: they are due to several individual actions that are as such harmless. At least in some cases, it seems impermissible to contribute to such harms, even if individual agents do not make a difference. The Problem of Collective Harm is the challenge of explaining why. I argue that, if the action is to be [moral], the probability of making a difference to harm must be small enough." [@humanities](https://beehaw.org/c/humanities)
Why capitalists are coming out against democracy - "Does classical liberalism imply democracy?" [https://www.ellerman.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/12/Reprint-EGP-Classical-Liberalism-Democracy.pdf](https://www.ellerman.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/12/Reprint-EGP-Classical-Liberalism-Democracy.pdf) "There is a fault line running through ... liberalism as to whether or not democratic self- governance is a necessary part of a liberal social order. The democratic and non-democratic strains of classical liberalism are both present today. Many ... libertarians ... represent the non-democratic strain in their promotion of non-democratic sovereign city-states." [@sneerclub](https://awful.systems/c/sneerclub)
A profoundly stupid case about video game cheating could transform adblocking into a copyright infringement [https://pluralistic.net/2024/07/29/faithful-user-agents/#hard-cases-make-bad-copyright-law](https://pluralistic.net/2024/07/29/faithful-user-agents/#hard-cases-make-bad-copyright-law) [@socialism](https://beehaw.org/c/socialism)
Utility, social utility, democracy, and altruistic and moral behavior from unexploitability, Darwinian evolution, and tribes [https://www.rangevoting.org/OmoUtil.html](https://www.rangevoting.org/OmoUtil.html) "S.M.Omohundro in 2007, by building on and/or simplifying ideas by a large number of economists, demonstrated that the philosophy of utilitarianism is forced upon an organism if that organism wishes to be "unexploitable." Exploitable organisms presumably tend to get exploited, suffer a competitive disadvantage." [@humanities](https://beehaw.org/c/humanities)
"Zoë Hitzig | What is quadratic funding?" - A general mechanism for funding a decentralized self-organizing ecosystem of public goods [https://youtu.be/xwY0UAk14Rk](https://youtu.be/xwY0UAk14Rk) The mechanism described in this video can be used to solve many modern problems such as news media finance, FOSS software development funding, scientific research and egalitarian campaign finance. News media is severely underfunded and is critical for effective democracy. Campaign finance tends to be plutocratic. [@neoliberal](https://lemmy.world/c/neoliberal)
Pro-market anti-capitalism Many on the left conflate markets with capitalism and oppose both. This is a mistake. Markets freed from capitalism where every workers' inalienable right to worker democracy may be useful, and help avoid the calculation problem. That being said, I'm highly sympathetic to those that seek to explore what might be possible without markets as that area is under-explored. Ultimately, we should emphasize worker coops Here is an non-nuanced meme [@politicalmemes](https://lemmy.world/c/politicalmemes)
"Inalienable Rights: Part I The Basic Argument" - what Nozick and Rothbard got wrong [https://www.ellerman.org/inalienable-rights-part-i-the-basic-argument/](https://www.ellerman.org/inalienable-rights-part-i-the-basic-argument/) “An inalienable right is a right that may not be ceded or transferred away even with the consent of the holders of the right. Any contract to alienate such a right would be an inherently invalid contract, and, vice-versa, a right such that any contract to alienate it was inherently invalid would thus be an inalienable right.” [@libertarianism](https://lemmy.world/c/libertarianism)
A moral argument for why all firms should be employee-owned - "Inalienable Right: Part 1 The Basic Argument" [https://www.ellerman.org/inalienable-rights-part-i-the-basic-argument/](https://www.ellerman.org/inalienable-rights-part-i-the-basic-argument/) [@general](https://lemmy.world/c/general)
On a fallacy in the Kaldor-Hicks efficiency-equity analysis "This paper shows that implicit assumptions about the numeraire good in the Kaldor-Hicks efficiency-equity analysis involve a “same-yardstick” fallacy (a fallacy pointed out by Paul Samuelson in another context). These results have negative implications for cost-benefit analysis, the wealth-maximization (e.g., “Chicago”) approach to law and economics, and other parts of applied welfare economics" [https://www.ellerman.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/Kaldor-Hicks-FallacyReprint.pdf](https://www.ellerman.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/Kaldor-Hicks-FallacyReprint.pdf) [@neoliberal](https://lemmy.world/c/neoliberal)
Partial Common Ownership: A New Model for Ownership - A new alternative to capitalist private property that addresses scarcity in the small Partial Common Ownership (PCO) is a flexible template for reconfiguring property relations, which has inspired many of us at RadicalxChange because it opens the door to a different kind of conversation about capitalism. [https://www.radicalxchange.org/media/blog/pco-a-new-model-of-ownership/](https://www.radicalxchange.org/media/blog/pco-a-new-model-of-ownership/) [@anarchism](https://slrpnk.net/c/anarchism)
"Inalienable Rights: Part I The Basic Argument" - the liberal theory that both Nozick and Rawls missed [https://www.ellerman.org/inalienable-rights-part-i-the-basic-argument/](https://www.ellerman.org/inalienable-rights-part-i-the-basic-argument/) "An inalienable right is a right that may not be ceded or transferred away even with the consent of the holders of the right. Any contract to alienate such a right would be an inherently invalid contract, and, vice-versa, a right such that any contract to alienate it was inherently invalid would thus be an inalienable right." [@neoliberal](https://lemmy.world/c/neoliberal)