Thanks for the feedback. Will try to keep that in mind when coming up with post titles

@solarpunk

I have never found a meme that suitably emphasizes the responsibility aspect. Responsibility plays an essential role in the underlying argument due to the peculiarity that responsibility can’t be transferred from person to person even with consent. You find memes about workers deserving the entire value of their labor, but none that emphasize responsibility and workers’ property rights to the literal produced outputs and liabilities for the used-up inputs rather than just their value

@solarpunk

The entire video isn’t required to understand the argument. The first 15 minutes are sufficient

This argument probably can be explained in a 4 panel comic.

Probably, something like:
1 side: an employer and employee cooperating to commit a crime, which results in both of them going to jail.
Other side: an employer and employee cooperating to produce a widget resulting in the employer solely appropriating 100% of the property rights to the widget and liabilities for used-up inputs

@solarpunk

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/Mondragon_Corporation

@canada

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

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 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

Marxism is not the only anti-capitalist critique. There are more modern non-Marxist critiques of capitalism such as the theory of inalienable rights. See: https://www.ellerman.org/inalienable-rights-part-i-the-basic-argument/

@science_memes

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

“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%27s_undefinability_theorem

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

In usual logic, a false sentence implies every sentence.

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

Also, if sentence P is false, then “P is false” is true

@science_memes

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.

@science_memes

Self-referential paradoxes are at the heart of limitative results in mathematical logic on what is provable, so it seems plausible a similar self-referential statement rules out omniscience.

Greek gods are gods in a different sense than the monotheistic conception of god that is omniscient, omnipotent and omnibenevolent. Sure, so the argument I give only applies to the latter sense.

@science_memes

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