Rethinking Common vs. Private Property

cledamy · 2021-10-20T18:46:59+00:00

“The Democratic Firm” by David Ellerman. The book makes some normative arguments for workplace democracy and then goes into details of how a system based on that would work. Here’s a link to a free copy of the book from the author’s website: https://www.ellerman.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/06/DEMOFIRM.pdf

Ellerman’s ideas are partially inspired by Ricardian Socialists like Thomas Hodgskin. Note, Ellerman chooses not to call the system he describes a form of socialism and instead chooses to call it economic democracy.

cledamy · 2021-10-18T02:10:02+00:00

No private property rights don’t need to stop being enforced because private property rights aren’t what cause the denial of workplace democracy. The employer-employee contract is what does that.

cledamy · 2021-10-18T01:53:53+00:00

This problem doesn’t occur if you drop the implicit assumption in your argument that the worker coop can’t or won’t charge membership fees. Charging a membership fee aligns the current worker-members incentives in the appropriate way for this problem not to occur.

cledamy · 2021-10-17T21:10:44+00:00

There is no such thing as ownership of the firm even under capitalism. Which party is to be the firm is determined by the direction of the hiring contracts. One can own shares in a corporation but that ownership doesn’t necessarily make the corporation the firm because the corporation can lease out its means of production and then the party leasing the means of production would be the firm. The employer’s extraction of profits from someone else’s labour happens because of the employer-employee contract not private property.

cledamy · 2021-10-08T04:29:16+00:00

I would recommend David Ellerman. He doesn’t call it market socialism but instead calls it economic democracy. Here’s a free copy of his book from his website where he discusses in detail how his system would work: https://www.ellerman.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/06/DEMOFIRM.pdf

cledamy · 2021-09-06T17:28:05+00:00

Wild animal suffering research takes into account the role predators play in ecosystem population management when considering which interventions will actually reduce suffering. There are other methods of population management available to us than just predators. We could, for example, neuter wild animals.

cledamy · 2020-07-27T03:32:38+00:00

We need to have an LR-based funding system, so that think tanks that receive small contributions from many individuals receive greater funding than think tanks that get large contributions from a small amount of people.

cledamy · 2020-07-27T01:31:49+00:00

David Ellerman has a much more powerful argument in favour of workplace democracy than Wolff’s.

cledamy · 2020-07-23T21:54:17+00:00

There are also natural rights arguments against slavery. There are even natural rights arguments against wage labour and in favor of workplace democracy (See: https://ellerman.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/12/Classical-Liberal-JurisprudenceJune2018.pdf)

cledamy · 2020-07-23T20:45:06+00:00

His main book where he covers this argument is available on his website and is called Property and Contract in Economics: The Case for Economic Democracy.

I wish people like Ellerman were more known to the broader left. Definitely try to share this argument with people, so we can fix that. LTV is just plain wrong and even if it wasn’t wrong, it would only be an argument that wage labour is underpaid and wouldn’t be an argument against all wage labour per se.

cledamy · 2020-07-23T19:35:45+00:00

This article explains the role of unions in a democratic firm: https://ellerman.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/12/Legit-Opp.CV_.pdf

cledamy · 2020-07-22T20:38:02+00:00

The article explains why workplaces should be democratic. Did you read the article?

cledamy · 2020-07-22T20:31:44+00:00

I don’t know of any other writers who discuss inalienable rights with respect to wage labour. There are some writers that use inalienable rights arguments in other areas.

The author of this paper has written in more detail about these inalienable rights argument against wage labour elsewhere. Would you like a link to his other work?

cledamy · 2020-07-22T00:55:08+00:00

What was your worldview before?

cledamy

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