this post was submitted on 20 Jul 2023
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By democratic membership in the firm, I mean just the workers in the firm being members not the entire society because the workers in the firm are governed by management. Worker coops do not prevents individuals from owning private property in the means of production. In a worker coop, the whole product of the firm is joint property of the workers in the firm, but this is ironically necessary for private property's moral basis, which is getting the fruits of your labor
I guess it depends on the definition of private property and communal ownership. For me private property is synonymous with private ownership, meaning someone, not everyone, owns the means of production. With communal ownership I don't mean communal society, but rather ownership by a group. For example everyone within a company owning the means of production of said company would be communal ownership.
In that sense I disagree with coops not preventing individuals owning private property in the means of production, because that creates the same frictions that capitalism creates. If someone owns a part of the means of production that you need to create the product, then it creates a situation where they can use that ownership as leverage because without that part you cannot create the product. If their means of production are irreplaceable then they can demand more fruits of labor, because they own a key part of productions, which is essentially what capitalism is. If it's communal ownership there's no leverage because it's for everyone to use and nobody can demand more simply because they own a key part of the production.
The system I am describing has full private ownership. I am not taking the socialist position of collectivizing the means of production. Capital can be privately owned including by individuals. For example, an individual could own a factory and rent it out to a worker coop.
Key inputs would have more value. That does not amount to more fruits of labor because by fruits of labor, I mean the literal property rights to the production output and the liabilities for the used-up inputs not the value
Then it's not a non-capitalist economy.
Your example is literally capitalism. You use your capital and extract surplus value from the worker coop in the form of "rent".
The anti-capitalist tradition I am speaking from is descended from Proudhon and other classical laborists not Marx. I reject the labor theory of value.
The difference from capitalism is that legal system recognizes the employer-employee contract as invalid, and thus all businesses are required to be worker coops. I am fine with calling it capitalism if necessary, but many defenders of capitalism would not consider it to be so
Why do you reject the labor theory of value?
Marginal productivity theory is a better analysis. I don't approve of the ideological way economists present it though.
There is a need for a labor theory to recognize flaws in capitalism, but the labor theory that is needed is one of property (LTP) not of value after all capitalism is a property system. LTV is insufficiently decisive in its critique. At best, it says that workers are underpaid. LTP, on the other hand, demonstrates that workers legally own 0% of what they produce