Property and Contract in #Economics: The Case for Economic Democracy by David Ellerman
This book makes 2 arguments.
The employment contract is the core of the #capitalism rather than private property
The employment contract is invalid because it violates #WorkersRights to #democracy in the firm. All firms should be structured as worker #coops for economic justice
@jlou I'd never heard of Ellerman until today. Righto, another Economic Democracy thesis to wade into! Very curious how he approaches allocation of investment between firms.
@Brendanjones This book is about the philosophical argument in favor of abolishing the employer-employee contract and for worker coops. He does address investment in another book
The core point about investment in Ellerman's economic democracy is that his philosophical justification for economic democracy is not based on getting the workers all value produced in an economic enterprise, so arbitrary non-voting preferred stock and other instruments are fine. Investors and worker coops can agree to any value amount going to investors
@jlou Okay that’s interesting, because that’s really not a Marxist approach to ED given extractive profit is possible.
The reason I’m wary of it (and we’re getting into degrowth here) is that it’s a growth dependent function - the company is required to grow to provide shareholder returns and/or to pay off any interest on a loan.
@jlou@bookstodon
I view both the employment contract and private property as core components of capitalism. The employment contract is a tool that perpetuates capitalist relations of production by enabling the exploitation of labor within a system where private ownership of the means of production is upheld.
@Radical_EgoCom What is your critique of private ownership of the means of production and what would you replace it with specifically?
The argument in the book is that the employment contract is what supports capitalist property relations where the employer receive 100% of the positive and negative product (together termed the whole product) while workers as employees receive 0%. The denial of the rights of labor is the core of capitalism, so the employment contract being the core makes sense
@jlou Don't think I agree with employment being the core identifier of capitalism. I mean, it's in the name - capitalism. Removing the labour contract disrupts private control of capital, but that doesn't mean employment is central. Tightly linked, yes, but not central.
That said, I'm not sure the direction of the relationship between employment and capital matters so much, because we're arriving at the same conclusion - private capital has to be disrupted.
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