An #EconomicDemocracy is a market economy where most firms are structured as #WorkerCoops.
"We all declare for liberty; but in using the same word we do not all mean the same thing. With some the word liberty may mean for each man to do as he pleases with himself, and the product of his labor; while with others the same word may mean for some men to do as they please with other men, and the product of other men’s labor.” – Abraham Lincoln
This quote captures the differing understandings and notions of liberty between these different political groups
Not yet.
Copyfarleft has not had a whole movement built up around it, and no one has standardized the licenses.
Such a license would allow commercial use by worker cooperatives. I understand that software freedom as it has been defined excludes such licenses, but I would argue that this position is wrong. There is nothing unfree about preventing firms based on workplace autocracy from exploiting the commons and the workers that work on the commons and the workers in their own firms @linux
@drwho The difference in my mind is that AGPL doesn’t come with a builtin business model to fund the legal fights when they become necessary. Such a copyfarleft license does by charging capitalist firms a licensing fee for using the software. These funds can then be used for paying project developers and funding license enforcement for those that choose to use the software without paying the licensing fee @linux
What I am suggesting is using a license that disallows capitalist firms completely from using the software not AGPL, which still allows them to use the software as long as they provide source code. In other words, copyfarleft that only extends use rights to non-capitalist commons-based economic entities-like worker coops. The project can then dual license to capitalist firms charging them for the right to use the software. This would give them a source of funding to fund any legal fights @linux
Why not use a license that prevents capitalist firms from even using the software?
The challenges you mention don’t really refute the main arguments for worker coops, inalienable rights theory, even if they were unsolvable problems that couldn’t be solved no matter what other changes were made. Economic democracy aims for workers to get the positive and negative fruits of their labor in property rights terms not value. This is based on the tenet that legal and de facto responsibility should match. Capitalist firms don’t satisfy this basic tenet. They are thus illegitimate @196
Capitalism v. communism is certainly a false dilemma. There are other alternatives such as Georgism as you noted. I would go further and advocate a Georgist economic democracy where all firms are structured as worker coops. Similar to the problem you identify with capitalism in that it fails to treat land and capital differently, the mainstream of Georgist thought fails to differentiate labor from capital in an important respect. Labor can’t factually be transferred unlike capital @196
Abolishing slavery did not prevent people from acting in a manner they wished. It prevented them from having the lack of rights of a slave. Similarly, preventing people from being wage laborers just means that that working in a firm would automatically confer voting rights over the firm and make management democratically accountable to the people that work in the firm
I am using the conventional definition of voluntariness. It is the people that are suggesting that wage labor is involuntary that are using unconventional definitions of the notion of voluntariness.
Even if this more expansive notion of voluntariness was coherent, it would not be an argument against capitalism per se because capitalism can have a UBI.
Hopefully, a teacher does not steal the positive and negative fruits of the student’s labor
No involuntary impositions of power and authority is the centrist position. The anarchist position should be no impositions of power and authority even if they are voluntary. A perfect example of voluntary power and authority is wage labor. By any usable standard, wage labor is voluntary. Anarchists should object to wage labor because it involves a hierarchy of alienation. This violates workers’ inalienable rights, which are rights that can’t be given up even with consent
Econ 101 is designed to obfuscate the real issues. Even talking about specific wealth distribution ratios is falling for the misframing of the issues that Econ 101 wants to lead people into with the pie metaphor. In the capitalist firm, the employer holds 100% of the property rights for the produced outputs and liabilities for the used-up inputs while workers qua employees get 0% of that. The entire division of the pie metaphor in Econ 101 is based around hiding this fact
@196