If the Republicans are going to call the Democrats communists and socialist regardless of how moderate a campaign Democrats run, Democrats might as well lean further left on economic policy. Appealing to the right does nothing because the right can appeal to the right better than the center-left can

@leftism

How can this be a rejection of the far left when Harris campaigned as a moderate (e.g. Cheney)? If republican voters are going to think Democrats are communist regardless of how moderate the Democrats are, maybe moderating isn't a good strategy. If the only choice is between right-wing and lite right-wing, right-wing voters will choose the real thing. Even then, Trumpists will still call democrats communists.

Many left polices are popular when they aren't labelled as left

@theonion

Any company that receives government subsidies or is bailed out because it's too big too fail or whatever the reason should be mandated to become a worker coop

@politics

Socialism vs capitalism is a false dichotomy. There are other alternatives like economic democracy or mutualism where all companies are democratic worker coops. There are other critics of capitalism besides Marx such as the classical laborists like Proudhon and their modern intellectual descendants like David Ellerman

@leftism

Doing what you're told does not relieve you of responsibility for the results of your actions

The employer-employee contract

It violates the theory of inalienable rights that implied the abolition of constitutional autocracy, coverture marriage, and voluntary self-sale contracts.

Inalienable means something that can't be transferred even with consent. In case of labor, the workers are jointly de facto responsible for production, so by the usual norm that legal and de facto responsibility should match, they should get the legal responsibility i.e. the fruits of their labor

@asklemmy

Land value tax would solve this when combined with a UBI from the revenue it generates

While many socialists supported worker coops in the interim, an economy of exclusively worker coops comes more so from the classical laborists such as Proudhon.

@general

After capitalism,

1. All firms should be democratic worker coops. The legal system would recognize the inalienable right to workers' control.
2. Land and natural resources should be collectively owned with revenue from private use of this collective property going out as a UBI. The atmosphere is included and any carbon fees are included.
3. Pools of collectivized capital democratically controlled by workers in member worker coops. Each worker coop leases all its capital from the pool

Not rightfully so

I'm a leftist as well. The paper argues that the non-democratic liberals are wrong about the implications of liberal principles. It even goes further and makes an argument that coherent liberalism must also oppose capitalism, and capitalism is inherently non-democratic. By the end, the paper argues that a democratic economy controlled by workers is the only kind of economic organization compatible with liberalism. Capitalist liberalism is poison because it is incoherent

@sneerclub

Yeah UBI would solve this. This might be a criticism of contemporary capitalism, but it isn't a critique of capitalism more broadly because in principle, capitalism can have a UBI.

More fruitful anti-capitalist critiques emphasize workplace authoritarianism, the employer's appropriation of the whole product of a firm, monopoly power associated with private ownership especially of land and natural resources, and inability to effectively allocate resources towards public goods

This was more explicit when it was called a master-servant relationship before employer-employee terminology became more common

What do you mean by valid input?

Both capital and labor are causally efficacious in production. Why would people use them otherwise? Capital is also the fruits of past labor, so denying capital remuneration denies remuneration to the workers that created that capital @asklemmy

Capitalism doesn't qualify as free market activity then. Capitalism inherently involves treating persons as things. In the firm, the workers are jointly de facto responsible (DFR) for production, but the employer gets sole legal responsibility for the positive and negative results of production. This violates the principle of legal and de facto responsibility matching. DFR isn't de facto transferred, but legal responsibility is. Morally, this is an institutional fraud
@memes

Or we could abolish the employer-employee contract and mandate that all firms be worker coops, so that no one could appropriate the positive and negative fruits of other people's labor

@news

If you look at property rights, the contrast is even stronger. The employer owns 100% of the property rights to the produced outputs and owes 100% of the liabilities for the used-up inputs. Meanwhile, workers qua employee receive 0% of both. This is despite their joint de facto responsibility for producing those results violating the basic principle of justice.

We need to move towards a copyfarleft model that considers the rights of both software users and developers unlike copyleft

Socialism is not when the government does stuff, so those institutions are not examples of socialism. Anti-capitalists are arguing for the complete abolition of exploitative capitalist property relations that violate workers' human rights.

This is a false dilemma. There are other alternatives to capitalism besides communism. It is entirely possible to have a non-capitalist non-communist system (e.g. an economy where every firm is democratically-controlled by the people that work in it)