cross-posted from: https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/7597775
Alienation of labour, what's that?
this post was submitted on 02 Nov 2023
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True, although this can be alliviated by working in a worker-owned cooperative business
not rly, market machinations force co-ops to behave like for-profit capitalist companies regardless. The hell of capitalism is the firm, not the fact that it has a boss. Even if you have great conditions as a worker-owner, your privilege is just built on the backs of non-owner (aka. 2nd class) workers and outsourcing (see Mondragon in Spain for example)
Don't get me wrong though: co-ops are still virtually always better than "standard" corporations imo. What I mean to say is that the systemic problem of capitalism is not solvable by just creating companies "of a new type"
The latter problem could be solved by banning having non-member workers at the legal level and requiring giving workers voting rights in the firm they work in.
Worker coops don't behave exactly like for-profit companies. Anti-capitalism is more than just worker democracy. For example, another aspect is common ownership of land and natural resources with fees for use. This would ensure that worker coops factor in environmental costs
You're forgetting the fact that your work has zero value in a vacuum though. If you enjoy your employment and are well remunerated for it, then a cut for the enabler isn't actually unreasonable. Having said that, the cut taken is usually way too high, but that's another discussion...
The employers' claim extend beyond a cut. They solely appropriate 100% of the whole positive and negative product of the firm while employees as employees have 0% claim on the whole product
Well that's not really true... It's very common for employees to be granted shares in some form or another, and of course your salary comes from some proportion of the firm's profits. Don't get me wrong, if I could just work on open source stuff all the time and have money magically appear in my account I'd be chuffed, but in the absence of a market, one arises - some people don't want the hassle of figuring out what people actually want and are happy to lend their arms to the oars in exchange for someone else to figure out where to go, and of course some people feel like they have a good vision as to what will be productive but don't have the ability to create the whole edifice themselves.
Regulation is, of course, important - in a democracy, the theory is that everyone has a right to vote for a government who will in turn protect their interests in what can otherwise become a very leveraged position for the employer - but the notion that every CEO is inherently a leech on society simply by virtue of being an employer seems a little too lacking in nuance for me to get onboard here.
In the context of the real world, I think it's unquestionably the case that director-level positions are over-rewarded and insufficiently taxed and regulated, but I see that more as a failure of implementation; I'm not sure how people could ever cooperate on the diversity of projects that currently exist if the employer/employee relationship we're forbidden. A lot of people are simply unable or unwilling to play the role of general; not everyone falls into that category of course, and it would be an interesting world if one could just join a collective effort and from the get-go be as highly rewarded and as listened to as the project's progenitors, but it can often take a long time to build up context...
Anyway what I'm saying here is that dictating a global framework for the structure of collective effort is genuinely really hard, and that's before you even get into the issues of what mandate is required for a body to be able to stipulate such a framework to begin with
The whole product is the legal rights to the produced outputs and the liabilities for the used-up inputs not value. The employer legally owns the outputs and is legally liable for the used-up inputs.
FOSS can use quadratic funding. Not arguing for complete market abolition.
The workers are de facto responsible for production. By the principle that legal and de facto responsibility should match, the workers should jointly receive the whole product of the firm. The workers can delegate in a coop
The thing is: just owning the means for someone elses work is not a service you provide to others (ie. employment). That whole position (the private ownership of the means of others work) is redundant and leeches off of society