J Lou

Capitalism is a system of property relations and labor relations. It is conceivable to not have those property relations and labor relations in a firm. However, a corporation doesn’t do that as the employer solely appropriates the entire positive and negative result of production i.e. the property rights to the produced outputs and liabilities for the used-up inputs. In a worker coop, the workers jointly appropriate the fruits of their labor. Capitalist property relations aren’t present @memes

Huh, there are worker coops and 100% ESOPs as alternatives to capitalism that can exist within capitalism @memes

Include, in your politics, actionable steps. The most important step is to create worker coops and supporting institutions, so you aren’t giving the fruits of your labor to capitalists with what you do everyday @memes

It treats persons like things by not holding them responsible for the results of their actions.

That principle would mean that workers should jointly own the produced outputs and jointly owe the liabilities for the used-up inputs as in a worker cooperative.

An intuition pump for the tenet would be situations where the law doesn’t fail to apply the principle. Consider an employer and employee committing a crime together.

Consent doesn’t transfer responsibility.

@memes

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

I have a specific theory of rights in mind. This theory of rights proposes worker coops as the only rights respecting way of organizing labor relations based on the inalienability of responsibility. I’m not using rights in a general vague sense to refer to harm.

Worker coops view workers differently than capitalist firms. They see labor as a fixed factor e.g. worker coops cut wages not jobs during economic, downturns.

The theory of rights I have in mind can fit in a license @programming

Far left as in explicit restrictions on capitalist firms using the software without paying for it while still allowing full software freedom for worker coops, which don’t violate workers’ rights.

Copyfarleft should set up a whole family of licenses of varying strengths and its own alternative ideology from the FSF. The first principle is an almost complete rejection of permissive open source licenses as enabling capitalist free riding @programming

I wouldn’t say FSF is too ideological. They just don’t have a political strategy for how they will bring about the changes they desire. To really change things towards a new mode of production, you need a way for people in the new mode of production to earn a living. Also, their ideology is wrong in its lack of emphasis on software workers’ rights and the relations of production

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

Being anti-capitalist doesn’t immediately imply being a communist. There are other alternatives to capitalism such as Economic Democracy.

This is also a straw man fallacy

I disagree. There are plenty of examples of liberal anti-capitalists such as David Ellerman

Capitalism is the opposite of democracy. In a capitalist firm, the managers are not accountable to the governed (i.e. workers). The employer is not a delegate of the workers. They manage the company in their own name not in the workers’ name. Managers do not have to have dictatorial control. It is entirely possible to have management be democratically accountable to the workers they govern as in a worker cooperative.

Capitalism v. Communism is a false dilemma. There are other options.

Capitalism is not just when the means of production are owned by individuals. For example, in an economy where all firms are democratically-controlled by the people that work in them, the means of production can be owned by individuals, but such an economy is not capitalist because exploitative property relations associated with capitalism are abolished

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)

This understanding of capitalism is a misunderstanding that both Marxists and neoclassical types share. It is not capital ownership that gives the employer the right to appropriate a firm’s whole product. The employment contract is what gives them that right. Sure, capital ownership affects bargaining power, but the root cause is that contract. Abolishing the employment contract while still having individual ownership is possible (i.e. a market economy of worker coops)

LVT taxes the unimproved value of land, so we are talking about land itself not what is built on top of it such as housing. Since land is a product of nature, the supply of it is perfectly inelastic

LVT taxing the empty lot next door at the same rate as a multimillion dollar hotel is exactly what makes it so efficiency enhancing because it give land owners economic incentives to use their land productively rather than just holding it and waiting for it to appreciate in value. With LVT, prices would exclude the value of the land.

LVT can be combined with other policies and taxes. You have to look at the whole package of policies to determine progressivity. LVT+UBI is progressive

It meets the definition of a progressive tax.

The broader Georgist program involves aggressive taxation of government-granted monopolies like IP, which both Musk and Bezos are indirectly beneficiaries of.

LVT is 1 policy meant to solve 1 problem. It can be combined with other policies that address other problems.

The labor theory of property, a negative application of which provides a moral rationale for LVT, also provides a justification for an inalienable right to worker democracy

Land value tax is progressive. Due to land’s inelastic supply, this tax cannot be passed on to others. People that own lots of land bear the entire burden of the tax. Charging for unimproved land value encourages building denser on more valuable land. This increases housing supply thus making housing more affordable

LVT is 1 policy. It can be combined with other policies. LVT is not an avoidable tax

Private ownership of labor implies the ability to alienate and transfer it for present or future benefits. Such a procedure is not possible because labor is de facto non-transferable. People can have private ownership over the products of labor, but they cannot own their labor because labor is inalienably theirs