I think the best way to put it is that a leftist is someone who believes that workers should own the wealth that they create, while a liberal is someone believes in “socially progressive causes” without examining the underlying systems that bring about the necessity of “socially progressive causes”.
For example, a liberal would want more woman CEOs, while a leftist would want to get rid of CEOs.
Direct worker control ensures a formally flat management structure instead of a hierarchical one. This structure is influenced by activist collectives and civic organizations, with all members allowed and expected to play a managerial role.
Hey that sounds like a horrible process but good luck, it’d be great if that could work somehow.
Seriously, have you ever tried to get 30 or more people to work on a complicated project? Flat structures like that make it take 300x as long.
It’s great for, maybe metalsmiths? Or . . y’know, sanitation workers? Where the gear and scope is more or less always the same? But for software engineering it can’t work like that. Not at any real scale, anyway.
That’s a fair question, but there are many different answers. Not all leftist schools of thought fully advocate for removing a management style hierarchy, though some do. Some ideas push for rotating management with either a round robin selection, a raffle system, or democratically elected managers. Not dissimilar to how many countries run their governments.
Alternatively, if it fits the workflow, a flat style structure where no one inherently has a defined role, so teams form naturally to work on what they want or deem necessary. Someone will still often fill the role of “project manager” mind you, but the who and how are determined based on what works best for the situation. Not unlike letting students form their own groups for projects.
If you are genuinely curious, there is no shortage of books, YouTube videos, and websites just waiting to opine about their preferred methodology that would give you a much more authentic and robust understanding. Or I bet if you thought about it, you could even come up with some variations yourself.
The important point to get across for leftists is that the structure of economic production should be such that its aim is to benefit the general populace as evenly or equitably as possible. This is opposed to an “owner class” who uses their power, usually in the form of wealth, to take control the economic means of production, who then sets out to have the workers create more value than they will be given in return, so that the “owner” can take the excess value generated by the workers to increase their own wealth and/or power.
tl;dr
The lynchpin question for leftists isn’t “who runs the factory?”, but “who reaps the rewards?”.
It sounds very theoretical. I don’t know of a large modern example.
The main problem with organizing work is that it’s very very difficult to do and the more people involved the more difficult it is. A hierarchical structure may not be ideal, but as with American democracy, it’s the worst thing we can think of besides everything else that has been tried.
tl;dr
The lynchpin question for leftists isn’t “who runs the factory?”, but “who reaps the rewards?”.
See, I would look at that as the linchpin question for capitalists.
