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J Lou

jlou@mastodon.social
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62 posts • 132 comments

#liberal #anticapitalism

An #EconomicDemocracy is a market economy where most firms are structured as #WorkerCoops.

#liberalism
#coops #cooperatives

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Classical laborists and mutualists were anti-capitalists. Some of whom predated Marx.
As I said, a mutualist economy or economic democracy has never existed. The modern arguments for economic democracy were first published in a book released in the 1990s. However, we have plenty of examples of worker coops and employee-owned corporations working well under capitalism. An economic democracy or mutualism differs from capitalism in that all firms are mandated to be worker coops

@whitepeopletwitter

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I know what capitalism is. My analysis of capitalism comes from a mutualist perspective and is inspired by the classical laborists rather than Marx

@whitepeopletwitter

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There has never been a worker-cooperative-dominated market economy, but actually existing worker coops and employee-owned corporations don’t seem to create billionaires, and have more equitable distribution of wages.

Why does mandating all firms to be worker coops not abolish capitalism in your view?

@whitepeopletwitter

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It seems to me that they’re hinting at abolishing capitalism.

One way to do that would be to

  1. Mandate worker coop structure on all businesses

  2. Institute a 100% land value tax

Taxing the rich doesn’t really solve the root of the problem. Abolishing capitalism pre-distributes wealth so that people don’t become billionaires in the first place. 100% land value tax encourages efficient use of land.

@whitepeopletwitter

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That sentence has a presupposition. The sentence I used can be fully formalized in a logic with predicates for knowledge of an entity and truth

@science_memes

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Being logical doesn’t imply knowing every true sentence.

Also, see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knower_paradox

@science_memes

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I am a mutualist as well. I just use the term, economic democracy as David Ellerman calls it, instead because mutualism doesn’t seem as clear. Also, mutualism has anarchist connotations, which I am sympathetic to, but I believe the movement to abolish capitalism should be broader than anarchism.

In other words,

anarchist economic democracy = mutualism

@196

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I am an anti-capitalist.

To get rid of capitalism, you don’t have to abolish absentee ownership of capital. A worker coop can lease capital from third parties and remain a non-capitalist democratic worker coop. Abolishing capitalism just requires abolishing the employment contract and common ownership of land and natural resources. Without the employment contract, everyone is either individually or jointly self-employed, so every firm is a worker coop

@196

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“This sentence contains 2 words” is a sensible sentence. It has 5 words, so what the sentence says is false.

The self-reference in the sentence is similar to that of the Liar’s paradox. Cousins of that paradox have been used to prove major limitative results in mathematical logic such as

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tarski%27s_undefinability_theorem

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gödel%27s_incompleteness_theorems

In usual logic, a false sentence implies every sentence.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Material_conditional

Also, if sentence P is false, then “P is false” is true

@science_memes

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