@PropaGandalf, what is your take on the article’s argument?

I can’t respond to @minnix’s lemmy account, so I will put my response here to the second half of their post.

The traditional libertarian stories that are claimed to rule out self-sale contracts are addressed in:

https://www.ellerman.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/12/Philmore-1982.scan_.pdf

The theory of inalienable rights is what rules out these contract for all coherent classical liberals. Notably, the set of ruled out contracts includes the employer-employee contract

@libertarianism

A group of people is de facto responsible for a result if it is a purposeful result of their deliberate and intentional joint actions.

@minnix, that is the definition of de facto responsibility. It is meaningful concept outside of a legal context. Ellerman’s theory is a theory of how the legal system should operate. However, he does draw an equality between the tenet of imputation and the labor theory of property. I would recommend anyone interested to read his other work

@libertarianism

A moneyless society that scales up to billions of people is unlikely to be possible

Postcapitalist alternatives that use currency to facilitate trade between actors without social ties seem much more plausible
@asklemmy

This would be joint self-employment as in a worker coop

@asklemmy

I would argue that all employment contracts are terrible due to their violation of the principle that legal and de facto responsibility should match. De facto responsibility is de facto non-transferable, so there is no way for legal and de facto responsibility to match in an employment contract. Instead, workers should always be individually or jointly self-employed as in a worker coop

@asklemmy

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

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

Not yet.

Copyfarleft has not had a whole movement built up around it, and no one has standardized the licenses.

@linux

Such a license would allow commercial use by worker cooperatives. I understand that software freedom as it has been defined excludes such licenses, but I would argue that this position is wrong. There is nothing unfree about preventing firms based on workplace autocracy from exploiting the commons and the workers that work on the commons and the workers in their own firms @linux

@drwho The difference in my mind is that AGPL doesn’t come with a builtin business model to fund the legal fights when they become necessary. Such a copyfarleft license does by charging capitalist firms a licensing fee for using the software. These funds can then be used for paying project developers and funding license enforcement for those that choose to use the software without paying the licensing fee @linux

What I am suggesting is using a license that disallows capitalist firms completely from using the software not AGPL, which still allows them to use the software as long as they provide source code. In other words, copyfarleft that only extends use rights to non-capitalist commons-based economic entities-like worker coops. The project can then dual license to capitalist firms charging them for the right to use the software. This would give them a source of funding to fund any legal fights @linux

Why not use a license that prevents capitalist firms from even using the software?

@linux

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)