this post was submitted on 12 Mar 2024
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I prefer Georgist economic democracy.
@memes
How are dynamics of violence and power handled? Within such systems I'm always worried about elites, coercion, consolidation. How are binding decisions made, and how do we prevent those powers from bringing about the things mentioned previously?
Worker coops are firms that are democratically worker-controlled. Communes are democratic also.
Unemployment would be less worrying due to the UBI. Worker coops are committed to their workers so have incentives to train them. Also, worker coops prefer to reduce pay during downturns rather than employment.
Trade policy between communes would be set by free agreement. Quadratic funding helps resolve collective action problems such as for defense. Power concentration is severely limited @memes
Hmmm, I see. I guess I'm asking about the nonlegal basis of law, or the non-normative basis of norms. Is there good contemporary research about the social dynamics of this at scale? I remember Lenin writing about commune clusters, and there's mention of scaling in Das Kapital volume one.
It was a good question. I am limited in response length because I am on Mastodon.
In terms of social dynamics of a stateless society, The Possibility of Cooperation by the game theorist Michael Taylor uses game theory to argue against the Hobbesian case for the state. Radical Markets by E. Glen Weyl covers how to do common ownership with minimal administration @memes
Thank you for the sources! I'll take a look eventually. Since both sources seem to interface with rational choice theory, there's probably a cool post-Homansian social network analysis angle that can be explored. I.e. how the weights & pathways of available choices can be modulated by the types of ties between people. I guess I'd expect entity-level decisions to be shaped by emergent structures, regardless of what their initial state was. So, a co-op could become something else entirely over time, regardless of what it says on the can. It's super neat that my Marxist thought is exploring these areas as well (sorry for the label!).
@jlou Can you expand on number 3? Distributing resources and/or capital for investment is the part of economic democracy for which I've never quite seen a good solution.
I've read Schweickart, Dahl, Olin Wright and Hahnel and none of their proposed systems are that great IMHO.
@memes
Based on ideas of Dmytri Kleiner and Glen Weyl. The commune's members lease all their capital from the commune. This is structured for minimal administration from the commune. Each member coop self-assesses a price for their capital. They pay a recurring fee on that price. The member is required to transfer the capital to anyone that pays the self-assessed price. With the right percentage, the incentives to over-assess and under-assess cancel out. The fee can be used to invest in coops @memes
@jlou
A different thread: why only worker co-ops, and not also other sorts of co-ops?
I do wonder if, in order to encourage innovation, it's a good idea to allow non-coops in limited forms.
For example (and feel free to adjust these numbers), you can start a business and employ people but as soon as you pass €1 million revenue or 5 employees (whichever is first) then it has to become a co-op.
The existence of UBI, UBS and an economy that's majority co-ops should limit exploitation.
@memes