Comments on: A rare glimmer of good news from organized labor http://asrblog.com/2009/11/03/a-rare-glimmer-of-good-news-from-organized-labor/ A blog to accompany the Vermont TV show Wed, 18 Jan 2012 11:09:19 +0000 hourly 1 http://wordpress.com/ By: carbonpenguin http://asrblog.com/2009/11/03/a-rare-glimmer-of-good-news-from-organized-labor/#comment-407 Tue, 24 Nov 2009 23:34:41 +0000 http://asrblog.com/?p=637#comment-407 The person who’s done the most work on the integration you are suggesting is Kevin Carson. His book on Organization Theory is one of the most insightful works of political economy that I’ve encountered. A short introduction to his thought can be found here: http://mutualist.org/id4.html and here: http://mutualist.org/id10.html .

Essentially, though, the idea is that worker-owned enterprises still compete with each other, and you have entrepreneurial incentives. The difference is that, instead of society split between an owning and a working class, ownership is spread through society without State intervention. Thus you avoid the monopoly inefficiencies inherent to both the communist and the corporate capitalist models, while making efficiency increases good rather than bad for individual workers, due to their ownership of their enterprises.

]]> By: Yz http://asrblog.com/2009/11/03/a-rare-glimmer-of-good-news-from-organized-labor/#comment-406 Tue, 24 Nov 2009 23:12:14 +0000 http://asrblog.com/?p=637#comment-406 I took a few Marxist economics courses in college and the theoretical bent of the professors who taught it(i.e. their school of Marxism) held that what makes an enterprise Communist has nothing to do with politics, but moreso with the way that the profits for an enterprise are determined to be distributed. If workers who are inputting labor into the creation of a product that produces profit for a company have a direct say in the distribution of said profits, the enterprise is theoretically Communist. These professors would also argue that every regime that has put on the Communist label were in fact not so from the economic perspective. They were actually state Capitalists whereby instead of private business management determining the way profits were distributed, it was instead the state serving the same function. The workers actually had little say in this – and thus technically this was not Communism.

Now if we look at Communism from this perspective, which is not political, but strictly deals with the ownership of the enterprises that are producing the goods and services for a place – how could that be integrated with a theoretical free market?

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