From: Ian Wright (wrighti@acm.org)
Date: Tue Jul 01 2008 - 15:30:16 EDT
> 1. by itself is not my concern here. But, when you combine > 1 + 2 then you have a system in which the more income you have > the more role you have in determining what goods are produced and in > what quantities. This implies an inequality of *decision-making* > since those with more income have more 'votes' in the marketplace. > This is not a democratic process at all. A principle of democracy > is 1 person, one vote. The principle of 'dollar votes' is one dollar, > one vote. So, if your concern is a socialist democracy then you should > be very wary of market socialism. Humans are equal but they do not act identically. Members of a firm should therefore be differentially rewarded because objectively they differentially contributed to the firm's revenue. In a democratic worker-owned firm the workers allocate the residual income to themselves on a democratic, one-member one-vote basis. That's because they are equal. But they may democratically decide to allocate more of that income to some members and less to others. The members of the firm are best placed to make this allocation decision. They have local knowledge of how members acted and have theories of how those actions affected the value of the firm's output. If all members are paid equally, regardless of how they acted, then in fact all members are paid unequally. It would not reflect the objective causality of the situation and it would also violate common-sense notions of fairness. I don't understand the motivation for wanting to pay everyone the same. It makes no sense to me, although I'm open to counter-arguments. So it seems to me that one challenge is the design of intra-firm democratic decision-making mechanisms that increase the probability that members of a firm are correctly differentially rewarded. I'm assuming these competitive and distributional relations are embedded within a wider socialist constitution that progressively makes more and more goods and services free for all. _______________________________________________ ope mailing list ope@lists.csuchico.edu https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/ope
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