We have been taught the workers must be the owners, but maybe that teaching is incorrect.
Instead of the baker owning the bakery, the miller owning the mill, and the farmer owning the farm,
imagine the people who actually need the bread own the bakery, mill and farm.
When the consumers of a product:
Own the Means of that Production and
Accept the product itself as the return on that investment,
there is no need to sell the product, for it is already owned by those who will consume it!
This special arrangement eliminates the usual need to buy/sell that product and so eliminates profit in a natural way leaving those special shareholders happy that they were able to avoid paying profit they would have otherwise paid if they had bought that product from the market.
This also prepares us for robots that will soon be able to plant and harvest , transport, grind, mix and bake the with almost no human intervention.
Consumers can own farms and factories and wells and refineries for the insane reason that we simply need the results, instead of owning for the tired game of attempting to overcharge each other.
We, as consumers, already pay all the costs of production (and even more when we pay profit), so it is easy to see we can afford to be the owners once we realize the dream of worker ownership was an accidental or purposeful misdirection on our road to Free as in Freedom physical production!
Welcome to the forum!
Great questions, I myself am wondering what everyone thinks about "What is just?" How should it be weight? If there are a multitude of weighers for an infinite number of communities, how can they be aligned?
Reimagining profit is a great direction, but I was wondering about the criticism towards worker ownership. Most companies are investor/market owned. Do you see it as coops (worker ownership) being a bad thing or were you referring to investor ownership structures? Because essentially textbook definition of coop/credit union structure is pretty much this:
^^ this being a very good structure when it comes to putting planet/community/human needs in the center of goods production.
What is your take on it from coop vs investor angle?
Are you suggesting coops already use property ownership in the Means of Production to preallocate those products, and are therefore prepared to face the automation apocalypse of abundance
I am talking about an optimization that can be used to eliminate the usual late purchase of commodities.
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The owner of a single does not buy from himself, he owns them even before they are
Even if he hires others to do the work, he still only pays the real costs of production, and profit is nowhere to be found. He does not fear abundance or automation and does not care about the market price of that product.
This is all very elementary and well understood for the single owner of a single tree.
The only thing I am observing is that we can use this same technique in groups to enjoy economy-of-scale and so create a realistic alternative to the usual token-passing fiasco which has caused us to believe that work is a need.
We humans are the sensors, we know what we have and have not, we know what we need, but unfortunately we are often induced into thinking we also need something else.
Let’s say a significant chunk of humanity tells THEOS they will be happy with having more “shmukkels” around - whatever they are. Being a demand-driven economic system, THEOS makes no moralising or discriminating decision on what shmukkels are and if people would really need them, it just sets out incentives to make sure everyone requesting could get access to shmukkels as soon as possible.
As far as the algorithm knows and understands, shmukkels could equally be lame frivolous things or life-saving devices.
However, a key balancing aspect is that every step to make a shmukkel is traced into the resource ecology. THEOS knows exactly how much producing and shipping shmukkels will cost to the planet in terms of resources, and knows how many people need them.
It will mathematically ( not statistically) assign resources while making sure the total production costs will never cross the reserve rate for each of the component resources, while it will be prohibitively expensive as it approaches the reserve. It might be very possible that because people need more shmukkels, other products wil decide to switch to alternative designs which do not use the same key basic resource
People that wants to have access to the shmukkels will have to stake their resource allocation rights. If they get a smukkel and it is expensive (in terms of resource use), they might not be able to get anything else until they give the shmukkel to the next in line.
Came across this piece today, and it reminded me of our formalist/subsantivist conversation above @Maija@liminal
It has more concrete examples than I’ve seen before on this subject.
It also illustrates an important distinction in cultural perspectives – the worldview that “places belong to people,” compared to the worldview that “people belong to places”