Fun fact: worker-owned businesses tend to be more productive, compensate workers more, survive longer, and better protect jobs compared to traditional companies. Elon Musk's argument falls flat in the face of decades of studies. Neither monarchs nor oligarchs are needed to create wealth and jobs.

It’s quite easy to see the problem. Workers are de facto responsible for the results of production, the produced outputs and for used-up inputs. The workers have 0% legal responsibility for these results. This violates the basic ethical principle of legal and de facto responsibility matching.

Sure, but the point is that political democratic voting rights distribution would be just as uncommon if it weren’t non-transferable legally. The underlying democratic theory arguments are based on the distinction between consent to delegate and consent to alienate governance rights.

Workers are de facto responsible for the results of production. The moral pronciple is to assign legal responsibility to the de facto responsibility. This implies workers jointly getting the positive and negative results of production.

Even by your own standards pro-capitalism isn’t a defensible position. Capitalism violates basic moral principles like holding people responsible for the results of their actions. By not being anti-capitalist, liberals violate these moral principles.

Of the many issues, I realized relatively young that I couldn’t pretend with libertarianism because it ignored the coercive power of the private sector. This illustrates that power.

this is absolutely worth remembering: when the abolitionists began the struggle against the slave power, the slave power looked unbeatable. they fought anyways--a long, difficult, often thankless struggle. they fought anyways.

The thing I keep telling myself is that if Fredrick Douglass made it though 1857 I can sure as hell make it through this

This is the main point I hope for the left to understand. Markets aren't inherently bad once capitalism is removed and workplace democracy is protected.

I see there is growth vs degrowth discourse happening again, and I'd like to again suggest that Georgism cuts that Gordian Knot. Georgism recognizes the finitude of natural resources and says, "You may use them IF you compensate current and future generations for their loss"

Everyone skips the chapter of Das Kapital† where Marx explains that capitalism is actually a huge improvement over most of previous human history. † Volume 1, Chapter 26, if you want to do the reading.

Central planners had a rational vision: replace the anarchy of the market with conscious coordination. Vivek Chibber explains why calculation and incentive problems undermined that vision, but a different sort of socialism can still flourish.

What people don’t realize is, going vegan lifts a weight of ethical inconsistency & subconscious guilt that we don’t realize we are carrying… So I urge you - 🛑 looking away 🛑 blocking those who speak for the innocent & the vulnerable, and start seeing veganism as the righteous movement that it is ⚖️

People will be like ‘Bluesky is all academics & historians’ & I’ll be like, ‘You mean the people who enthusiastically tell me the coolest shit I ever heard?????’

Rejecting surveillance capitalism means insisting, clearly and unapologetically, that markets should serve the people — not the other way around

"Socialists are better at capitalism than maga who are communists." A tiny taste of leftism and americans are unlocking new political dimensions never thought possible, thank you Mamdani.

"But the data tells a different story. In the last five years, 81 people have been killed by political violence in the United States. Right-wing terrorists account for over half of those murders, some 54%,

Can anyone explain how a planned socialist economy would work without just describing markets again? #socialism #capitalism

What’s the best work on the ethics of veganism or vegetarianism? #philsky

A defense of taxation

Pure fire from Ellerman. The implication is that profit is not merely the result of exploitation by the employer, it is a joint exploitation by the employer and the state, and this is a conscious collusion on their part.

this is something about co-ops that I think is essential: leadership isn't cemented in place with indefinite terms and opaque decision-making. it's voted in by its membership, and when workers lose faith in their leadership, they can vote them out it's democracy in an otherwise undemocratic economy

We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable. So did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings. Resistance and change often begin in art, and very often in our art, the art of words.

Shareholder capitalism isn’t democratic because the shareholders aren’t the ones governed by management. The workers are. The workers are de facto responsible for creating the production results, but receive 0% legal responsibility for corresponding property claims.

you cannot build a genuinely free society through permanently unfree structures.

FOSS but in a leftie way not a libertarian way

Mutualism is cool, but David Ellerman’s modernization of the labor theory of property is a much stronger argument against capitalism than those offered by any mutualist www.ellerman.org/rethinking-c...

The two philosophers corresponding to each stolen factor: David Ellerman & Henry George

Totally agree. It isn’t enough to critique capitalism. We have to have a well-defined alternative. I personally think economic democracy where all firms are structured as worker co-ops is that alternative.

This, of course, is a problem of weak governance or government collusion, as we are no longer capable of regulating capitalism. We need a new form of government, a new economic system or both.

The Republican Party is trying to revive the traitorous confederacy.

Workplace democracy and healthcare pls

Individuals fund the system and create demand The only time leftists don’t back an ethical ban is when it comes to veganism it seems. Tesla Target etc ban? Full support as no personal accountability required, even celebrating vandalism of personal property. A ban of unnecessary harm to animals? 🙉🙈😤

Building useful things and selling them isn't Capitalism. In fact, Capitalism is what stands in the way of more people building useful things and selling them.

"No ethics please" is crazy lmao. Predictable but crazy.

I would love for such a site to include chimera political views that fuse traditionally opposing ideologies like anti-capitalist liberalism as put forward in the linked article. The funniest is center-right-libertarian arguments in favor of taxation that appeal to Georgist property theory

i left the echo chamber im lowkey a socialist now but also i need to learn about centrist and right-wing views. they should make a website where they show political spectrum (or chart idk) with different sides' opinions on an issue. and you click on them to see the argument and the counterargument

Online leftist spaces are exhausting to be in. They all hate each other.

Research by Berman et al suggests lay people see utilitarianism as self-defeating. People believe a society adopting a utilitarian, welfare-maximizing moral code would lead to more suffering than one adopting a rule- or virtue-based moral code: buff.ly/LWrrUHt

An argument against #utilitarianism inspired by the linked paper. #philosophy #philsky #ethics #metaethics #consequentialism

A good supplement to Wolff's case against capitalism is David Ellerman's case for workplace democracy from a rights-based philosophical perspective: youtu.be/E8mq9va5_ZE

The workers of the world have no nation. Fuck "patriotism".

My ideal world: ✅Agroecology ✅Community land trusts ✅Energy democracy ✅Inclusive education ✅Mass public transit ✅Liberation of marginalized ✅Participatory budgeting ✅People's assemblies ✅Pluralism ✅Public banks & credit unions ✅Universal citizenship ✅Universal healthcare ✅Worker-owned cooperatives

Anybody familiar with this Ellerman guy? I think it's David Ellerman. Reading a restatement of his work and my man is cooking as they say

Illegal immigration is a victimless crime.