We are all realizing that the Left has to work harder at offering alternatives as well as critiques of the present political-economic system.

Some posters here at "babble" do provide such alternatives.

I would like to offer my own as well:

I believe that the best way to ensure peaceful (and therefore lasting) change is to pursue the establishment of people's democratic and human rights as workers. These human rights are to be entrenched in constitutions or as the laws of countries through the political process.

While the political path is being pursued, unions, and social justice activists should obviously attempt to achieve work place human rights on their own, outside of the political process. Part of this will consist of the active dissemination of the justice and benefits of democracy in the work place.

Three final points before discussion [hopefully] begins:

1. Work place democracy should be made more central to Left activism because so many other things flow from justice at work. Women's autonomy, anyone's autonomy depends to a great deal on the accessibility of quality work. Environmental sustainability will best be served by workers unafraid to pursue environmental stewardship. etc., ...

2. Giving people greater control within their work places helps to transcend the old debate over "free markets" [which some people believe is the height of human liberty] and "big government" [which can supposedly ensure social justice and democratic control over the economy].

Also, I honestly believe that if we don't pursue this, then we're just playing ring-around-the-fucking-rosey forever.

I can't see any clearer alternatives for the Left.

"Green" parties in Europe haven't been able to legislate the sort of behaviour and economics that they have wanted to.

Rebuilding the welfare state ideas ignore the fact that the conditions that created the welfare state no longer apply and the conditions that produced its dismantling still exist.

There won't be a revolution in the foreseeable future, and if there is, there will be violence and unforeseeable consequences.

Enhancing workers' rights on the job can help weaken the power of capital that makes mere political democracy so frustrating.

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Originally posted by robbie_dee:

How about this: Is "democracy" even possible in a workplace where the relationship between employee and employer is defined as the sale of the employee's time and effort to the employer in exchange for a wage?

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I would say that democracy would begin to be possible if workers were treated as "citizens" of the places where they worked. If they could not be exiled (fired, laid-off) without democratic consensus from the rest of the workplace. If they had the right of free speech. If they had the sort of control over their immediate work-spaces similar to that described in Albert & Hahnel's Participatory Economics [ie. you can decorate your cubicle but you can't blare your own brand of music, the most banal thing that comes to me at the moment.]

If workers had the right and the ability to see the company's finances, and to vote on what is going to be produced.

I see this as similar to the works councils in Germany and Sweden, but with the important difference that works councils are bound by the limits of the legislation that created them, with everything else being imagined to be the preserve of managers/owners. What I'm talking about is changing how we think about the political status of a worker within a workplace.

entrepreneurs? if someone is a genuine entrepreneur, then people will trust them (until they fuck up!) and will most likely listen to what they have to say. the same way other democratic societies elect leaders.

I would suggest to you that the majority of workers who, under present conditions, where they're told that they're there to work, not to think, where they are treated as an expense in the production process, and who therefore, don't care too much about their jobs, ... would change their attitude under such a regime as i'm suggesting.

I would suggest that it's the same with our voters in a liberal-capitalist-democracy. They don't vote because it doesn't matter. Increasingly, since 1945, the right-wing, with the public relations industry, has worked to convince people that only renting themselves out and buying whatever they can afford as a consequence of this renting of themselves, can offer realistic fulfillment. And "third way" politicians and other scum have worked to make this a reality.

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Originally posted by Stephen Gordon:
But what is an investor - the person or corporation who supplies the capital - supposed to do in or expect from such an arrangement?

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Well, if they want to run it all themselves and be a dictator, they can work alone. But when they say they need help, they have to accept the human rights of the humans they hire.

And, as i said, most Canadian workers have no desire to string up their bosses, ... a lot of them respect their bosses' abilties. They would be "leaders" for as long as they proved themselves, and their initial investment of capital has to be respected. That's why i call for democracy and not expropriation.

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Originally posted by Stephen Gordon:
Retained earnings belong to the investors as well; they're just not distributed.

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the gloomy conclusions you reach at the end of your last post are worth their own thread.

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Originally posted by thwap:
Well, if they want to run it all themselves and be a dictator, they can work alone. But when they say they need help, they have to accept the human rights of the humans they hire.

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But with the narrowing of the channel by which an entrepreneur can realize profits, wouldn't there be less incentive then to start new enterprises? I'm not disagreeing with your concept necessarily; I am wondering how it would fit with what we've come to expect from the economy, i.e., vigorous job growth.

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And, as i said, most Canadian workers have no desire to string up their bosses, ... a lot of them respect their bosses' abilties.

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Originally posted by thwap:

Your point being???? Who "earned" the "earnings"? If words have meaning, "retained earnings" refers to the portion of the sales price not distributed to the factors of production or distributed as rent. This automatically goes to the passive investor by what leap of logic???

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Originally posted by robbie_dee:
How about this: Is "democracy" even possible in a workplace where the relationship between employee and employer is defined as the sale of the employee's time and effort to the employer in exchange for a wage?

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my answer to that question would be no. no matter how nice the boss is, no matter how considerate the boss is of taking the employees' opinions into consideration while making a decision. in the end, the decision is always made by the boss, and in the end, it is only the boss who is responsible for having made a certain decision. that's the problem with the very concept of an employer-employee relationship. the employer decides everything. democracy implies everybody gets involved in the decision-making process.

also, your definition is quite basic in that it doesn't take into account what happens to the employee if he/she is under difficult personal circumstances and is unable to provide time and effort to the employer. should the employee lose wages? what if the employee needs the money to come out of the difficult personal circumstance?

The comments and questions came just as i was beginning to get drunk for a couple of days.

I'd like to respond to Oliver Gordon:

Yes, "investors" are going to receive a cut in their income. I can't get too worked up about this though. In the first place, because I think Canada has more money than it knows what to do with (witness the speculation on the stockmarkets, the housing bubbles, the conspicuous consumption of a minority) and it's not going to the people who need it.

You talk as if the "investors" [ie., some relatively wealthier person who happened to buy some stocks from somebody else] have earned the portion they get from retained earnings. Again, this is money that came from customers. It came from the sales price of the stuff that was built. Some glorified bubble-gum-card traders haven't contributed anything to this.

In the future, firms should get their capital from local, democratically run credit-unions, government investment banks, and retained earnings. I really don't see Anglo-American style financial markets and their "investors" as all that valuable to the system. I quite like the correlation Jim Stanford found between a predominant financial sector and economic stagnation.

So, in answer to your question: "What about the investors?" My answer is: "They are going to receive a drop in their incomes."

So, the idea that people are equal at work will have started to percolate through the general consciousness, and business start-ups will be considering that they might have to accomodate workers' human rights.

People will still want to work for themselves, or do something on their own.

But let's not overestimate the importance of entrepreneurs. Most all of the biggest firms are not run by entrepreneurs but by bureaucracies. Most innovations today come from employee-scientists, not individual geniuses.

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Originally posted by Stephen Gordon:
Where did they get their tools, machinery, and the buildings where they work?

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actually, in all of those factories, the workers had a revolution where they worked. the tools, machinery and buildings all existed already. and it was plain to see the huge difference in wages between the boss and the employees. and then, the bosses laid people off, people who had dedicated all their working lives to this place. and the machines sat around untouched for months on end waiting to be sold to another corporate-type person, while the laid off workers and their families starved. they reclaimed their factory through protests and sit-ins, took control of managment aspects as well to ensure that workers couldn't get laid off so easily - especially without being given a reason, took control of every aspect of the plant, and a true democracy was born. i don't remember what happened to the boss unfortunately. i think he chose to walk out instead of being a part of team of workers.

i don't think that a person who provides capital at the beginning of a venture is any more important than the workers who can't afford to provide the capital. why should it be that the capital-provider be viewed as a boss? isn't it a 50-50 relationship? a business, no matter how much capital it has, isn't going to thrive, or even survive, without workers.

also, i don't think thwap is just talking about new businesses adopting this model of "workers as citizens". cooperatives are already growing that approach this model. but it takes a long time for a cooperative to grow. i think we should be working to bring in equality in places that already exist. greater power to the individual, and hence greater power to the workplace. more honesty and transparency. everybody should know what's going on. no more of those secret board meetings filled with just a handful of people. no more of a handful of people influencing government decisions.

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Thus, workers live in two opposing worlds, a democratic one and an authoritarian
one. A merging of these worlds could occur partially or fully if democratic rights were
conferred upon workers so that they participated in the decisions affecting their working
lives. That is, if workers owned and managed their own workplaces as is the case with worker cooperatives, their citizen and political rights would not end abruptly when
crossing the boundary of employment. A major objection is that if workers had greater
power in the workplace, economic productivity would suffer and the standard of living
would fall. The bulk of this paper will address that issue and show that in a variety of
organizations the empirical research has shown that the opposite would occur.

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