Re: corporations/More Side Issue

[andie nachgeborenen <andie_nachgeborenen@xxxxxxxxx>]

There has been a lot of discussion of the question you
ask about the behavior of people in a self-managed
economy, some of it mathematized. For for formal
discussion, see various works of Jaroslav Vanek,
including, I think, The Labor Managed Economy, and
Benjamin Ward's classic paper 'The Firm in Illyria:
Market Syndicalism', American Economic Review, 1958;
there is an older (almost all this stuff is older
now), collection of papers and documents, etc., in an
out-of-print 2 vol. set called something like
Self-Managed Socialism, edited by Branko Horvat,
Mihalo Markovic, and others.  David Schweickart, a
philosopher who has a PhD in math, has a fairly
nontechnical but empirically grounded discussion in
his Against Capitalism, Westview 1993.

The general idea about is that in their economic
activities, worker-cooperators will act as if they
were profit-maximizers, but the fact that labor is not
a cost gives them a different set of incentives from
capitalist firms that are explored in the books and
papers above. Somed of these incentives produce more
internalization of cost and more socially productive
behavior than profit-maxing under capitalism. Other
social goals are attained through legislation
(including taxation), refgulation, and planning.

I don't think there is any need to put scare quotes
around "contracts" in a market socialist society. A
contract is just a legally enforceable promise, and
any market society, maybe any modern society, will
have a legal system and a set of rules for contract
law.

jks

--- Sabri Oncu <soncu@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> Justin:
>
> > Moreover one could imagine a market society
> > where, for example, the corporations did not
> > have undemocratic power and wealth, and where
> > the workers managed them themselves.
>
> This is an interesting point.
>
> I have never been against optimizing objective
> functions, assuming that objectives can reasonably
> be
> mathematized.
>
> Here is a question Justin:
>
> What may be some objectives of workers managed
> corporations in the market society you imagine?
>
> Put differently, what kind of "contracts" such
> corporations and the persons that embody them will
> have to "sign" in this market society?
>
> Of course, before such a society is constructed we
> may
> never know what these contracts will exactly look
> like
> but what do you expect them to look like,
> approximately, that is?
>
> Best,
>
> Sabri


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