You do not know yourself. Slacking produces no tangible benefits for people with empowering work.

Of course the workplace democracy part of the model does just that. ESOPs and various schemes of workplace participation are such steps, as are existing worker-owned enterprises. Legislations that would encourage and facilitate the latter would be most helpful.

I also think a network of community public banks funded by a capital assets tax and dedicated to providing funds for job creation is an incremental step—not conceived of initially as a replacement for capitalist capital markets but as a supplement to them.

A capital assets tax should be quite feasible. No one likes taxes, and yet we need more revenue. The share of income taxes paid by corporations has plummeted in the last two decades—in part because they are so easy to avoid via creative accounting. Why not a flat rate tax on capital assets—a business “property tax.” For publicly traded corporations, the value is quite transparent: multiply the value of the stock on Jan 1 and multiply it by the number of outstanding shares. The rate could be quite low at first, with the funds all ear-marked for job creation.

This would be the counterpart of the payroll tax. Currently, labor is taxed, but capital is now. The labor tax is earmarked by social security. Earmark the capital tax for community investment, distributed on a per capita basis, with priority given to job creation? This doesn’t sound so radical, does it?

But then, should there be a major financial crisis with the standard capital markets in disarray, the stage would be set for a large expansion of this alternative financial mechanism.

I certainly agree that efforts to make work more meaningful, including breaking down the division between mental and manual labor, and reigning in the obscene inequalities of workplace compensation should be pursued. These reforms are also suggested by the model. One would expect a democratic workplace to move in these directions.

Thanks for the comments.

What you’re calling for is the elimination of banking, i.e. the chief capitalist investment mechanism of the past several centuries?

This is not meant to critique either. They’re both provocative, but the real difficulty with this sort of prescriptive work is that alternative prescriptions invite academic battles over what is still essentially fantasy.

I would suggest that anyone attempting to describe a new society determine how w might get there through incremental steps in the present.

I would further suggest that leftists become so busy with the idealization of concepts that they ignore the rough parallels in their ideas.

For instance, mixed job complexes as a non-purist principle make a great deal of sense and sound exactly like what socialists have talked about for 15o years. Keep in mind that most firms on earth are actually small; most firms could very easily mix job complexes in a roughly egalitarian way, and honestly most do informally enough.

I think his purpose is to address the division between intellectual and physical labor. This isn’t foolish, it’s a good idea. It also isn’t nearly as radical as it apparently sounds. Many jobs do this currently, including all skilled crafts and trades. It makes a great deal of sense for small firms, as a baic principle if not a formal logic. And I expect it is exactly what would result from any real workplace democracy grounded in worker ownership. It is simple a blending of managerial and nonmanagerial work. I’m assuming you wouldn’t be opposed to this if you’re a socialist of any sort. Albert’s goals are more radical than this but the core seems simple enough, and the core is what matters most.

In regards to pay, I think the standard method of compensation in worker cooperatives is to pay differential wages to employees with a “social wage” ratio cap between the highest and lowest paid employees, and giving all workers an equal share of profits. this creates a very practical rough equality.

But how far will our legislative bodies have to go, do you think, to establish workplace democracy? Besides your proposed ban on inheritance (mandating that the assets of a private company be sold to the workers once the original owner dies or decides to sell), will the law set the general framework for workplace democracy? Will it, for example, legally codify “one worker one vote”? Or will the government leave most of these questions up to the worker-controlled enterprises themselves?