ML

Libertarian Market Socialism (Libertarian Socialism with Market socialism. i.e Mutualism Lite)

Transcript:

Hello everybody, this video will be a little different. Usually I explain stuff using facts and such but, in this video, I will just tell you about my opinion on how a socialist economy could work. Please keep in mind that there are 7 qintillion forms of socialism and that everyone will disagree with me on this. Also, none of what I am saying is set in stone, it could all change if I come a long a better way of doing things. 

I will tell you the macro side of how the national and global economy would work as well as the way individuals would interact with that system. Feel free to tell me why your system is better and what advantages it has compared to mine. Also, this is not a utopian ideal of what could be but what I perceive to be realistic to achieve in the next few years, if we get the needed support that is. That being said, here we go:

Right now, the economic unit is a country. Labor laws, minimum wage, quality standards and so on are all usually dictated on a national or state level. I would move that down to the county level also I would rename counties to communes because that’s a better word. Labor laws as well as any other laws would then be business of the people who work and live in a place and not of the politicians in a capital somewhere. 

This has many reasons. One of them is that decentralized governments are more flexible. Another one is that this reduces bureaucracy which is nice. But most importantly it gives people the ability to control the laws that are important to them instead of trusting a, potentially corrupt, politician a few hundred miles away.

In my system all factories would be employee owned, this means that those who work in a factory are legally and economically responsible for it. How exactly that would work would be left up to the cooperatives themselves. They could elect one of the workers to become a manager, they could do direct democracy and have everyone vote on everything or they could hire external managers. 

A: We’d like to keep our boss! He gave us pizza once a month in exchange for working overtime every single day! We don’t wanna loose him!

B: Not to worry! You can just elect him as a boss every few years. You just can’t give him the ownership over the factory. If you like your boss, you can keep your boss.

I’d leave that up to the cooperatives for the same reason I’d give communes the power to change their own laws. Of course, that would have some effects. One of them is that financial markets would be a thing of the past because only people who work in a factory can own a part of it which means stock is no more. RIP Wall street. You won’t be missed. Of course, this could make founding a new business harder. 

If you can’t own the product you create why create a product at all? And yea, investors probably wouldn’t enjoy that, but we can found new businesses without them. For example, the commune could fund projects. Or some workers could band together and invest their money which happens to be what the original idea behind issuing stock was, allowing easy crowd funding. 

There is no reason to assume that there would be fewer new businesses because of this. I would even argue that there could be more since the communes would prevent monopolies for reasons I’ll get into later, and without monopolies new businesses have a way higher change of surviving. This would offset the lower amount of businesses created by billionaire investors.

If you are worried about innovation taking a hit, please watch my video on capitalism and innovation. TLDR: Capitalism does not cause innovation. But what would be the upside of giving the workers the factories? At first not much. They’d elect a new manager every now and then and they’d keep working. 

But at some point, during an election one of the candidates would notice that giving the employees better pay get’s you votes. That way the manager would be encouraged to pay the workers more and cut his own pay. That way extreme inequality can be abolished without any other legal reform. And it’s a similar case for automatization. 

The manager could buy new machines but instead of firing a bunch of people to maximize profits like a capitalist would they’d reduce everyone’s working hours while staying at the same pay. Or they could pay everyone more for working the same time. You see, just giving factories to workers would help a great deal.