Left Forum 2017: Worker/Owner Coops: Doing Better Than Capitalism - Part 1 of 3

More than 60 Worker/Owner businesses across New York City and hundreds across the United States; Are they Utopian Proletarian Experiments or the building blocks for a new Economy that can do better than Capitalism. This workshop, featuring Economist Richard Wolff, Worker/Owner Cooperative Leaders and Representatives from the Community that has grown to incubate and support them, will explore these critical questions for a growing movement towards real change in the United States.

Chair:
Alan Schulman - Veteran Public School's Educator and Activist; Program Coordinator, Democracy At Work New York

Speakers:
Richard D. Wolff - Democracy At Work

Pablo Benson-Silva - Director of Membership and Communications at the New York City Network of Worker Cooperatives (NYCNOWC).

Rebecca Lurie - CUNY, Murphy Institute for Labor and Urban studies

Sean Abbot Klafter - Social Studies Teacher, NYC Department of Education

See panel on Left Forum website:

See complete Left Forum 2017 schedule

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[oldgymrat]

ECONOMICS - National Debt
MICHAEL JAMES MCDANIEL·THURSDAY, JUNE 22, 2017
The whole of the national debt is a long-term transfer of wealth from the bottom of the wealth scale to the top. In its general terms, our economy is all of the ways we facilitate or discourage economic activity. Part and parcel of this are how we distribute the production of those products generated by our economy.

Our system values property, depending on who's, often above human life itself arguing that property can come down to life itself. We allow government two ways of getting the resources necessary to its purposes, taxation and borrowing money from those that have it, thus the national debt. In favoring debt over taxation we borrow (pay interest to) from those we otherwise would have taxed for the same purposes. The difference is we transfer that production's value to those who are already wealthy and do not add to the wealth of the polity/commons. Please understand this as it is not morality though we treat it as such.

I would argue that a more socialistic system would advance civilization more than the present system based on an attempt to harness a human failing (greed) which is capitalism. We are now about to enter on a very damaging bust in our economic system based upon a failure to have enough purchasing power afoot to keep the wheels turning. We are already in an age of such great financial corruption and waste to be personally very disconcerting to me. You are told that there is one economic reality and that is "scarcity". It once was true but happily is no longer but the fear of want and human greed have led to you being conditioned into believing it still so. We also give up our planning power to those who market most successfully with little attention to needs other than profits.

AWAKE!

--
MichaelArchAngel

[presa]

I think the drive for "Worker Coops". Is an effort to make going to work, in cities, more interesting and productive, by taking the risks that once were the Employer's, and now placing those risks and burdens of organizing productivity, onto the typically less educated common worker. Well educated coops will obviously perform much better than uneducated ones.
The capitalizing of the old company assets, I fear, will be a well disguised freebie for those old capitalists' selling out to a naive coop. With well known declining demand one wonders whether capitalized coops, indebted at the start, companies will fare better than spontaneous vertically aligned ones?
...
This is an attempt also, to effect a reversal of Adam Smith's corollary to efficient manufacturing jobs: "they make people as stupid as they can become!" After generations of simple task manufacturing jobs; we will now be asked to shift gears and become sophisticated in how we live our lives. That is going to be interesting to live through.

[Cid]

Can we get the audio turned up a bit? Thanks! Such great work.

[davidcook]

Prof Wolff a perfect example of a clever intellectual who is a prat and a dangerous one

[robertrichard]

You mean we are not the shiny wage slave worker country on the hill?