Worker Self Directed Enterprises

There’s a lot I like, and dislike, about Richard Wolff.

One thing that seems OK is his promotion of Worker Self Directed Enterprises (WSDE). One of his latest works is a book (more here):

David Ellerman actually beat Wolff to it with Abolish Human Rentals. I like Ellerman’s approach or framing/analysis better, but Wolff is on a similar plane and has commanded a lot of attention lately.

Some materials get a worker coop started are here. See this PDF of coop startup resources.

What I don’t like is that Wolff falls into the same trench a lot of people on the so-called left do, mainly that they want to use the State to fix disasters that are a function of the State itself. He also fails to see or acknowledge an alternative to his Statist approach, that of free market anti-capitalism. Unlike Ellerman, Wolff seems to be really anti-market, like Micheal Albert, and from what I can see thus far, like Albert, promotes a bureaucratic machine although Wolff says otherwise regularly in his Economic Update radio program. If Wolf understood that “cost should be the limit of price” and that markets can be anti capitalist, he may sing a different tune. Instead he’s stuck in the same same statist paradigm that needs shifting.

Almost every new innovation gives rise to some call from some Progressive somewhere to regulate it, monitor it, sometimes even ban it. Rarely will a Progressive reject new assignments for government, even though it has already assumed so many that it manages so poorly (and at a financial loss). It behooves us to point out that the more government attempts to control, the less well it will perform all of its duties, including the essential ones. read more