Markets

Under my cooperative commnunitarian plan, there will still be markets. They will be localized to the greatest extent possible. The differences between the proposed, and the status quo is that the means of production and distribution will be owned by an association of cooperating inter-community locally based community/worker cooperatives.

I envison a "double payer system " where an Equity Union replaces the current for-profit equity trading and investing paradigm and lending institutions, with a not-for-profit (business entities make profit, but the profits are ear-marked for the start-up of new community/worker hybrid cooperatives.

The other payer, besides the Equity Union, would be the government which would make direct payments from the treasury to poor folk for work, including the supplementing of funds for the worker equity contributions to community/worker hybrid cooperatives.

My philosophy on labor goes back to the French Physiocrats of the 1600's who postulated that natural resources were the basis of all wealth, which is consistent with Marx's "Labor Theory of Value" in that human labor is a natural resource. All productive work is done by people and machines built by people. (Draft animals are a natural resource as well). What my system eliminates is money begets money. Allocation of financial resources will be a job for workers in the new system, but their compensation will be wages and equity participation in the new system, not personal profits.

I am not Suggesting State Socialism, which was really more closely akin to State Capitalism except that surpluses (in the Capitalist world called profits) were earmarked as I have suggested.

Few of the Soviet era economic systems approached the cooperative communitarian ideal (local, and syndicalist control) that I am proposing. Perhaps Yugoslavia came the closest.

The Mondragon Cooperative Community system in the Basque region of Spain is a worthwhile, currently functioning model.