Cooperatives: May 2005 Archives

DECENTRALISATION OF ECONOMIC POWER

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By Ac. Krtashivananda Avt.

People have some fundamental rights to create sustainable communities and to control their own resources, economies, and means of livelihood. These rights in turn influenced by their right to choose what cultural values they will embrace. A globalised economy in its present form denies these rights by transferring power to make the relevant choices to global corporations and financial institutions. It does not serve the human interest.

The theories of both capitalism and communism accept the aphorism, “He who control the gold rules”. Communist theory proposed workers control of means of production but never cared to implement it. Adam Smith implicitly made the same assumption in the vision of an ideal market economy comprising small farmers and artisans – a circumstance in which owner, manager, and worker supposed to be the same. But the capitalism persistently transfers property rights to economic oligarchies and financial institutions that are largely unaccountable even to their owners. Whereas communism vested property rights in a distant state and denied the people any means of holding the state accountable for its exercise of those rights............Read More

By Betsy Bowman and Bob Stone

Private-dictatorship capitalism and government-dictatorship communism are not the only choices we have for socioeconomic systems. Cooperative ownership by workers and managers in the framework of economic democracy is a third alternative. The following article provides an in-depth analysis of the moral virtues, conceptual sophistication, and practical superiority of cooperatives and economy democracy over either authoritarian counterpart.

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About this Archive

This page is a archive of entries in the Cooperatives category from May 2005.

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