The University of Edinburgh are doing a short, self-paced online course on Co-operative Economics focusing on #workercoop/s.
I presume we might have some interested people here?... :)
Let me know if it's any good!
https://www.edx.org/course/economic-democracy-cooperative-edinburghx-coopsx-0
@samtoland I'm currently working my way through it, although probably being a bit slow.
@wu_lee great! where do you see it - on the spectrum of practical to academic... (I would suspect more of the latter than the former).
@samtoland So far, fairly academic. Describing examples of working coops, initially.
But I was sidetracked by learning about David Ellerman and his development of "The Labour Theory of Property", because I'd never heard of it and it makes quite a good argument that Marx's "Labour Theory of Value" took a wrong turn, and is worse than useless as a result...
...The LToP takes the stance that employment (renting one's own labour) is morally equivalent to voluntary slavery, and therefore should be abolished favour of worker-owned enterprise.
Whereas the LToV plays into the hands of Capitalism by effectively conceding that employment is okay, and just quibbles about what a fair price for the products labour are.
David Ellerman quite well summarised here:
http://www.thestraddler.com/201715/piece2.php
Also on P2PF http://wiki.p2pfoundation.net/Labor_Theory_of_Property
...Of course, having read that I felt obliged to go and trawl the internet for explanations and defences of the LToV, which stalled my studies!
Especially since it coincided with Dmytri Kleiner's article trying to connect Bitcoin with the LToV:
https://blog.p2pfoundation.net/face-value-bitcoin-proof-work-labour-theory-value/2018/02/01
@wu_lee interesting, interesting. I am a digresser myself with these things.
In fact, if you haven't read #postcapitalism by Mason - would give it a read. Be interested to hear your thoughts on the central thesis.
Oh, and so I heard, also Jeremy Rifkin
@samtoland It's been on my pile of "to-read" books since it was published. I have read a lot of synopses/reviews of it, but not the book itself! As such not quite ready to comment.
But it seems to have a lot on common with Michel Bauwen's ideas on Commons Transition.
https://commonstransition.org/a-introduction-to-basic-p2p-ideas
Maybe Nick Srnicek too? (Just been learning about that here, another discursion):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fJ8TUAVpUXo)