#peter gowan

[redshift-13]

Bernie Sanders’s plan for worker-owned funds isn’t just notable because it could lead us toward a democratized, sustainable, socialist economy. It’s also the product of a growing collaboration between the Left in the United States and the United Kingdom.

“Capital has been put on notice.

On both sides of the Atlantic, the Left is no longer content to regulate capitalism. Instead, leaders of socialist movements contending for state power are now seeking to transform the landscape of ownership, redistributing wealth and power in the economy by democratizing company ownership.

Bernie Sanders’s support for worker ownership funds, announced last week, is the latest ambitious commitment to the new politics of democratic ownership. If implemented, this would be a vital institutional turn towards, in Sanders’s words, “an economy where workers feel that they’re not just a cog in the machine — one where they have power over their jobs and can make decisions.”

Though the details of Sanders’s plans are still under discussion, the implications are clear. The plan would require businesses to contribute a percentage of stocks to a fund controlled by employees. In turn, the fund would pay a regular dividend to workers while making them a powerful voting bloc in corporate decision-making.

By rewiring income and control rights at the company level, gradually dislodging ownership by capitalists (typically with control exercised through extractive financial intermediaries that act as their agents) and empowering labor, the funds would help reshape how the economy operates and for whom.

There are important details to debate, particularly how the dividends would be distributed. To coincide with the Sanders’s announcement, Common Wealth, a UK-based think tank designing ownership models for the democratic economy, published research by Lenore Palladino, a senior economist at the Roosevelt Institute, on the distributional effects of worker funds. Critically, it shows that for the 1,345 corporations that reported sufficient information who would likely be required to establish a fund under the proposal, granting 10 percent of dividends per employee would have meant an average payout of $2,725 per worker. If a higher percentage of companies were owned by workers, this payout could be even higher.”

.....

A very modest proposal, but an arguably necessary step on the road to the abolition of capitalism and its destructive legacies.

[zwischenstadt]

The Nixon administration was planning to get OPEC to greatly increase its oil prices a full two years before OPEC did so, and as early as 1972 the Nixon administration planned for the US private banks to recycle the petrodollars when OPEC finally did take US advice and jack up oil prices.  The Nixon administration understood the way in which the US state could use expanding private financial markets as a political multiplier of the impact of US Treasury moves with the dollar.  But according to Nixon's Ambassador in Saudi Arabia at the time, the principal political objective behind Nixon's drive for the OPEC oil price rise was to deal a crippling blow to the Japanese and European economies, both overwhelmingly dependent on Middle East oil, rather than to decisively transform international financial affairs.  Nevertheless, Nixon's officials showed far more strategic insight into the consequences of what they were attempting than most political scientists would credit any government with.  Its capacity for deception both over the oil price rise and in the way in which it manipulated discussions with its 'allies' in the IMF over so-called 'international monetary reform' was brilliant. The US government realised that the oil price rises would produce an enormous increase in the dollar earnings of oil states that could not absorb such funds into their own productive sectors.  At the same time, the oil price rises would plunge very many states into serious trade deficits as the costs of their oil imports soared.  So the so-called petrodollars would have to be recycled from the Gulf through the western banking systems to non-oil-producing states.  Other governments had wanted the petrodollars to be recycled through the IMF.  But the US rejected this, insisting the Atlantic world's private banks (at that time led by American banks) should be the recycling vehicles.  And because the US was politically dominant in the Gulf, it could get its way.

Peter Gowan, The Global Gamble, pg 21