Re: OWNERSHIP: A Personal Summing Up

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In a message dated 4/8/01 Dellerman@worldbank.org writes:

> 3. Kelso's ...major contribution was on the practical
>  side, the ESOP and its various minor cousins.  That is what he will be 
known
>  for, and I think all non-Binarian advocates of worker ownership or economic
>  democracy will agree on that accomplishment.

This was a major contribution, but I think his political vision of shifting 
from a focus on augmenting labor incomes to providing capital incomes for the 
masses was even more important.  It was this that really hit me, and I think 
many others.
  
>  5. As an aside, the idea that a loan to buy a capital asset could be paid 
> off
>  with a truncated portion of the cashflow thrown off by the asset is in 
> theory a
>  non-starter for the simple reason that the value of the capital asset is 
> usually
>  taken to be the discounted present value of all the cashflow thrown off by 
> the asset.

Businesses do this all the time--they borrow money to buy or lease equipment, 
and repay the loan with increased revenues derived from use of the equipment. 
 What they add is (1) actually putting the equipment in service to produce 
something, and (2) assuming the risk that the new revenue will be 
insufficient to repay the loan.

>  7. Another thing I learned from the Ownership discussion was the depth of 
> the anti-labor distain or animus in the hard-core Binarian position...  

This has stuck me as well.  The idea that collective bargaining is 
illegitimate coercion, in particular, is enough to alienate a huge number of 
potential allies.  Plus the repeated insistence that labor's legitimate share 
of national income should be something like 10% cannot endear them to the 
labor movement.

>  8. Finally, the Ownership discussion has reconfirmed to me that the whole
>  Binarian position has absolutely no connection with the idea of workplace
>  democracy...  This is another way to view the divergence
>  between the Binarians and those who come to employee ownership from the 
Left
>  (e.g., from an interest in the labor movement, worker cooperatives,
>  co-determination, or labor-managed firms)...  Not only does Binarian 
theory not account for the relative success of the
>  ESOP, it would seem from the Ownership discussion that Binarian theory has
>  become as much a liability as an asset for the further development of 
> employee ownership and workplace democracy--IMHO.
 
I think you are right here, but my perspective is a bit different.  I came 
from the left, workplace democracy (WD) orientation, which is how I first 
encountered Kelso's ideas, thru writings on employee ownership.  But I had a 
conversion from WD to Kelso's idea of spreading capital ownership, because it 
solved for me many nagging problems I had with WD.  I now believe the right 
way to go is more in line with the binarian vision (with a rectified 
theoretical foundation) than with WD, and I do think this is line of division 
in the "ownership" movement that cannot be papered over.

Alan Zundel
For the Public Good
http://www.publicgood.org