Capitalism's Fatal Flaw, and the Way Forward: EQUITISM: ¿A Danger of Demotivation?

EQUITISM:

¿A Danger of Demotivation?

GLOBAL STRATEGIC HYPOTHESES.

Dear Reader,

I think that many capitalists worry about their workers’ motivation.

Some seem to think that they must keep workers poor and desperate in order to keep them working: low wages – a very self-serving attitude for those capitalists who are obsessed with profits at any cost.

Some of same would no doubt think that the associated workers/producers in Equitist Citizen Stewardship Equity socialized producers’ cooperatives will lack incentives to work.

But recall, such co-ops will have to compete successfully to survive as such – compete with other ‘Stewardship Equity’ cooperatives in their field of goods and/or services, and compete with capitalist enterprises, producing for the same markets.

Competition is perhaps the chief among the economic checks and balances central to the successful self-reproduction of a ‘political-economic democracy’, as we envision it.

Monopoly is bad. As is oligopoly or near-monopoly.

Private capitalist monopolies are horrible in their consequences.

State[-capitalist] monopolies are the worst of all.

¿But beyond the competitive struggle to survive and to thrive, economically, what can we foresee that would motivate the associated producers in Equitist producers’ cooperatives to continue to produce products and services growing in quantity, as needed, and growing in quality/use-value, and to continue to grow the social forces of their production [i.e., to grow their own labor-productivity]?

For each associated producer in a ‘Citizen Stewardship Equity’ socialized producers’ cooperative, we foresee four main motivations for continued and improving production and productivity –

1. To sustain their livelihoods – to keep their jobs – in the valued cooperative form of those jobs, much preferred to working for a capitalist enterprise, for wages, with little say over working conditions and job security, etc.;

2. To reproduce their valued work community, and the valued quality of life and of solidarity which that community affords them, versus the vicious, snake-pit ‘“war of each against all[ others, and against self]”’ that is so typically encountered in capitalist enterprises today;

3. To participate in productive-force-increasing, productivity-increasing innovations that will allow for shorter work-days, hence for more disposable time for their “real of freedom” life with their families, friends, and avocations. This is a far different motivation for productive-force-growth than the capitalist motive – the latter motive being to increase [unconsciously, relative surplus-value-based] profitability, and may well accelerate productive-force-growth over that generated by the capitalist profit motive, while avoiding the ulteriorities, anomalies and perversions inherent in the capitalist motive for productivity advance;

4. To win out in ‘athleticistic’ competition with other co-op “teams”, and with capitalist firms, e.g., those producing for the same markets.

We suspect that these four motivations will sustain and advance the quantity, where needed, as well as the quality of social production – and the happiness of the majority class – far more than does the capitalist profit motive, especially given that motive’s predestined ‘humanocidal’ denouement in the ‘technodepreciation’-driven profit-fall ‘descendence-phase’ of the capitalist system, now nearing its historical paroxysm and death-throes.

We even suspect that majority class preferences tied to these four motivations will make workers increasingly ‘unhireable’ by capitalist firms, as opportunities for ‘collective self-employment’ in proliferating Stewardship cooperatives develops, over time, in an Equitist ‘Political-ECONOMIC DEMOCRACY’, as successor system to the, ‘self-«aufheben»-ating’, [state-]capitalist systems now prevailing on this planet, so that capitalist firms will gradually wither away, as their social obsolescence is increasingly revealed.

It would be a profound mistake to outlaw private capitalist wage-labor, to set up the state to coercively suppress private capitalism, and to coercively force all workers – including many lengthily and deeply capitalistically-conditioned workers, not ready, willing or psychologically able to participate in the collective self-management processes of a producers’ cooperative – to join a ‘Stewardship enterprise’.

Such a state would soon either be overthrown, by the majority class, or would otherwise have to become a state-bureaucratic tyranny; a totalitarian, terroristic police state.

For more information regarding these Seldonian insights, and to read and/or download, free of charge, PDFs and/or JPGs of Foundation books, other texts, and images, please see:

www.dialectics.info

and

https://independent.academia.edu/KarlSeldon

For partially pictographical, ‘poster-ized’ visualizations of many of these Seldonian insights -- specimens of ‘dialectical art’ – as well as dialectically-illustrated books published by the F.E.D. Press, see –