This one really threw me for a loop. Do startup founders making or seeking a big exit really think of themselves as "labor"?
What would it even mean for labor to “win,” if not by controlling some capital of their own? Could a union win without a pension plan?
Capital in the sense being discussed (which derives from the same critique of capitalism in which "capitalism" was coined) refers to the non-financial, non-land means of production; one's life savings are not capital, though they may (or may not) be used to acquire capital.
> It’s common to have a goal of retiring someday, and having capital is how you retire.
Having private ownership of capital is important to being able to retire within capitalism. That's a feature of capitalism, not an inherent feature of retirement.
> What would it even mean for labor to “win,” if not by controlling some capital of their own?
It expressly involves control of capital by labor collectively, which is not the same as private ownership of capital.
> Could a union win without a pension plan?
A pension plan is not capital. In a system in which private ownership of capital is a thing, and in which capital ownership is systematically favored throughout society, it will be normal for a pension fund to own capital, but the existence of such a system means that labor has not won.
Also, pension plans aren't essential to unions, they are something unions often provide because providing for retirement is a gap in the system in which they exist that they elect to plug collectively. If labor actually won, that gap would not exist.
So okay, for capital, substitute “ownership of a claim to the profits from capital.”
I think it might be fun to imagine an economic system very different than ours, but I suspect it’s going to need cultural institutions that fulfill similar roles, because they serve human needs and those needs aren’t going away.
For example, suppose that in the system you’re imagining, a retired worker goes to the store to get something to eat. Presumably, the collective has a worker making sure that nobody takes more than their fair share, or otherwise it’s all going to disappear. So the retiree has present some kind of abstract claim showing what they’re entitled to.
It’s going to serve a similar role to retirement savings. How does it work? When you retire, how secure is your claim? How much can you get, and what happens when political institutions change?
I think it’s easier to talk about such things in terms of familiar institutions that we understand well, but with the understanding that there could be different approaches, in theory.
No one is against farms and factories. Some people are against ownership of farms and factories by private parties separate from working in them.
> For example, suppose that in the system you’re imagining, a retired worker goes to the store to get something to eat.
Then they pay money for it. Which likely comes out of a retirement pension.
> So the retiree has present some kind of abstract claim showing what they’re entitled to.
That "abstract claim" is called "money", and exists separate from (and predates) capitalist property structures, and does not rely on private ownership of the means of production.
> It’s going to serve a similar role to retirement savings. How does it work? When you retire, how secure is your claim? How much can you get, and what happens when political institutions change?
No claim is resilient to change of political institutions; systems of property rights are themselves political institutions.
> I think it’s easier to talk about such things in terms of familiar institutions that we understand well
Yes, but the problem is that you are confusing entirely different institutions that do not rely on each other, simply because they happen to coexist in the system you are most familiar with (though that is not universally historically the case.)
"Capital", "money", and "some form of provision for retirement" are not the same thing.
I’m still pretty unclear on how it works, though. Who makes decisions about factories and farms and how do they get funding? What are the sources and sinks for money in this system?
(For example, one simple model has money being created via government spending and drained via taxes. The taxes create the demand for money.)
The least dissimilar version to the modern mixed economies that dominate the West currently would be a system in which the firms employing workers were (in the ideal state; real systems -- even "capitalist" ones -- are rarely platonic ideals of the underlying concept, and so in practice exceptions, e.g., for sole proprietorships of certain scale and with defined worker rights, are possible as a matter of convenience rather than right) universally labor coops; "financial capital", which is not capital in the sense being discussed, would still exist, but labor would rent financial capital rather than capital renting labor; money would be essentially unchanged from how it works in the modern West.