Hi everyone, although I am not personally socialist, I come in peace with a question that I am seeking to learn.
Within capitalism, the concept of “limited liability” is common. Essentially, the owners of a firm cannot be held personally liable for the wrongs of the firm. If Toyota makes dangerous airbags, the personal home of the executives cannot be seized to pay victims. Only company assets can be liquidated.
How does this work within a Marxist framework where the workers are the owners of the “firms” (or of the manufacturing plant). For example, imagine that a worker-owned plant makes faulty airbags through negligence. Would the workers be personally liable? Or would the concept of limited liability remain, and the worst that could happen would be the liquidation of the plant to repay victims’ families?
Thank you for hearing my question!
There’s a lot of assumptions about how society is organized buried in your questions that are worth unpacking, and let me say up front that I don’t think you’re going to get a single, straightforward answer.
First, you are implying the continued existence of civil and criminal law, more or less as it currently is. Personally, I think both of those are bad systems independently, and even worse and more absurd when combined.
Second, you almost seem to imply a socialist world to be a sort of market-based cooperative system? Many of us dream of a more radical world. Though specifics vary, usually we hope that our new economic system will be based on collaboration and comradery, not competition and profit. Theories on how that social collaboration should happen vary widely, but any in case, many of us dream of a world without money, in which case the assumption of pecuniary damages breaks down.
You say you’re not a socialist, and the world without money causes eyerolls among many non-socialists – it is such a ridiculous pipe dream, no? How wildly unrealistic! We socialists have many ways of talking about this eyeroll-inducing phenomenon. Mark Fisher called it “Capitalist Realism,” famously saying, in his book of the same name, that “it is easier to imagine the end of the world than it is to imagine the end of capitalism.”
This force is so powerful that we cannot even imagine a world without a modern conception of money, yet we know they have existed for all of human history, including in much more recent times and in more familiar cultures than most people realize. In “Debt: The First 5,000 Years,” David Graeber gives an account of how societies have organized accounting for and rewarding labor and value, how market emerge, the much shorter history of coinage than most people imagine (did you know Homer’s Greece didn’t have coins?), and how societies operated with different or entirely without conceptions of money. There are even well-documented examples of societies in Tudor England functioning without money (or with so little money as to be basically without it) because of international economic factors causing metal coinage shortages.
So, to get back to your question: I don’t know the details, but I do know that whatever system we’d make for dealing with (to use your example) faulty airbags should be one based on preventing the mistake from happening again. The current system hopes to incentivize companies to avoid making that mistake, and then (supposedly, though we know how it often actually works out) punishes them for making it.
I hope that, first of all, by removing profit motive, we have fewer situations like that. I don’t cut corners when I work on my garden, because that’s not why I garden. I do cut corners while I’m at work, as does everyone, because I work for a wage, and I usually don’t really give a fuck about my employers, most of which are making shit no one actually needs (all while actively contributing to the destruction of our planet).
When catastrophic mistakes do happen, then we should focus on collaborative efforts to avoid them from happening again, not on adversarial judicial processes (that companies can often buy their way out of) that only force companies to pay “damages,” often far less than the profits they made by cutting the corner in the first place. If “firms” are no longer in competition with each other, perhaps that is best done by reorganizing them, or by having outside experts from another firm conduct an investigation and give a plan, overseen by whatever body is coordinating car manufacturing (workers’ councils, the state, whatever your vision is).
Think about it like this, though it’s an admittedly imperfect analogy: what happens inside an existing company when one team messes up? Sometimes, if specific people are at fault, they’re fired (and there the analogy breaks down a little), but in healthy companies, much more often, there is a focus on avoiding the problem from happening again. How that happens can vary.
Finally, on repaying victims’ families: I want to live in a world that is “from each according to their ability, to each according to their needs.” Victims and their families should not be forced to rely on the judgement of a farcical legal system to be taken care of, oftentimes several years after the event, during which they are completely screwed.
I hope that’s helpful? Sorry for the tome. You caught me on a day I really want to avoid working.
I really appreciate the thoughtful and well-explained response. In the past, I have not gotten responses like this when I’ve tried to ask people on Reddit on the communism101 sub. In fact I got banned for a question one time so I just gave up on trying to learn.
To clarify, when I say I’m not a socialist, I’m not anti-socialist. In fact, I am in favor of almost everything you described, and I really like the idea of worker coops specifically. I’m just still trying to figure out where I stand politically, and frankly socialists intimidate me because the online communities tend to be dogmatic and often hostile (I know oftentimes this is a justified defense mechanism towards endless brigading). I like this Beehaw socialism community because it seems more calm and reasonable.
So all that to say, I’m still trying to figure everything out.
The reason I came up with this question was because of the recent submersible accident in the news. Putting aside for a moment that the passengers were rich people, I was just thinking about what a sick society we have where the company that made this submersible was able to cut so many corners and make such an unsafe product, and lie to people about it. And then I was thinking about how limited liability is probably a harmful part of that. The CEO’s family will still get to keep all their wealth regardless of any lawsuits. So I was wondering how a “different system”, like one under socialism, might approach it. And your answer was really good. Under a socialist system, at least the one like you described, perhaps the profit incentives to cut corners wouldn’t have been there in the first place.
Happy to help! Sorry to hear about the former bad experiences. I’d like to think that’s as much an artifact of being on Reddit than it is of socialists, at least as much as I know both of those things pretty well. Most of my friends are socialists, and we’re very nice people!
I recommend books more than internet forums. There is such a wealth of leftist literature written by such wide-ranging and imaginative people. I mentioned David Graeber’s “Debt” in my comment, for example. Debt is a cinder block of a book, but if you want to start smaller, he wrote “Bullshit Jobs” and “The Utopia of Rules,” both of which are delightful. I’m partial to the latter.
I agree with you about the absolute madness of that submarine company, and about how unsafe our current economic system is (see also: climate change). I’d argue that goes far beyond the concept of limited liability. We have organized our entire economy on the assumption that everything that is made must be made by a for-profit company, but we also all recognize that without some adversarial force, be it from competition or government regulators, for-profit companies will start racking up body counts. This is a crazy way to make a society function. Why would you pick as your starting place a dangerous and shitty world, and from there hope that competition and regulation can make it better? Why not just set out to make things good in the first place?
I’ve actually written about why digital technology is particularly affected by this, if you’re curious.
Even in our current capitalist system there are efforts to hold executives of companies accountable for their corruption, negligence and poor safety standards. Countries with communist governments like Vietnam and China regularly use the full force of the law against criminal elements within business, up to and including executions. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2014/04/04/vietnams-punishment-for-corrupt-bankers-death/
Britain passed corporate manslaughter laws following a rail disaster but it remains toothless and there was talk of introducing corporate homicide laws in the US following the Boeing plane crashes but it didn’t get far.
Other posters have provided more thorough answers. I just wanted to point out that even when constrained by the capitalist mode of production we can do much more to hold businesses accountable.
same as with coops, each owner (all the workers) has limited liability.
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