Suchergebnisse
"Rutger Claassen"
Titel: Varieties of Social Ownership: A Reflection on Plural Cooperativism
Autor: Rutger Claassen
Seite: 427-436
Kuch’s proposal for a regime of Plural Cooperativism relies on a universalization of the (worker) cooperative, while abolishing today’s dominant business corporations. It integrates several other components (public banks and stock markets) into such a regime. In this response, I first make some general comments about the normative framework of Kuch’s paper, which presents Plural Cooperativism as a way to instantiate the idea of ‘social ownership’. Second, I question the exclusive focus on cooperatives: why pluralize cooperativism, and not a pluralism of a wider set of corporate forms, amongst which foundation-owned companies and state-owned companies? Third, I question whether we should pluralize cooperativism with private and public shareholding. Why not restrict oneself to cooperativism simpliciter? All in all, we can think of ‘varieties of social ownership’ just as there are varieties of capitalism. My critiques are meant to stimulate systematic comparative thinking about the merits of Plural Cooperativism versus other regimes of social ownership.
Titel: The Meaning of Social Ownership, the Priority of Cooperativism, and the Unpleasant Need for Private Shareholding: A Reply to Claassen
Autor: Hannes Kuch
Seite: 195-205
This paper defends the model of Plural Cooperativism against criticism. Plural Cooperativism is a society-wide economic system of cooperative ownership that allows for limited private shareholding, counterbalanced by public shareholding and a more democratic reallocation of control rights, while universal inheritances enable broad-based investment in cooperatives. In response to Rutger Claassen’s critique, the paper clarifies the normative foundations of social ownership and argues that cooperatives can serve a wide range of values beyond workplace democracy, especially when a public shareholder complements them. It further defends the focus on cooperatives against Claassen’s proposal to rely more strongly on trust-owned firms, since the latter exhibit a structural deficit in workplace democracy and impose overly demanding altruistic requirements. Finally, it justifies the opportunity for private shareholding by addressing issues of entry costs, financing, and portfolio diversification, and it argues for a strong role of the public shareholder by showing that disinvestment threats from private shareholders persist under Plural Cooperativism.