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[...] The online sphere inspires incessant talk of gift economies and public-spiritedness and democracy, but commercialism and privatization and inequality lurk beneath the surface.

This contradiction is captured in a single word: “open,” a concept capacious enough to contain both the com…

[...] The left has always existed in tension between two basic dimensions. On the one hand, the left needs and desires to be concrete and practical, to have its feet on the ground, with direct responses to people’s immediate needs and solutions for today’s problems. On the other hand, it needs to h…

Yet workers in most modern capitalist corporations are required by law and/or custom to accept working conditions over which they exercise no democratic control. If they refuse, they can be fired—and the primary option available to them is to work for another employer under similarly undemocratic c…

A WSDE-based economic system could thus address the ancient problems of the division of labor and specialization of function. Adam Smith’s pin factory has often been interpreted as a rationalization for ever-more-narrow specialization of jobs, training, and mentalities as necessary for maximizing s…

We are now ready to tackle a particularly thorny issue in the analysis of an economic system based on WSDEs. This concerns the division of the employees of every WSDE into two groups with different relationships to the production and distribution of the surplus. The first group comprises the worker…