[...] the board of a WSDE would likely see the need to secure certain management functions. It might, like its capitalist counterparts, hire professional managers. On the other hand, it might prefer instead, for many reasons, to substitute a rotational system whereby all surplus-producing workers are periodically rotated through management positions. The board might see this as an appropriate way to avoid reifying people into fixed positions of manager and managed—positions that might possibly pave the way for a return to capitalism. Workers who were thus temporarily removed from producing surpluses would nonetheless need to be funded for their management activities and time by the board’s distributions from the surplus it appropriates from the nonmanagerial workers. The extent to which worker-directors are also rotated through management functions would further differentiate a WSDE-based economy from capitalism.

[...] the WSDE-based system would not need a patent system (nor suffer its constraint on other people’s use of new inventions), since it could provide alternative incentives for innovation just as it established alternative sources of needed funding.

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 workers who produce surpluses and who also compose the board of directors in WSDEs. They are the workers who directly produce the outputs of the WSDEs—the software programs, shirts, buses, machines, and so on. Every WSDE also employs another, different kind of worker who provides the conditions and ancillary services that enable the surplus-producers to function. I will call these workers enablers.

Enablers include the secretaries, clerks, receptionists, security guards, cleaning staff, and so on who maintain the paperwork and physical spaces that provide the necessary conditions for the first group of workers to produce a surplus. Other types of enablers include managers, lawyers, architects, and counselors who provide still other conditions.

Enablers are just as crucial for the reproduction of the WSDE as are the surplus-producers. However, unlike the surplus-producing workers, enablers do not directly produce the surplus; rather, they provide various conditions for the surplus-producers to function effectively. The enabling group of workers obtains its sustenance and the means to perform its functions by receiving distributed shares of the surplus from the worker-directors. In other words, the surplus-producers need the enablers to be able to produce surpluses, while the enablers need surplus distributions from the surplus-producers/appropriators to be able to perform their enabling functions.

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 surpluses and profits. For most of those interpretations, specialization of a function has been treated as identical to specialization of the functionary. Yet that is not the case. Whatever the merits of specialization of function within a division of labor, the merits of equivalently specializing the laborer are dubious. Beyond a certain degree and a certain period of time, keeping one person in one job may reduce productivity and profitability. If a fully rounded personality and a diversely engaged body and mind are connected to personal happiness, genuine democracy, and work productivity, then a WSDE-based economic system with rotation of jobs will be far more fulfilling—and quite possibly more productive—than work has been under private or state capitalism.