This is a preprint of: Ellerman, David. 2025. “The Historical and Modern Arguments Against Contractual Slavery.” In The Palgrave Handbook of Modern Slavery, edited by Maria Krambia Kapardis, Colin Clark, Ajwang Warria, and Michel Dion. Palgrave Macmillan. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-58614-9_9.
Are Corporations the Problem?
May 26, 2025 by
Are corporations the problem? Can reforms in the area of corporate responsibility (e.g., more stakeholder governance) lead to any real changes? The goal of the paper is to analyse debates concerning the Citizens United case, corporate personhood, the stakeholder theory, the affected interests principle and, finally, deeper fallacies with respect to the rights of capital embedded in Marxism and conventional economic theories of capital and corporate finance.
Worker Cooperatives and Other “Cooperatives”
March 24, 2025 by
When is a “Coop” not really a cooperative? The short answer is whenever the actual activity of the “cooperative” is not carried out by the members but by employees. The problem is, of course, not in cooperation per se but in the hiring, employing, renting, or leasing of people to carry out the supposedly “cooperative” activities of the “cooperative.”
Democratic Ownership: Scale Through Leveraged Conversions
November 28, 2024 by
One of the problems that cooperatives face is that they do not have a standard gradual conversion mechanism but are generally established as new business startups or by an all-at-once conversion of a conventional company to a cooperative. This paper describes such a conversion mechanism.
Myth and Metaphor in Orthodox Economics
June 1, 2024 by
This is Chapter 2 from: Ellerman, David. 1995. Intellectual Trespassing as a Way of Life: Essays in Philosophy, Economics, and Mathematics. Lanham MD: Rowman & Littlefield.
Discussion of the fundamental questions of political economy is today almost completely clouded and distorted by a number of basic myths and metaphors. Deconstruction is necessary before constructive discussions can begin. The myths and metaphors are concerned with basic conceptions about property and contract, not with prices and markets. As layer upon layer of distortions are removed, new facts and new perspectives on old facts will emerge. These facts have fairly direct normative implications, but the disagreements and controversies are about the facts, not about norms or prescriptions.
Worker Cooperatives and other so-called “Cooperatives”
March 30, 2024 by
Most cooperative organizations today do not exemplify any cooperative activity; non-worker cooperatives do not represent any cooperative activity of the members since the only joint activity of the organization is carried out by employees. The idea that cooperatives are democratically governed does not apply to non-worker cooperatives (based on the employment relation) since the members are not choosing the managers or governors of their own activity but of the activity of the people working in the cooperative.
Classical Liberalism and Workplace Democracy
November 20, 2019 by
This is a paper coauthored by Tej Gonza for the European Liberal Forum, the foundation associated with the Lib-Dem parties of the EU in the EU Parliament. It explores the support for workplace democracy given by democratic classical liberals such as Tocqueville, Mill, Dewey, and Buchanan.
Interview at Norwegian Thinktank Manifest (English trans.)
November 22, 2018 by
English translation of June 2018 interview at Oslo think-tank Manifest.
Some Less Well-Known Supporters of Workplace Democracy
August 11, 2018 by
This is a collection of likenesses or pictures and some representative quotations of a number of less well-known supporters (all dead white men) of workplace democracy.
New Work for the Visible Hand of Business
January 1, 2018 by
This is an essay about the late Richard Cornuelle’s essay “New work for invisible hands” in a commemorative volume of Conversations on Philanthropy.