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!
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.