Richard D. Wolff

Capital - and indeed, all three volumes - is an important book to read because (1) it remains a foundational work in how and why to criticize the capitalist system, (2) it is thus a good balancing companion to the works of Adam Smith and David Ricardo whose foundational works in economics were both highly celebratory of the capitalist system, (3) it can enable you to pursue the vast accumulated literature of Marxian economics. There are several books that can help you work through Marx's Capital and David Harvey's is certainly one of those. Please excuse my immodesty but let me also recommend the chapter devoted to Marx's economics in the following book: R.D. Wolff and S. A. Resnick, Contending Economic Theories: Neoclassical, Keynesian and Marxian (Cambridge: MIT Press 2012). This book also clarifies systematically how Marxian economics differs from the mainstream neoclassical economics and also from Keynesian economics.

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Just coincidence; the two organizations have no relationship, never did, and just reflect that the worker coop idea is basically about bringing democracy into the workplace and is an idea whose time has come.

I make it a rule never to give advice when I have not first ascertained the financial details of the person to whom I am offering the advice. So I cannot offer it to you in these circumstances either. I can say to you that capitalism has a long history of cycles that basically run usually every 4-7 years. The last cyclical downturn in the US (and elsewhere too) was in 2009-2010. You can do the arithmetic. Be extraordinarily cautious because the fast-worsening political instabilities overlay the underlying economic instabilities.

I would agree that the capitalist system both inherited money and monetary systems from the feudalism or other systems that preceded it but also transformed money and monetary systems so that they were more aligned with, more reproductive of the specifically capitalist organization of enterprises and the economy as a whole. I am less clear on why you would want to go to relatively unusual mechanisms (at least these days) such as digital muni currency or demurrage charges if your goal is to "fund worker-owned/run businesses." Most tax systems could raise the money needed to support what we call WSDEs (workers self-directed enterprises). The support can include one or more of the following: buying WSDE outputs, lending to WSDEs below market rates, investing in WSDEs, subsidizing them by lowering their input costs, providing free or low cost consulting services, training employees, and so on. In doing any or all of these things, government (at any level: municipal, state, federal) would be providing to WSDEs the same set of supports that governments have provided to capitalist enterprises over the last 300 years. One could, of course, explore how muni currencies of various sorts might facilitate the development of a ESDE sector.

There are, with an economy based on WSDEs, a variety of ways to organize pension systems (as indeed there has proved to be a variety within capitalist systems). For an existing system built and refined over half a century, you can look at the Mondragon Cooperative Corporation's very well documented system. Another way would be to allocate a portion of a worker coop's net revenues as a fund to be used to make pension payments to retired WSDE workers. This raises the question of how such a fund would be invested over the time that the worker is working. And here multiple possibilities likewise exist. It could be cautiously invested in govt bonds and/or it could be invested, part or whole, in loans at interest to new start-up WSDE's thereby constituting a fund that was both aimed at pension provision but also WSDE growth. Witholding of contributions into such a pension fund could come from individual WSDE members' wage income and/or from net income of the WSDE (total revenues minus wage and other input costs). An interesting concept that some WSDE's have developed entails rethinking what "retirement" means. Here the idea is that individual workers would be offered a situation somewhere between regular work and full retirement with a whole network of full-time and varying part-time tasks needed by the community of WSDEs that would be partly paid as all regular workers are paid and partly funded out of pension fund disbursements. In sum, no special problems attach to WSDE's in terms of establishing, funding and managing a pension fund system.

An old man, Bernie Sanders, galvanized millions of young people into a powerful political force. The young can be reached by anyone who has (1) a solid critique of the political economy of a declining US capitalism, and (2) a reasonable plan of what changes to make to give young people (and everyone else) real hope for the future. If we do that, the young will be moved, excited not only to save Social Security but to make the many other changes this country so badly needs. I do a good bit of public speaking and traveling around the US and my audiences include a growing number of young folks, more all the time. The politics represented by Clinton and Trump are making their ugly last gasps. The component of the young in the mass demonstrations across the country against Trump's actions on refugees is yet another sign of what is possible. Organization to mobilize: that is the key next step.

Probably are such statistical efforts but they depend on myjriad assumptions and are always contested endlessly. On the point of work/non work dichotomy as socially divisive, that would apply to almost any definition of work unless it was tantamount to equal with non-work. Hegelian complexity but true nevertheless.

Having not ever really looked into this, I cannot offer you much in the way of an answer. Sorry about that. What I can say is that as global capitalism's relentless instability and inequality worsen, all kinds of rising anxieties push people to rethink their situations, loyalties, etc. They question assumptions they took for granted. One of those is nationality. That can take the form of the rise of extreme nationalist political movements and parties (eg., Trump, Farage, LePen among many others) and/or kinds of nationalism built around units smaller than currently constituted nations such as Scotland, Catalonia, Macedonia, Quebec, and now California as well as Texas. These are signs of socio-economic decline.