ABSTRACT

Economic theorists have made it clear that the workers of democratic firms should earn pay rates commensurate with pre-fixed percent shares of the firm’s surplus. In a system of cooperative firms, worker incomes differ both within one and the same firm and between different firms. Firm-level coefficients which are fixed by the workers themselves in collective resolutions passed at meetings are socially determined by definition, but as the relevant choices have to be made by reference to the prevailing market conditions, they are so only in part. Karl Korsch suggested that the managers of democratic firms were likely to secure higher remuneration coefficients as soon as the capital owners appropriating corporate profits in our day were successfully ousted from the systems. An alternative option would be pooling corporate tax receipts into a social fund for use by the State in supplementing the meagre distributions likely to be made by firms in temporary financial distress.