Public ownership, worker control, and the labour epistocracy problem

Abstract

This paper argues that influential contemporary models of market socialism fail to do justice to traditional socialist concerns about exploitation and, by implication, about workplace oppression. More precisely, neither pure public ownership models (such as Roemer's), nor hybrid models of public ownership plus worker control (such as Schweickart's) suffice individually to attenuate exploitation and workplace hierarchy. Quite independently of alienable capital, these theories fail to account for the labour epistocracy, a class of workers who, by dint of higher marketable epistemic credentials and talents, can subjugate the labour of those with lower epistemic credentials. An improved model of market socialism would, I argue, account for the labour epistocracy by combining universal worker control with a strongly predistributive form of public ownership.