More pertinent, however, is that capitalism tends to stultify the worker's creativity, his human urge for self-expression, freedom, mutually respectful interaction with others, recognition of his self-determined sense of self, recognition of himself as a self rather than an object, a means to an end. Karl Marx called it "alienation." Capitalism alienates the worker-and the capitalist-from his "fundamental human need" for "self-fulfilling and creative work," "the exercise of skill and craftsmanship,"8 in addition to his fundamental desire to determine himself {whence comes the desire to dismantle oppressive power-relations and replace them with democracy}. Alternative visions of social organization thus arise, including Robert Owen's communitarian socialism, Charles Fourier's associationist communalism, Proudhon's mutualism {a kind of anarchism}, Marx's communism, Bakunin's collectivist anarchism, Kropotkin's anarchist communism, Anton Pannekoek's council communism, and more recently, Murray Bookchin's libertarian municipalism, Michael Albert's participatory economics, Takis Fotopoulos's inclusive democracy, Paul Hirst's associationalism, and so on. Each of these schools of thought differs from the others in more or less defined ways, but they all have in common the privileging of economic and social cooperation and egalitarianism.
( Chris Wright )
[ Worker Cooperatives and ]
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