The late “Great Debate between Capitalism and Socialism” was misframed from the viewpoint of those who advocate an economic democracy. An economic democracy is a private property market economy where the contract to rent people (the employment relation) is abolished, where the democratic principle is applied to the workplace so that the legal members of each firm are the people who work in it, and where the assets and liabilities produced in the firms are thus privately appropriated by the people who create them in accordance with the standard principle of imputing legal responsibility in accordance with de facto responsibility (i.e., the modern treatment of the labor theory of property) [see Ellerman 1992].

From the viewpoint of economic democracy, the capitalism-socialism debate was a debate between private and state capitalism (i.e., the private or public employment system), and the debate was as misframed as would be a debate between the private or public ownership of slaves.

David Ellerman