Corporate monopoly of common resources typically creates artificial scarcity, resulting in socio-economic imbalances that restrict workers from access to economic opportunity and diminish consumer purchasing power.
As a reform agenda, supporting theories and real-world examples can include decentralization, democratic cooperatives, public banking, fair trade and the regionalization of food production and currency.
While the income of any individual might include proceeds from any combination of these three sources—land, labor and capital are generally considered mutually exclusive factors in economic models of the production and distribution of wealth.
Alternately, David Schweickart asserts in his book, After Capitalism: "The structure of a capitalist society consists of three basic components: Supply and demand are generally accepted as market functions for establishing prices.
[12] "Behind the abstraction known as 'the market' lurks a set of institutions designed to maximize the wealth and power of the most privileged group of people in the world—the creditor-rentier class of the first world and their junior partners in the third".
If unemployment is too low, workers make wage demands that either cut into profits to an extent that jeopardizes future investment, or are passed on to consumers, thus generating inflationary instability.
[30] In A Preface To Economic Democracy, Robert A. Dahl suggests that agrarian economy and society in the early United States "underwent a revolutionary transformation into a new system of commercial and industrial capitalism that automatically generated vast inequalities of wealth, income, status, and power."
Corporations have established a homogeneous global playing field around which they can freely move raw materials, labor, capital, finished products, tax-paying obligations, and profits.
"[33] Jack Rasmus, author of The War At Home and The Trillion Dollar Income Shift, argues that the increasing concentration of corporate power is a cause of the large-scale debt, unemployment, and poverty characteristic of economic recession and depression.
[36] Imperialism, as defined by Dictionary of Human Geography, is "the creation and/or maintenance of an unequal economic, cultural, and territorial relationship, usually between states and often in the form of an empire, based on domination and subordination.
He asserted that the merging of banks and industrial cartels gave rise to finance capital, which was then exported (rather than goods) in pursuit of greater profits than the home market could offer.
[39] According to analyst Michael Parenti, imperialism is "the process whereby the dominant politico-economic interests of one nation expropriate for their own enrichment the land, labor, raw materials, and markets of another people.
While he conceded imperialism is not typically recognized as a legitimate allegation about the United States, Parenti argued: Emperors and conquistadors were interested mostly in plunder and tribute, gold and glory.
Capitalist imperialism invests in other countries, transforming and dominating their economies, cultures, and political life, integrating their financial and productive structures into an international system of capital accumulation.
Through inequalities of trade, developing countries are overcharged for import of manufactured goods and underpaid for raw material exports, as wealth is siphoned from the periphery of empire and hoarded at the imperial-centers-of-capital: Over eight-hundred years ago the powerful of the city-states of Europe learned to control the resources and markets of the countryside by raiding and destroying others’ primitive industrial capital, thus openly monopolizing that capital and establishing and maintaining extreme inequality of pay.
[6]Smith goes on to say that, like other financial empires in history, the contemporary model forms alliances necessary to develop and control wealth, keeping peripheral nations impoverished providers of cheap resources for the imperial capital centers.
Business profits funded the parties, politicians, public relations campaigns, and professional think tanks that together shaped the real social effects and historical decline of government economic regulation.
When the working class, not a revolutionary party, is the agency of social transformation, change will be based on workplace organization, community mobilizations and democratic political action.
Inclusive democracy is based on the principle that meeting basic needs is a fundamental human right which is guaranteed to all who are in a physical condition to offer a minimal amount of work.
While reform agendas tend to critique the existing system and recommend corrective measures, they do not necessarily suggest alternative models to replace the fundamental structures of capitalism; private ownership of productive resources, the market and wage labor.
While these measures have never been implemented in their purest form, they have provided a foundation for Social Credit political parties in many countries and for reform agendas that retain the title, "economic democracy".
In his book, Capitalism 3.0, Peter Barnes likens a "National Dividend" to the game of Monopoly, where all players start with a fair distribution of financial opportunity to succeed, and try to privatize as much as they can as they move around "the commons".
Contrasting "redistribution" of income (or property) with "predistribution", Barnes argues for "propertizing" (without corporately privatizing) "the commons" to spread ownership universally, without taking wealth from some and giving it to others.
[71] Smith further claimed that converting these exclusive entitlements to inclusive human rights would minimize battles for market share, thereby eliminating most offices and staff needed to maintain monopoly structures, and stop the wars generated to protect them.
[79] Financial capital should be the total savings of all citizens, balanced by primary-created money to fill any shortfall, or its destruction through increased reserve requirements to eliminate any surplus.
[81] A cooperative is an autonomous association of persons united voluntarily to meet their common economic, social, and cultural needs and aspirations through a jointly owned and democratically controlled enterprise.
"[90] The idea of economic democracy through worker ownership on a national scale has been argued by economist Tom Winters, who states that "building a cooperative economy is one small step on the journey to reclaiming the wealth we all collectively create.
He claimed that their intentions of exclusive entitlement were clearly exposed when the imperial centers resorted to military force to prevent such barter and maintain monopoly control of others' resources.
And as political entities “it is crucial that firms be made compatible with the democratic commitments of our nations.”[94] Germany and to a lesser extent the broader European Union have experimented with a way of workplace democracy known as Co-determination, a system that allows workers to elect representatives that sit on the board of directors of a company.
Theorists of economic democracy have argued that one solution to this unequal concentration of power is to create mechanisms that distribute ownership of productive assets across the entire population.