John Womack wrote:
>The question is about an arrangement (maybe a 
>mode) of production in which producers use their 
>own means of production to produce, employ only 
>their own (and their family's unpaid) labor, own 
>the product, and trade their goods, and there 
>are traders who trade only among such producers.
>
>This arrangement would not be (simply) a phase 
>or stage between other arrangements (or modes) 
>of production, or economic systems.
>
>So far the most interesting economics I have 
>read of such an arrangement is in 
>Georgescu-Roegen's articles on "production" and 
>"process" between 1960 and 1973. But they are 
>about only such an arrangement in agriculture, 
>independent peasant production (regardless of artisans or traders).
>
>Are there classical, neoclassical, or Marxist 
>economists who have written about such 
>production and exchange in comprehensive, 
>general, or abstract terms? Whom would you recommend for theory and insights?


This would be an arrangement, would it not, where 
labor hires capital and claims the total product, 
rather than capital hiring labor. I would think 
that economic theory in itself would be 
indifferent to the question of who hires whom, 
and only social convention and economic power 
dictate that one method predominates. Such 
worker-owned systems are widespread, some of the 
biggest examples being the Mondragon Cooperative 
Corporation or the cooperative economy which 
dominates Emilia-Romanga in Italy. David Ellerman 
has written on this in Intellectual Trespassing 
as a Way of Life and Property and Contract  in 
Economics: the Case for Economic Democracy. See 
www.ellerman.org. I know of no cases where they 
trade only with like firms, or why that restriction would be important.

John C. Medaille