The alternative is everyone grows their own food, builds their own houses, makes their own clothes, gathers firewood, yadda yadda.
You certainly wouldn’t have the Internet in such a paradise.
That said, with all that we now have, 4 6 hour work days should be the norm.
It’s about the question who owns the product that labor produced (along with land).
Why can someone be the owner of a production line?
This perfectly describes capitalism. The workers are factually responsible for using up the inputs to produce the outputs. The workers build the positive and negative product, but the employer has sole ownership of the produced outputs and holds the liabilities for the used-up inputs. The workers produce the whole product but are denied the legal rights to it under capitalism
An intuition pump for this tenet is the case where an employer and employee cooperate to commit a crime and get caught. Both the employer and employee are held legally responsible for the crime. The servant in work becomes a partner in crime. The employee can't argue that they sold their labor so whatever was done with their labor is not their responsibility. The law already applies this tenet. It just fails to apply it in the firm.
What do you mean by benefit?
To adhere to this tenet, all firms would have to be structured as democratic worker coops. This would benefit society by making it more just. The basic idea of a miscarriage of justice is when someone else is held legally responsible for the deeds of another party such as when one party cooperates to commit a crime and another innocent party is held guilty of it. The employer-employee contract varies in degree, but it is also a miscarriage of justice.
What do you mean by benefit?
You should not confuse capitalism with markets, and you should not confuse markets with working together.
Consider the family unit, it is doubtful that everyone cooks their own single serve or rotates meal duty evenly. Humans can specialise without capital.
Capital is what enables someone to have someone else cook for them, who then has to go cook their own meal. The one with capital isn’t even doing anything for the cook, they are simply taking money that someone working at a widgt factory they own made and giving it to the cook. In so doing they appropriate both the widget factory worker’s meal and the cooks!
you can even have market exchange without capitalism. In the above situation if we remove the capitalist the widget maker could give the cook widgets for a meal. Or even currency from selling widgets for a meal. Materially the capitalist contributes nothing, their role is entirely created by private property law.
In what I described, the differences are:
1. Buyers can compel current holders to transfer the asset to them if they pay enough. This reduces the power of capital holders.
2. All self-assessed prices of all capital are public
3. A large portion of the value of capital flows into a collective fund
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