The anti-capitalist argument ought to be to draw a distinction between consent to delegate and consent to alienate. The latter is invalid as David Ellerman argues. The usual leftist argument that capitalist employment is coercive just isn’t persuasive.
Isn't persuasive mostly because we've been so heavily propagandized all our lives.
True, everyone has the right to refuse employment if they don't like the conditions, just like everyone has equal right to sleep under the bridge (or not, depending on local laws).
But because the consequence of refusing that job and all others that don't meet our basic needs is homelessness and starvation, we are compelled to accept jobs that don't meet our basic needs. That is coercive.
Refusing to purchase groceries can also lead to starvation, but surely contracts to purchase groceries are acceptable. The critique has to pick out something that differentiates the employer-employee contract from other contracts. The consent vs. coercion distinction applies to most contracts and isn’t unique to employment.
Source: https://youtu.be/UQxvAjFSlCw
@jlou I do not unconditionally approve of contracts to purchase groceries, especially if all the groceries are provided by one producer such that you can only starve if you don't buy from it.
Consent goes as far as the outside option goes. If the outside option is death, consent is meaningless.
I agree, but that is a criticism of monopolies not of capitalism per se. Many pro-capitalist thinkers are anti-monopolist. The anti-monopolist argument, by itself, doesn’t philosophically justify abolishing capitalism. The alternative to any particular employment contract isn’t death because there are multiple employers.
To rule out capitalism decisively, the argument must be that employment itself inherently violates workers’ inalienable human rights
@jlou Sure, if you don't like one labor contract you can take another. But there is no meaningful alternative to taking one among the ones on offer.
And for as much as capitalism apologists talk about competition, in practice owners/managers cooperate to each other's benefit and to the detriment of workers.
@magitweeter @MikeDunnAuthor Many pro-capitalists agree with labor protections.
The grocery situation isn’t much different though. The pro-capitalist would argue the legal system doesn’t owe you a job with the exact terms you want. What employers are willing to pay and the conditions they offer is up to them according to them. As long as there is mutual consent, there is nothing wrong with capitalist between adults. The anti-capitalist response should be the inalienable rights argument.
If employers coordinate, that is monopsony, which pro-capitalists already object to. Thus this still isn’t a meaningfully anti-capitalist argument.
@jlou The burden of proof lies on the capitalist to provide the practical answer to monopoly.
The anti-capitalist has no such burden of proof, because it is not monopoly in itself that is a bad thing. It is capitalism that is founded in the goodness of competition. Depending on your flavor of anti-capitalism, monopoly can be either materially impossible or managed democratically by the whole of society.
All the arguments you’ve given for capitalism being bad so far have been dependent on monopoly and/or labor monopsony, so the anti-capitalist taking this line of reasoning would’ve to solve the problem they pick out with capitalism in their alternative.
Competition for resources is inherent to situations where resources are scarce. It isn’t particular to capitalism
@jlou Sure, but they're not based on the existence of monopoly itself. Only on its effects on the social good. Those are bad under capitalism specifically because of concentration that allows exploitation of workers by owners.
Consider: if the workers and the owners were the same people, no exploitation would occur, even under monopoly (of a single firm collectively owned by all of society).
@jlou I am skeptical by default of arguments that rely on human rights, because it takes a state to enforce rights. To make an argument against employment from human rights is to argue that the state should ban employment. And that's an absurdity. States are value-extraction machines, and it will never be in their interest to ban the institutions that enable value extraction.
Human rights don’t need a state. Human rights are a moral concept. How they ought to be protected is another question altogether.
Construing the employment contract’s abolition as a ban is misunderstanding the situation. The state’s legal system is the one that creates the employment contract. There are no factual transfers of possession that correspond to the legal transfers of property in an employment contract. Abolishing the employment contract is liberating.
@jlou Rights look good on paper, but the argument is not complete without the matter of enforcement. I don't oppose capitalism out of an abstract commitment to human rights. I oppose capitalism because it makes people's lives worse.
Employment contracts are no more, no less state-enforced than any other kind of contract. I don't get that part.
Making peoples’ lives worse = violating peoples’ rights and/or reducing their freedom
The state enforces the employers’ ownership of the firm’s whole product despite the whole product being in the workers’ de facto possession and control rather than labor being in the employer’s de facto possession. This is a mismatch between contractual and factual transfers. Here, the state enforces a contract as if it had been fulfilled despite it being unfulfillable even in principle.
Gun violence violates people’s right to life. What constitutes making people’s lives worse depends on the moral framework.
I don’t see how people’s moral rights are necessarily being trampled always.
You’re conflating the state’s system of rights with moral rights. The two concepts are different.
The state can violate people’s rights and it does so quite frequently. Anti-state arguments often appeal to rights arguments based on lack of consent to the social contract to delegitimize the state.
Well, I just don’t see why you believe that rights have to be enforced by the state. If I protect someone from violence, surely, I’ve protected their rights, but I’m not the state. Moral rights can fail to be enforced, and still be valid.
what you could oppose = you have a right to overrule
Consent is a consideration from rights-based deontological ethics. The Stanford encyclopedia of philosophy defines rights as:
“Rights are entitlements (not) to perform certain actions, or (not) to be in certain states; or entitlements that others (not) perform certain actions or (not) be in certain states.”
What would it mean for consent to be primitive here?
Rights aren’t a primitive notion. They’re always derived from moral principles. Also, there are rights that are non-transferable even with consent, so consent doesn’t capture all rights.
In metaethics, there are 3 types of ethical theories: rights-based/deontological, consequentialist and virtue ethics. Consent is from the rights-based/deontological tradition. There is no consent-focused ethical theory that isn’t rights-based.
The library owns the book’s future services. The person borrowing the book possesses and owns the current services of the book. In a contract to borrow or lease something, what is sold is ownership of a segment of the services of the thing.
The morally relevant difference is that in a firm inputs are used up to produce output. The responsibility for those transformations lies with the workers not solely with the employer.
How is it a legal fiction? I’m talking about moral rights to services here. The critique is of the current legal system.
Just because you have the moral rights to a segment of current services doesn’t mean you moral rights to services of the thing indefinitely into the future. If there was no distinction between owning a segment of the services and owning all future services, there would be no morally relevant difference between slavery and employment, which isn’t the case.
RE: https://mastodon.social/@jlou/115362021888042212
You already believe in moral rights if you argue in terms of consent. The reason doing certain things without consent is wrong is because it violates other people’s rights and doesn’t fulfill your obligation to respect other’s rights.
Examples of consent to delegate include a lawyer representing you and democratic worker cooperatives, while consent to alienate could be an employer-employee contract, slavery, and non-democratic governance.
The distinction lies in whether governing institutions or organizations are accountable to those governed and whether the governed can revoke and recall the governors/managers as their delegates. This comes from David Ellerman’s work on inalienable rights.
https://www.ellerman.org/inalienable-rights-part-i-the-basic-argument/
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