@MikeDunnAuthor

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.

@jlou

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.

@MikeDunnAuthor

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.

@MikeDunnAuthor

@magitweeter @MikeDunnAuthor

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 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.

@MikeDunnAuthor

@magitweeter @MikeDunnAuthor

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.

@magitweeter

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.

@magitweeter

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.

@magitweeter

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.