would the adjustment of 'most employment is inherently slavery' satisfy your pedanticism? economic enslavement is ubiquitous and not at all how it must be.
No. It's still a claim grounded in rhetoric rather than reason. It's the lack of anything but rhetoric that bugs me, not the specific wording.
I mean, look, one could perhaps make such a claim, and make a reasoned case for it. The article doesn't do that. It doesn't even try. It merely defines work to be slavery, and quotes some people who agree. That's not proof, not evidence, and not very convincing. It's just rhetoric.
So the author dogmatically makes an assertion. That and a buck will get you a Coke at McDonald's. If you want me to listen, though, you're going to have to do a lot better than that.
[Edit: The article did give some reasons. They're dogmatic generalizations that are so far removed from my experience of work that I completely dismissed them as mere rhetoric.]
True slaves can't quit. While most people do need SOME form of employment to provide income, changing jobs or working for yourself are both options that are available.
if you work as a software engineer pretty much by definition you are part of a tiny, tiny minority of workers in the world, so perhaps you should try thinking about the experience of workers in the third world via empathy?
Funny, for a load of bullshit the article offered a much more detailed explanation of their thesis than you have of yours.
Don't you understand that we all inherently have blind spots based on where we come from? The idea that work has to be alright because everyone does it is exactly what people used to say about slavery and overt subjugation of women. People still say it's bullshit that we should concern ourselves with the environmental impacts of what we do.
It's easy to call something bullshit, but philosophers for centuries have suggested that wage labor is better described as wage slavery. It is a legitimate idea and one worth considering. You're quick to dismiss the idea but slow to provide alternative suggestions for how we might be able to end the forced misery of the working class.
> Don't you understand that we all inherently have blind spots based on where we come from?
I sure do. You might have them, too.
> philosophers for centuries have suggested that wage labor is better described as wage slavery.
I'm sure they have. That doesn't make it "a legitimate idea and one worth considering". Philosophers have said lots of other things over the years, too, many of them patently absurd. You need a better proof than "(some) philosophers have said it".
Can we make work better than it is? Probably yes. Does over-the-top rhetoric make it more likely to happen? No, it makes it less likely. It just gets you classified as a Marxist shill, and regarded as already discredited. If you want anything to actually change, screaming out absurd overheated rhetoric isn't a path likely to succeed. Instead, it gets you ignored.
Marx and Engels are hugely influential and popular philosophers. The idea of "wage slavery" is a pretty common and legitimate one. Just because you think it is "over the top" doesn't make it not a legitimate view.
Without a doubt, Marx and Engels have been hugely influential in the deaths and enslavement of countless millions over the past century. They have indeed been among the most popular philosophers for several of the most murderous tyrants in human history. A member of my immediate family learned about the evils of "wage slavery" in "classes" taught by Marxists at the Chinese work camp where he was a slave without wages.
I don't know that the term "legitimate" has any real meaning, but when it comes to making a useful contribution, I suspect that Marxist theory will make about the same contribution to employment that it has made to agriculture, industrial production, journalism, civil liberties....
That is guilt by association and not really a meaningful argument though. Marx and Engels are used all the time in literary criticism, gender studies, sociology. You just seem to have a really big bone to pick with Marxists.
Actually yes, I do consider the horrific, mass atrocities committed by Marxists in the name of Marxism to be relevant to the credibility of Marxism in just the same way that I consider similar consequences when Nazis came to power to discredit their political theories. And, you make a good point about additional fields of Marxist influence: Marxist agriculture's contribution to the food supply, Marxist industry's contribution to national productivity, Marxist political officers on staff at State newspapers and their contribution to journalism, AND literary criticism and gender studies' contribution to academics and free speech on campus.
Marxism has influenced so many fields wherever it has gone, and if you like what it has done to these fields, it's reasonable to assume that it could have a similar impact on paid employment arrangements.
For me, though, that's not an encouraging thought. I've seen enough of the destruction that results when Marxist theory is applied to real people to conclude that whatever the problems with paid employment, good answers will not come from Marxism.
There are so many ways to argue against this article. The fact that the person you responded to didn't go into as much detail as the author is just because the author spent a lot of time writing all of this nonsense down. Here are a few arguments against the author:
1) The argument that an employee is a 'slave' and 'dominated' by the employer would work the other way, as well. The author says "A worker must obey the boss, or ultimately lose the job." You could say this about the reverse, too: "A boss must obey his worker, or ultimately the worker will quit" If the boss fires the worker, the worker has to find a new job. If the worker quits, the boss has to find a new worker. Now, there are a lot of good arguments as to why the power dynamic is not equal between a worker and a boss, but it isn't an a priori fact like this author makes it seem.
2) The ideas about value are non-sensical. No one argues that things have a universal agreed upon value, nor does economics rely on that idea. Yes, the value of something varies from person to person, but that very fact is what allows an economy to function at all! If everything had equal value to everyone, then no one would ever make any transaction. The value of something TO A PARTICULAR PERSON is exactly equal to what they would be willing to trade for it. The idea that "In a barter system, for an exchange to be fair, the value of the exchanged goods and services must be equal. However, value is unknowable, therefore barter falls apart on practical grounds" is totally not true. Each person knows exactly what they are willing to trade for some good r service. In fact, this idea is non-sensical just from observation; obviously barter does not fall apart on practical grounds, because every single society on earth practices it. Put a group of people together with some goods, and a barter economy will develop. See any prison for an example.
These are just two examples of the ridiculousness of the author's argument. There are countless more.
Most people have to work to survive. That's the "slavery" part of it, and it is currently inherent to employment. Let me choose whether to work or not while retaining the same quality of life as anyone else and I won't think of it that way.
This is probably the dumbest thing I've read today. The difference between a worker and a slave is clearly at the end of the day, the worker has more money than at the start, and can exercise buying power over whatever he or she wants to do, including retiring and leaving the company.
This is basically just communism re-wrapped as "changing work."
'at the end of the day, the worker has more money than at the start, and can exercise buying power over whatever he or she wants to do'
This is only true for the subset of workers that have disposable income, mind.
Imagine a graph of 'work-related expenses' against 'hours worked'. Simplified example for a general job. Say a bus driver.
At zero hours, it's nil. At one hour, it would rocket (you need to either live close to, or commute to your workplace).
Then it remains fairly static for a while.
As the hours creep up, your ability to manage your life outside of work decreases and so convenience purchases enter the equation as a work-related expense.
Imagine you own a car. Previously you might have been able to learn and work on it yourself. Or just not fix it if it breaks. With a job, you may now need to pay for a mechanic. And so on and so forth.
"Whatever you want to do" is fairly limited in the case that you have barely any disposable income.
It's true that you might be better off than not working. But not really in the monetary sense. More that your preferences* (i.e. location) and the employers's preferences happen to align and you can gain something.
What if debt means they don't have more money then the start? What if they can't possibly retire or leave due to financial burdens? Surely you can be a slave without the threat of violence, by just not having any other option to survive?
As a tangent to my other post; 'more than the start' can take other forms than money and often does.
It might be that your employment requires that you own a car, and that without the employment you wouldn't need one and couldn't afford to run one anyway.
So the car can be considered a cost of employment. A business expense (though not tax-deductible).
The side benefit is that you now have use of a car on the weekends. That doesn't really help you with retiring, though it perhaps improves your quality of life.
I say it like it's far from an extreme or outlying view in the wider sweep of history. The idea that just about everybody should be an employee is a very recent one
>This is basically just communism re-wrapped as "changing work."
You say that like it's a bad thing. Anarchism historically has always been libertarian communism. It was Marx who paired authoritarianism and communism into the ideology that drove almost all the worst despots of the 20th century.
It appears you are either a big fan of Bakunin, have a poor understanding of Marx in history, or simply suffer a grossly inaccurate understanding of Marx's political theory.
Marx most certainly did not pair authoritarianism and communism. Ever. You speak of a mythical version of Marx's conception of the state in particular, and Marxist theory in general. This mythical yarn was spun by Soviets--and other despots and their followers--who were desperate to dress themselves in Marxist garb, as well as Western powers desperate to discredit Marxist theory and drum up national opposition in response to feeling threatened by it.
Marx advocated the use of a state to transition society to a stateless condition. This period of socialism, the dictatorship of the proletariat, is the authoritarian streak that led to the Marx/Bakunin break.
Lenin, and probably others, advocated for the use of a state to transition, not Marx. The dictatorship of the proletariate is a transitional period when the proletariates take over the means of production through revolution. There are still classes at this point, hence transition, but the ruling class is the working class. In other words, a "dictatorship" of the many and not the few.
As far as the split goes, it was a lot more involved than just one issue. The problem you are referring to, however, had more to do with using politics of the time in order to motivate workers which they both understood in many parts of Europe were not ready for what they wanted. Marxist were ok with participating in politics, Bakunin was not. They both agreed though that real change would come from an uprising of people and not through political action.
Again, your understanding of Marxist political theory is grossly inaccurate. This is [still] the mythical version of Marxism that was parroted by Soviets, [at least some] Chinese, and Western powers for their own ends--be it masquerading as "true" Marxists, or scaring the shit out of people into seeing Marxism/socialism/communism, instead of its authoritarian practitioners, as "evil". You also appear to misunderstand entirely Marx's conception of the dictatorship of the proletariat. It was in no way authoritarian in any of Marx's explications of the idea.
Marx was--in his political theory, as well as his political activity--focused on defending and advancing the idea of democratic authority of the general interests of the masses. He did not, unlike Bakunin and others, view the masses as mere cannon fodder--Bakunin actually called them this--to throw at standing power to succeed in revolutionary overthrow. Moreover, Marx ardently and unfailingly argued and advocated that the ultimate end, with regard to the masses, was to teach them to walk by themselves, eschewing the bureaucratic regulation through which they are taught from childhood onward to believe in and acquiesce to the authority of those set over them. Workers are to engage the process of self-emancipation through taking charge of and reorganizing society--through bottom-up democratic means. Bakunin and others, on the other hand, argued that teaching the people anything was stupid, and they should merely be convinced to revolt. To this, Marx once wrote that inciting workers without offering them any guiding ideas or constructive self-emancipatory doctrine was "equivalent to vain dishonest play at preaching which assumes an inspired prophet on the one side and on the other only the gaping asses."[1]
Writing during his time of participating in the International, Marx believed it “the business of the International Working Men’s Association to combine and generalize the spontaneous movements of the working classes, but not to dictate or impose any doctrinary system whatever.”[2] He vehemently opposed the moves by Bakunin and others to create secretive, autonomous groups within the International, because such a group “is opposed to the development of the proletarian movement because, instead of instructing the workers, these societies subject them to authoritarian, mystical laws which cramp their independence and distort their powers of reason.”[3] Marx explained to Wilhelm Blos that when he and Engels joined the Communist League, they “did so only on condition that anything conducive to a superstitious belief in authority be eliminated from the Rules.”[4]
The dictatorship of the proletariat is a bottom-up democratic seizure of power. Marx did not have any problem playing politics. He just wanted to see the workers in control of politics, instead of it residing in the hands of capitalists and their elitist servants who would use political power to perpetuate the alienation and division of workers, thus preserving the privileged status of those with capital within the social and political system. Of course, this is also heavily integrated with taking control of the means of production and placing it into the hands of the working masses, as tarentel mentions in a sibling comment. Nevertheless, you are imbuing Marx's notion of "dictatorship of the proletariat" with post-Marx, 20th-century infused notions of dictatorship--that is, authoritarian rule of one (or few) over all.
Feel free to say if you are still convinced of the rightness of your inaccurate understanding and I will offer more explanation.
[EDIT]: For full disclosure, the particular arc and inclusion of quoted items 2-4 is borrowed from David Adam's "Marx, Bakunin, and the question of authoritarianism"[5]. It got directly to the bits I wanted to cover, and saved me the time of having to comb back through my own library to find the relevant quotes I was looking for.
The US economy has never had a strong demand for lazy people. You work for a wage because you are to lazy to figure out for your self how to build something or sell something. "But how are you supposed to pay the rent?" - Well now you are starting to think...
"The only major differences between a slave and a worker is that a worker is only a slave at work while a slave is a slave twenty-four hours a day"
I'm not a fan of the slave comparison in this context because the word has meaning beyond 'loss of self-determination'.
Moving beyond that, though - it is certainly untrue that a worker only loses self-determination while at work.
What you do, and where you are, during the most productive hours of your life fundamentally shapes you as a person.
It impacts on where you live. It impacts on activities outside of work, because units of time are not fungible. You're less rested, you're restricted to things that can happen after 5pm, etcetera.
"nature does not produce on the one hand owners of money or commodities, and on the other hand men possessing nothing but their own labour-power...[this] is clearly the result of a past historical development..."
Hacker News is a site full of entrepreneurs extolling the virtues of hard work and doing four years' work in one year's time -- how can this be so popular?
Because Hacker News is also filled with software engineers, and we know better than most that automation is going to force us all, as a society, to philosophize about work and the nature and purpose of it all.
A Universal Basic Income could change the relationship to work so that people had the free time they needed to get educated, practice, and then come to markets with real value to contribute. We are transitioning to an excellence oriented society that tolerates gaps so that bursts of socially valuable creativity might be captured.
I did not know wage slavery was a controversial term.
Money is a tool of control, how do you earn money without being controlled by others and following their standards?
How do you spend money without controlling others? Like you donate someone a blanket, that's their burden now and they can be fined for littering if they don't take care of it properly.
We are tightly controlled and tightly control others. The consequences range from minor inconveniences to death.
Death and violence are less frequent per capita, but the threat and control remains.
Freedom and control are both illusions.
I'm free to quit and starve. All the food and land is owned.
The term is not controversial, but taking it seriously is, unless you're an anarchist and already assume that all societal constructs are attempts at coercion or slavery to begin with.
I would argue that such a definition dilutes terms like 'slavery' or 'coercion' to the point that they become nearly meaningless.
Is this discussion we're having right now really worth considering a form of slavery? Am I attempting to control you, or are you attempting to control me? In this context, can it even be argued that language itself is an act of violence, or that there is even anything wrong with slavery, if it defines human interaction at so many fundamental levels?
After all anarchy itself is a societal construct, with commonly accepted norms, accepted practices, attitudes, cults of personality. What would happen in a perfect anarchist society when someone inevitably questioned anarchy?
The article is nice. But the point about bartering is wrong. The argument seems to go like this:
- Each thing has a different value based on the person judging it.
- Therefore, we cannot barter.
This is unfounded: The subjectivity of value does not make bartering impossible. Bartering is possible if one judges their own work to have less value or equal value to some other work that they are willing to exchange it for; and vice-versa.
However, I agree with the article that bartering may be undesirable; but the value argument is incorrect.
This was one of the worst parts of the article (there were lots of bad parts). The fact that different people place different values on the same object is WHY bartering works at all. If there was a specific value for every object, and everyone agreed on exactly what that value was, then no one would ever trade anything.
I feel like the author of this post does not understand basic economic theory.
This sure stuck a stick in this hive of libertarianism! A better-argued, and far less earnestly argued position is Ellerman's, from "The Libertarian Case for Slavery."
Interesting article but it fails to answer the basic question, "why do anything at all?"
The obvious answer is that one must do something to stay alive, such as gather food. It's how animals, or more accurately, heterotrophs, live. They find things to eat and try to eat them.
Humans lived like this for a long, long, time.
But then people specialized in things, some learned to grow plants and domesticate animals, others built structures, some specialized in warfare, and so on.
Specialization, which allowed people to become more proficient at a smaller set of activities, came with a price - peole now had to work together because they were no longer self-sufficient. This meant either banding together consciously, for example a tribe, where duties could be allocated somewhat equally, or trading one's specialties for those of another's. Barter was a worthy first stab at trade, but eventually people found using a proxy - a medium of exchange - much easier. A purse full of coins was much handier than dragging around one's flock of sheep.
Then came things such as contracts, courts, and all the other baggage of a money-oriented society.
This is not to say I agree with the conflation of one's job with one's identity - and maybe in a society that doesn't need everyone to hold a job such questions may become passé or perhaps even become categorized as "too personal", as we consider questions about one's politics or religion.
But back to my original question - the writer didn't seem to consider the trivial case of those who choose to do nothing beneficial for others or themselves. Again, maybe in a world where work is optional that might be moot - but I know several people who would do nothing but eat, drink, sleep, play video games, and breed like rabbits. It's hard to imagine any society being able to produce enough food to keep a rapidly multiplying cohort of parasites fed. And then what?
And yet we have hospitals full of health workers, schools full of teachers, and penniless artists and musicians - none of whom chose to maximise their earning potential on wall st or wherever but rather to contribute to society in some way that they felt drawn to
I promise to shut up after this. The writer also has a false idea about value and worth. I say the answer is very simple - the value of a thing lies in how much someone is willing to pay for it. That seems circular, but recursive might describe it more accurately. We use a construct known as a market to describe the process.
1) someone (whom we'll call the producer) brings a thing to the market, offering it for a price. Usually the price equals what it cost to produce the things plus a little extra, which we'll call "profit" because it sounds cool.
2) if someone else (we'll call them the consumer) pays the price, then maybe the price of the next item will rise, or maybe it won't.
3) if no one pays the price before the producer runs out of patience, then the producer might lower the price or maybe they'll leave.
4) steps 1-3 continue until everyone is satisfied or runs of of patience.
57 comments
[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 108 ms ] threadI mean, look, one could perhaps make such a claim, and make a reasoned case for it. The article doesn't do that. It doesn't even try. It merely defines work to be slavery, and quotes some people who agree. That's not proof, not evidence, and not very convincing. It's just rhetoric.
So the author dogmatically makes an assertion. That and a buck will get you a Coke at McDonald's. If you want me to listen, though, you're going to have to do a lot better than that.
[Edit: The article did give some reasons. They're dogmatic generalizations that are so far removed from my experience of work that I completely dismissed them as mere rhetoric.]
The article lays out a perspective. You dont have to agree with that perspective but you sure need to do better than keep saying its not true.
To SOME. available to SOME.
Don't you understand that we all inherently have blind spots based on where we come from? The idea that work has to be alright because everyone does it is exactly what people used to say about slavery and overt subjugation of women. People still say it's bullshit that we should concern ourselves with the environmental impacts of what we do.
It's easy to call something bullshit, but philosophers for centuries have suggested that wage labor is better described as wage slavery. It is a legitimate idea and one worth considering. You're quick to dismiss the idea but slow to provide alternative suggestions for how we might be able to end the forced misery of the working class.
I sure do. You might have them, too.
> philosophers for centuries have suggested that wage labor is better described as wage slavery.
I'm sure they have. That doesn't make it "a legitimate idea and one worth considering". Philosophers have said lots of other things over the years, too, many of them patently absurd. You need a better proof than "(some) philosophers have said it".
Can we make work better than it is? Probably yes. Does over-the-top rhetoric make it more likely to happen? No, it makes it less likely. It just gets you classified as a Marxist shill, and regarded as already discredited. If you want anything to actually change, screaming out absurd overheated rhetoric isn't a path likely to succeed. Instead, it gets you ignored.
I don't know that the term "legitimate" has any real meaning, but when it comes to making a useful contribution, I suspect that Marxist theory will make about the same contribution to employment that it has made to agriculture, industrial production, journalism, civil liberties....
Marxism has influenced so many fields wherever it has gone, and if you like what it has done to these fields, it's reasonable to assume that it could have a similar impact on paid employment arrangements.
For me, though, that's not an encouraging thought. I've seen enough of the destruction that results when Marxist theory is applied to real people to conclude that whatever the problems with paid employment, good answers will not come from Marxism.
1) The argument that an employee is a 'slave' and 'dominated' by the employer would work the other way, as well. The author says "A worker must obey the boss, or ultimately lose the job." You could say this about the reverse, too: "A boss must obey his worker, or ultimately the worker will quit" If the boss fires the worker, the worker has to find a new job. If the worker quits, the boss has to find a new worker. Now, there are a lot of good arguments as to why the power dynamic is not equal between a worker and a boss, but it isn't an a priori fact like this author makes it seem.
2) The ideas about value are non-sensical. No one argues that things have a universal agreed upon value, nor does economics rely on that idea. Yes, the value of something varies from person to person, but that very fact is what allows an economy to function at all! If everything had equal value to everyone, then no one would ever make any transaction. The value of something TO A PARTICULAR PERSON is exactly equal to what they would be willing to trade for it. The idea that "In a barter system, for an exchange to be fair, the value of the exchanged goods and services must be equal. However, value is unknowable, therefore barter falls apart on practical grounds" is totally not true. Each person knows exactly what they are willing to trade for some good r service. In fact, this idea is non-sensical just from observation; obviously barter does not fall apart on practical grounds, because every single society on earth practices it. Put a group of people together with some goods, and a barter economy will develop. See any prison for an example.
These are just two examples of the ridiculousness of the author's argument. There are countless more.
This is basically just communism re-wrapped as "changing work."
This is only true for the subset of workers that have disposable income, mind.
Imagine a graph of 'work-related expenses' against 'hours worked'. Simplified example for a general job. Say a bus driver.
At zero hours, it's nil. At one hour, it would rocket (you need to either live close to, or commute to your workplace).
Then it remains fairly static for a while.
As the hours creep up, your ability to manage your life outside of work decreases and so convenience purchases enter the equation as a work-related expense.
Imagine you own a car. Previously you might have been able to learn and work on it yourself. Or just not fix it if it breaks. With a job, you may now need to pay for a mechanic. And so on and so forth.
"Whatever you want to do" is fairly limited in the case that you have barely any disposable income.
It's true that you might be better off than not working. But not really in the monetary sense. More that your preferences* (i.e. location) and the employers's preferences happen to align and you can gain something.
It might be that your employment requires that you own a car, and that without the employment you wouldn't need one and couldn't afford to run one anyway.
So the car can be considered a cost of employment. A business expense (though not tax-deductible).
The side benefit is that you now have use of a car on the weekends. That doesn't really help you with retiring, though it perhaps improves your quality of life.
Even the Stoics regarded working for money as a form of slavery
You say this like we'd expect the Stoics to be especially unlikely to regard something as a form of slavery. I don't know that to be true. Is it?
[1]: http://fourhourworkweek.com/2009/04/13/stoicism-101-a-practi...
[2]: http://www.entrepreneur.com/article/238146
[3]: http://mfishbein.com/stoicism-entrepreneurship/
You say that like it's a bad thing. Anarchism historically has always been libertarian communism. It was Marx who paired authoritarianism and communism into the ideology that drove almost all the worst despots of the 20th century.
Marx most certainly did not pair authoritarianism and communism. Ever. You speak of a mythical version of Marx's conception of the state in particular, and Marxist theory in general. This mythical yarn was spun by Soviets--and other despots and their followers--who were desperate to dress themselves in Marxist garb, as well as Western powers desperate to discredit Marxist theory and drum up national opposition in response to feeling threatened by it.
As far as the split goes, it was a lot more involved than just one issue. The problem you are referring to, however, had more to do with using politics of the time in order to motivate workers which they both understood in many parts of Europe were not ready for what they wanted. Marxist were ok with participating in politics, Bakunin was not. They both agreed though that real change would come from an uprising of people and not through political action.
Marx was--in his political theory, as well as his political activity--focused on defending and advancing the idea of democratic authority of the general interests of the masses. He did not, unlike Bakunin and others, view the masses as mere cannon fodder--Bakunin actually called them this--to throw at standing power to succeed in revolutionary overthrow. Moreover, Marx ardently and unfailingly argued and advocated that the ultimate end, with regard to the masses, was to teach them to walk by themselves, eschewing the bureaucratic regulation through which they are taught from childhood onward to believe in and acquiesce to the authority of those set over them. Workers are to engage the process of self-emancipation through taking charge of and reorganizing society--through bottom-up democratic means. Bakunin and others, on the other hand, argued that teaching the people anything was stupid, and they should merely be convinced to revolt. To this, Marx once wrote that inciting workers without offering them any guiding ideas or constructive self-emancipatory doctrine was "equivalent to vain dishonest play at preaching which assumes an inspired prophet on the one side and on the other only the gaping asses."[1]
Writing during his time of participating in the International, Marx believed it “the business of the International Working Men’s Association to combine and generalize the spontaneous movements of the working classes, but not to dictate or impose any doctrinary system whatever.”[2] He vehemently opposed the moves by Bakunin and others to create secretive, autonomous groups within the International, because such a group “is opposed to the development of the proletarian movement because, instead of instructing the workers, these societies subject them to authoritarian, mystical laws which cramp their independence and distort their powers of reason.”[3] Marx explained to Wilhelm Blos that when he and Engels joined the Communist League, they “did so only on condition that anything conducive to a superstitious belief in authority be eliminated from the Rules.”[4]
The dictatorship of the proletariat is a bottom-up democratic seizure of power. Marx did not have any problem playing politics. He just wanted to see the workers in control of politics, instead of it residing in the hands of capitalists and their elitist servants who would use political power to perpetuate the alienation and division of workers, thus preserving the privileged status of those with capital within the social and political system. Of course, this is also heavily integrated with taking control of the means of production and placing it into the hands of the working masses, as tarentel mentions in a sibling comment. Nevertheless, you are imbuing Marx's notion of "dictatorship of the proletariat" with post-Marx, 20th-century infused notions of dictatorship--that is, authoritarian rule of one (or few) over all.
Feel free to say if you are still convinced of the rightness of your inaccurate understanding and I will offer more explanation.
[EDIT]: For full disclosure, the particular arc and inclusion of quoted items 2-4 is borrowed from David Adam's "Marx, Bakunin, and the question of authoritarianism"[5]. It got directly to the bits I wanted to cover, and saved me the time of having to comb back through my own library to find the relevant quotes I was looking for.
[1]: Franc...
I'm not a fan of the slave comparison in this context because the word has meaning beyond 'loss of self-determination'.
Moving beyond that, though - it is certainly untrue that a worker only loses self-determination while at work.
What you do, and where you are, during the most productive hours of your life fundamentally shapes you as a person.
It impacts on where you live. It impacts on activities outside of work, because units of time are not fungible. You're less rested, you're restricted to things that can happen after 5pm, etcetera.
It was written in 2011. Why front page today? Is this genuinely a popular idea or is HN being manipulated somehow?
Money is a tool of control, how do you earn money without being controlled by others and following their standards?
How do you spend money without controlling others? Like you donate someone a blanket, that's their burden now and they can be fined for littering if they don't take care of it properly.
We are tightly controlled and tightly control others. The consequences range from minor inconveniences to death.
Death and violence are less frequent per capita, but the threat and control remains.
Freedom and control are both illusions.
I'm free to quit and starve. All the food and land is owned.
What else would they be?
How do you have a societal construct that isn't coerced?
Voluntary participation of 100% of participants ....
Is this discussion we're having right now really worth considering a form of slavery? Am I attempting to control you, or are you attempting to control me? In this context, can it even be argued that language itself is an act of violence, or that there is even anything wrong with slavery, if it defines human interaction at so many fundamental levels?
After all anarchy itself is a societal construct, with commonly accepted norms, accepted practices, attitudes, cults of personality. What would happen in a perfect anarchist society when someone inevitably questioned anarchy?
- Each thing has a different value based on the person judging it. - Therefore, we cannot barter.
This is unfounded: The subjectivity of value does not make bartering impossible. Bartering is possible if one judges their own work to have less value or equal value to some other work that they are willing to exchange it for; and vice-versa.
However, I agree with the article that bartering may be undesirable; but the value argument is incorrect.
I feel like the author of this post does not understand basic economic theory.
The obvious answer is that one must do something to stay alive, such as gather food. It's how animals, or more accurately, heterotrophs, live. They find things to eat and try to eat them.
Humans lived like this for a long, long, time.
But then people specialized in things, some learned to grow plants and domesticate animals, others built structures, some specialized in warfare, and so on.
Specialization, which allowed people to become more proficient at a smaller set of activities, came with a price - peole now had to work together because they were no longer self-sufficient. This meant either banding together consciously, for example a tribe, where duties could be allocated somewhat equally, or trading one's specialties for those of another's. Barter was a worthy first stab at trade, but eventually people found using a proxy - a medium of exchange - much easier. A purse full of coins was much handier than dragging around one's flock of sheep.
Then came things such as contracts, courts, and all the other baggage of a money-oriented society.
This is not to say I agree with the conflation of one's job with one's identity - and maybe in a society that doesn't need everyone to hold a job such questions may become passé or perhaps even become categorized as "too personal", as we consider questions about one's politics or religion.
But back to my original question - the writer didn't seem to consider the trivial case of those who choose to do nothing beneficial for others or themselves. Again, maybe in a world where work is optional that might be moot - but I know several people who would do nothing but eat, drink, sleep, play video games, and breed like rabbits. It's hard to imagine any society being able to produce enough food to keep a rapidly multiplying cohort of parasites fed. And then what?
1) someone (whom we'll call the producer) brings a thing to the market, offering it for a price. Usually the price equals what it cost to produce the things plus a little extra, which we'll call "profit" because it sounds cool. 2) if someone else (we'll call them the consumer) pays the price, then maybe the price of the next item will rise, or maybe it won't. 3) if no one pays the price before the producer runs out of patience, then the producer might lower the price or maybe they'll leave. 4) steps 1-3 continue until everyone is satisfied or runs of of patience.
As someone who has struggled to find enjoyment at a job working on products I didn’t believe in, I found this line particularly poignant.