The Dialectics of Wage Slavery: Further Developed
(A person interested in Kevin Carson’s book, Studies in Mutualist Political Economy, can view it online at this link. It’s the source for my quotation below)
Bravo! For Brad Spangler’s attempt at innovation and subsequent libertarian reconciliation with the left in the controversial realm of the nature of wage work. I try to paint myself as a guy whose been influenced by the dialectical way of looking at things, so I hope to prove my credentials on that score by pointing out that Brad’s analysis is a dialectical one. If we employ the definition of dialectics as “the art of context keeping”, for which the New Yawker Chris Matthew Sciabarra is to be forever thanked for bringing to my attention, then the dialectical nature of Brad’s take becomes ever more clear. The point of Brad’s post was to point out the conflation of context with casualty. A leftist will typically assert that the “market” is to blame for the phenomenon of individuals having little choice in their place of employment, while the libertarian will say “Silly leftist! There is no need to complain because you are still choosing between a number of employment options, even if said opportunities are not so great”.
Well, I thought I was a wordy guy, but Brad makes a bid for the top spot of wordiness by making use of the word oligopsony which describes a situation where there are few buyers but loads of sellers. This is the word that he believes provides an accurate description of the current U.S. labor market. He makes a plea to libertarians and leftists alike to recognize the current labor market is artificially tight; due to regulatory cartelization on the part of the state that makes it harder to start a money-making business or productive endeavor. A dialectical thinker would be keen to keep this state tainted context in mind when examining these issues, and thus see that the current marketplace is not as conducive to choice as alleged orthodox “free market” thinkers might have you believe.
I wish to extend Brad’s analysis beyond the context of the limited number of opportunities of employment by others due to state intervention in the economy and focus on the limitations on the ability to be self-employed due to an artificial shortage of capital. The contemporary mutualist anarchist, Kevin Carson, has written on this issue and thus is worth quoting here:
In every system of class exploitation, a ruling class controls access to the means of production in order to extract tribute from labor. The landlord monopoly, which we examined in the last section, is one example of this principle. And until the nineteenth century, the control of land was probably the single most important form of privilege by which labor was forced to accept less than its product as a wage. But in industrial capitalism, arguably, the importance of landlordism has been surpassed in importance by the money monopoly. Under that latter form of privilege, the state’s licensing of banks, capitalization requirements, and other market entry barriers enable banks to charge a monopoly price for loans in the form of usurious interest rates. Thus, labor’s access to capital is restricted, and labor is forced to pay tribute in the form of artificially high interest rates.
If you are forced to pay high rates of interest when seeking to obtain capital for which to go into business for yourself than the likelihood of being able to do so is drastically decreased. Furthermore; a smaller number of individuals will have the ability to work for themselves and thus self-employment will not be as realistic of an alternative to being employed by someone else. This context is also a creation of the state and must be overcome; if people are ever to have a more reasonable ability to be self-employed.
An awareness of these two state created contexts should be kept in mind when reading leftist literature that is replete with the loaded term “wage slavery”. It may not be the apex of intellectual preciseness to identify the term wages — since you can receive wages without being in the bondage of slavery — with the horror of slavery, yet it does capture the rotten emotional state that many individuals may feel when they are faced with one drudgery after another, as a means of making a living. It’s a term suited for people who want to express passionate outrage; if there ever was one.
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Natasha | Labor, LeftLibertarian.org, Libertarian Left, Libertarianism
Great post Nick.
Have you read Shwarz’s What Is Mutualism? The section on money has gotten me thinking more and more how absolutely ridiculous it is that we’re all forced into accepting a debt-ridden currency as something of value. And meanwhile paying interest, either directly in the case of loans, or indirectly within the price of things produced by people who’ve taken the loans, so that others can profit by spreading around more debt. I don’t think the term wage slavery is far off, but between the interest paid to a very small group of people and taxes it certainly seems like we’re all in a plantation economy.
Great post Nick. I think the point should be made that even under Anarchy, some interest on capital will be high, but this will be due to risk, not the money monopoly you describe.
I think part of the solution is a self-organized, micro-loan, micro-payment cooperative banks, like the women of Uganda have done. This seems like agorism in practice.
Mike Park from LL2
Thanks for the link, Nick. As Mike says, in a free market regime there is likely to be a major shift from profit on capital as such, to entrepreneurial profit based on risk and on superior power power to anticipate demand. And without entry barriers to enable someone to draw rents off of a single innovation indefinitely, the only way to keep getting rich is to keep innovating.