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Title: Contract Feudalism
Author: Kevin Carson
Date: 2006
Language: en
Topics: contract feudalism
Source: Retrieved 07/20/2022 from https://c4ss.org/content/12614
Notes: Originally published in the 2006 issue of Economic Notes No. 105 by the Libertarian Alliance.

Kevin Carson

Contract Feudalism

What is “Contract Feudalism”?

Elizabeth Anderson recently coined the term “contract feudalism” to

describe the increasing power of employers over employees’ lives outside

the workplace.

According to Anderson, one of the benefits that the worker traditionally

received in return for his submission to the bosses’ authority on the

job was sovereignty over the rest of his life in the “real world”

outside of work. Under the terms of this Taylorist bargain, the worker

surrendered his sense of craftsmanship and control over his own work in

return for the right to express his “real” personality through

consumption in the part of his life that still belonged to him. This

bargain assumed,

the separation of work from the home. However arbitrary and abusive the

boss may have been on the factory floor, when work was over the workers

could at least escape his tyranny… [T]he separation of work from home

made a big difference to workers’ liberty from their employers’

wills.[1]

Wage labor, traditionally, has involved a devil’s bargain in which you

“sell your life in order to live”: you cut off the eight or twelve hours

you spend at work and flush them down the toilet, in order to get the

money you need to support your real life in the real world, where you’re

treated like an adult human being. And out in the real world, where your

judgment and values actually matter, you try to pretend that that other

hellhole doesn’t exist.

At the same time, Anderson points out, this separation of work from home

depends entirely on the relative bargaining power of labor for its

enforcement. (I’ll return to this, the central issue, later on.)

The Shift in Power

But it’s apparent that the bargaining power of labor is shifting

radically away from workers. For all too many employers, the traditional

devil’s bargain is no longer good enough. Employers (especially in the

service sector) are coming to view not only the employee’s laborpower

during work hours, but the employee himself as their property. White

collar and service workers are expected to live on-call 24 hours a day:

that thing they used to call “home” is just the shelf they’re stored on

when their owner isn’t using them at the moment. And the boss has a

claim on what they do even during the time they’re not on the clock: the

political meetings you attend, whether you smoke, the things you write

on your blog — nothing is really yours. Most people who blog on

political or social issues, probably, fear what might turn up if the

Human Resources Gestapo do a Google on them. As for the job search

itself — good God! You’ve got to account for every week you’ve ever

spent unemployed, and justify what use you made of your time without a

master. If you were ever self-employed, you might be considered

“overqualified”: That is, there’s a danger you might not quite have your

mind right, because you don’t need the job badly enough. Not to mention

the questions about why you left your past job, the personality

profiling to determine if you’re concealing any non-Stepford Wife

opinions behind a facade of obedience, etc… It’s probably a lot like the

tests of “political reliability” to join the old Soviet Communist Party.

Examples of contract feudalism have been especially prominent in the

news lately. The example Anderson herself provided was of Michigan-based

Weyco, whose president forbade his workers to smoke “not just at work

but anywhere else.” The policy, taken in response to rising cost of

health coverage, required workers to submit to nicotine tests.[2]

Another recent example of “contract feudalism” is the saga of Joe

Gordon, owner of the Woolamaloo Gazette blog, who was fired from the

Waterstone’s bookstore chain when it came to his bosses’ attention that

he’d made the occasional venting post after a particularly bad day at

work.[3]

Yet another is a National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) ruling that

allowed employers to prohibit employees from hanging out off the job.

Here is the gist of it, from a Harold Meyerson piece at the Washington

Post:

On June 7 the three Republican appointees on the five-member board that

regulates employer/employee relations in the United States handed down a

remarkable ruling that expands the rights of employers to muck around in

their workers’ lives when they’re off the job. They upheld the legality

of a regulation for uniformed employees at Guardsmark, a security guard

company, that reads, “[Y]ou must NOT… fraternize on duty or off duty,

date or become overly friendly with the client’s employees or with

co-employees.”[4]

The “Vulgar Libertarian” Response and its Errors

Many free market libertarians instinctively respond to complaints about

such policies by rallying around the employer. One commenter, for

example, said this in response to Elizabeth Anderson’s post at

Left2Right blog: “It’s a free market. If you don’t like your employer’s

rules, then work somewhere else.” One of the most common libertarian

defenses of sweatshops, likewise, is that they must be better than the

available alternatives, since nobody is forced to work there.

Well, yes and no. The question is, who sets the range of available

alternatives? If the state limits the range of alternatives available to

labor and weakens its bargaining power in the labor market, and it acts

in collusion with employers in doing so, then the “free market” defense

of employers is somewhat disingenuous.

I use the term “vulgar libertarian” to describe this “What’s good for

General Motors” understanding of “free market” principles, which

identifies the free market with the interests of employers against

workers, big business against small, and the producer against the

consumer. As I described it in Studies in Mutualist Political

Economy:[5]

Vulgar libertarian apologists for capitalism use the term “free market”

in an equivocal sense: they seem to have trouble remembering, from one

moment to the next, whether they’re defending actually existing

capitalism or free market principles. So we get [a] standard boilerplate

article… arguing that the rich can’t get rich at the expense of the

poor, because “that’s not how the free market works” — implicitly

assuming that this is a free market. When prodded, they’ll grudgingly

admit that the present system is not a free market, and that it includes

a lot of state intervention on behalf of the rich. But as soon as they

think they can get away with it, they go right back to defending the

wealth of existing corporations on the basis of “free market

principles.”

The fact is, this is not a free market. It’s a state capitalist system

in which (as Murray Rothbard put it in “The Student Revolution”) “our

corporate state uses the coercive taxing power either to accumulate

corporate capital or to lower corporate costs.”[6] As Benjamin Tucker

wrote over a century ago:

… It is not enough, however true, to say that, “if a man has labor to

sell, he must find some one with money to buy it”; it is necessary to

add the much more important truth that, if a man has labor to sell, he

has a right to a free market in which to sell it, — a market in which no

one shall be prevented by restrictive laws from honestly obtaining the

money to buy it. If the man with labor to sell has not this free market,

then his liberty is violated and his property virtually taken from him.

Now, such a market has constantly been denied, not only to the laborers

at Homestead, but to the laborers of the entire civilized world. And the

men who have denied it are the Andrew Carnegies. Capitalists of whom

this Pittsburgh forgemaster is a typical representative have placed and

kept upon the statute-books all sorts of prohibitions and taxes (of

which the customs tariff is among the least harmful) designed to limit

and effective in limiting the number of bidders for the labor of those

who have labor to sell…

… Let Carnegie, Dana & Co. first see to it that every law in violation

of equal liberty is removed from the statute-books. If, after that, any

laborers shall interfere with the rights of their employers, or shall

use force upon inoffensive “scabs,” or shall attack their employers’

watchmen, whether these be Pinkerton detectives, sheriff’s deputies, or

the State militia, I pledge myself that, as an Anarchist and in

consequence of my Anarchistic faith, I will be among the first to

volunteer as a member of a force to repress these disturbers of order

and, if necessary, sweep them from the earth. But while these invasive

laws remain, I must view every forcible conflict that arises as the

consequence of an original violation of liberty on the part of the

employing classes, and, if any sweeping is done, may the laborers hold

the broom! Still, while my sympathies thus go with the under dog, I

shall never cease to proclaim my conviction that the annihilation of

neither party can secure justice, and that the only effective sweeping

will be that which clears from the statute-book every restriction of the

freedom of the market…[7]

But whatever restrictions could he possibly have been talking about? To

read mainstream “free market” defenses of existing employment relations,

you’d get the idea that the only restrictions on the freedom of the

market are those that hurt the owning classes and big business (you

know, the “last persecuted minority”).

In fact, such vulgar libertarian apologetics share a very artificial set

of assumptions: see, laborers just happen to be stuck with this poor set

of options — the employing classes have absolutely nothing to do with

it. And the owning classes just happen to have all these means of

production on their hands, and the laboring classes just happen to be

propertyless proletarians who are forced to sell their labor on the

owners’ terms. The possibility that the employing classes might be

directly implicated in state policies that reduced the available options

of laborers is too ludicrous even to consider.

It’s the old nursery-tale of primitive accumulation. “ Lenin” of Lenin’s

Tomb blog recalls being exposed to it in the government schools:

The illusion of a free and equal contract between employee and employer

is one that exerts considerable hold, particularly given the paucity of

industrial conflict over the last fifteen years. The thought that the

situation might be rigged in advance, by virtue of the capitalists

control of the means of production, is so obvious that it eludes many

people who otherwise place themselves on the Left.

In part, this is because people are prepared from an early age to expect

and accept this state of affairs. In high school Business Studies class,

I was shown along with my class mates a video sponsored by some bank

which purported to demonstrate how the division of labour came about. It

all took place, it seemed, in a relatively benign and peaceful fashion,

with no intruding political questions or economic phases. From the

cavemen to cashcards, it was really all about work being broken down

into separate tasks which would be undertaken by those most able to do

them. Then, finding contact with nearby villages, they would trade

things that they were good at making for the things that the other

villages were good at making… The only interesting thing about this

propaganda video is that it raised not a single eyebrow — as how could

it? One is led to expect to work for a capitalist without seeing

anything necessarily unjust about it, and one has nothing to compare it

to. The worker is taught to sell herself (all those job interview

training schemes) without perceiving herself as a commodity.[8]

I had a similar reaction to all those passages on time-preference in

Bohm-Bawerk and Mises that just accepted, as a matter of course, that

one person was in a position to “contribute” capital to the production

process, while another for some mysterious reason needed the means of

production and the labor-fund that were so graciously “provided.”

The most famous critic of this nursery-tale, of course, was the state

socialist Karl Marx:

In times long gone-by there were two sorts of people; one, the diligent,

intelligent, and, above all, frugal elite; the other, lazy rascals,

spending their substance, and more, in riotous living. The legend of

theological original sin tells us certainly how man came to be condemned

to eat his bread in the sweat of his brow; but the history of economic

original sin reveals to us that there are people to whom this is by no

means essential. Never mind! Thus it came to pass that the former sort

accumulated wealth, and the latter sort had at last nothing to sell

except their own skins. And from this original sin dates the poverty of

the great majority that, despite all its labour, has up to now nothing

to sell but itself, and the wealth of the few that increases constantly

although they have long ceased to work.[9]

But the criticism was by no means limited to statists. The free market

advocate Franz Oppenheimer wrote:

According to Adam Smith, the classes in a society are the results of

“natural” development. From an original state of equality, these arose

from no other cause than the exercise of the economic virtues of

industry, frugality and providence…

[C]lass domination, on this theory, is the result of a gradual

differentiation from an original state of general equality and freedom,

with no implication in it of any extra-economic power…

This assumed proof is based upon the concept of a “primitive

accumulation,” or an original store of wealth, in lands and in movable

property, brought about by means of purely economic forces; a doctrine

justly derided by Karl Marx as a “fairy tale.” Its scheme of reasoning

approximates this:

Somewhere, in some far-stretching, fertile country, a number of free

men, of equal status, form a union for mutual protection. Gradually they

differentiate into property classes. Those best endowed with strength,

wisdom, capacity for saving, industry and caution, slowly acquire a

basic amount of real or movable property; while the stupid and less

efficient, and those given to carelessness and waste, remain without

possessions. The well-to-do lend their productive property to the less

well-off in return for tribute, either ground-rent or profit, and become

thereby continually richer, while the others always remain poor. These

differences in possession gradually develop social class distinctions;

since everywhere the rich have preference, while they alone have the

time and the means to devote to public affairs and to turn the laws

administered by them to their own advantage. Thus, in time, there

develops a ruling and property-owning estate, and a proletariat, a class

without property. The primitive state of free and equal fellows becomes

a class-state, by an inherent law of development, because in every

conceivable mass of men there are, as may readily be seen, strong and

weak, clever and foolish, cautious and wasteful ones.[10]

How We Got Where We Are Now

In the real world, of course, things are a little less rosy. The means

of production, during the centuries of the capitalist epoch, have been

concentrated in a few hands by one of the greatest robberies in human

history. The peasants of Britain were deprived of customary property

rights in the land, by enclosures and other state sanctioned theft, and

driven into the factories like cattle. And the factory owners benefited,

in addition, from near-totalitarian social controls on the movement and

free association of labor; this legal regime included the Combination

Acts, the Riot Act, and the law of settlements (the latter amounting to

an internal passport system).

By the way: if you think the above passages are just Marxoid rhetoric,

bear in mind that the ruling class literature of the early industrial

revolution was full of complaints about just how hard it was to get

workers into the factories: not only were the lower classes not flocking

into the factories of their own free will, but the owning classes used a

great deal of energy thinking up ways to force them to do so. Employers

of the day engaged in very frank talk, as frank as that of any Marxist,

on the need to keep working people destitute and deprive them of

independent access to the means of production, in order to get them to

work hard enough and cheaply enough.

Albert Nock, surely nobody’s idea of a Marxist, dismissed the bourgeois

nursery-tale with typical Nockian contempt:

The horrors of England’s industrial life in the last century furnish a

standing brief for addicts of positive intervention. Child-labour and

woman-labour in the mills and mines; Coketown and Mr. Bounderby;

starvation wages; killing hours; vile and hazardous conditions of

labour; coffin ships officered by ruffians — all these are glibly

charged off by reformers and publicists to a regime of rugged

individualism, unrestrained competition, and laissez-faire. This is an

absurdity on its face, for no such regime ever existed in England. They

were due to the State’s primary intervention whereby the population of

England was expropriated from the land; due to the State’s removal of

the land from competition with industry for labour. Nor did the factory

system and the “industrial revolution” have the least thing to do with

creating those hordes of miserable beings. When the factory system came

in, those hordes were already there, expropriated, and they went into

the mills for whatever Mr. Gradgrind and Mr. Plugson of Undershot would

give them, because they had no choice but to beg, steal or starve. Their

misery and degradation did not lie at the door of individualism; they

lay nowhere but at the door of the State. Adam Smith’s economics are not

the economics of individualism; they are the economics of landowners and

mill-owners. Our zealots of positive intervention would do well to read

the history of the Enclosures Acts and the work of the Hammonds, and see

what they can make of them.[11]

Even in the so-called “free market” that supposedly ensued by the

mid-19^(th) century, the owners of capital and land were able to exact

tribute from labor, thanks to a general legal framework that (among

other things) restricted workers’ access to their own cheap,

self-organized capital through mutual banks. As a result of this “money

monopoly,” workers had to sell their labor in a “buyer’s market” on

terms set by the owning classes, and thus pay tribute (in the form of a

wage less than their labor-product) for access to the means of

production. Thus the worker has been robbed doubly: by the state’s

initial use of force to forestall a producer-owned market economy; and

by the state’s ongoing intervention that forces him to sell his labor

for less than his product. The vast majority of accumulated capital

today is the result, not of the capitalist’s past labor and abstention,

but of robbery.

So even in the so-called “laissez-faire” 19^(th) century, as Tucker

described the situation, the level of statist intervention on behalf of

the owning and employing classes was already warping the wage system in

all sorts of authoritarian directions. The phenomenon of wage labor

existed to the extent that it did only as a result of the process of

primitive accumulation by which the producing classes had, in previous

centuries, been robbed of their property in the means of production and

forced to sell their labor on the bosses’ terms. And thanks to the

state’s restriction of self-organized credit and of access to unoccupied

land, which enabled the owners of artificially scarce land and capital

to charge tribute for access to them, workers faced an ongoing necessity

of selling their labor on still more disadvantageous terms.

The problem was exacerbated during the state capitalist revolution of

the 20^(th) century, by still higher levels of corporatist intervention,

and the resulting centralization of the economy. The effect of

government subsidies and regulatory cartelization was to conceal or

transfer the inefficiency costs of large-scale organization, and to

promote a state capitalist model of business organization that was far

larger, and far more hierarchical and bureaucratic, than could possibly

have survived in a free market.

The state’s subsidies to the development of capital-intensive

production, as the century wore on, promoted deskilling and ever-steeper

internal hierarchies, and reduced the bargaining power that came with

labor’s control of the production process. Many of the most powerfully

deskilling forms of production technology were created as a result of

the state’s subsidies to research and development. As David Montgomery

wrote in Forces of Production: A Social History of Industrial

Automation,

[I]nvestigation of the actual design and use of capital-intensive,

labor-saving, skill-reducing technology has begun to indicate that cost

reduction was not a prime motivation, nor was it achieved. Rather than

any such economic stimulus, the overriding impulse behind the

development of the American system of manufacture was military; the

principal promoter of the new methods was not the self-adjusting market

but the extra-market U.S. Army Ordnance Department… The drive to

automate has been from its inception the drive to reduce dependence upon

skilled labor, to deskill necessary labor and reduce rather than raise

wages.[12]

Finally, the decision of neoliberal elites in the 1970s to freeze real

wages and transfer all productivity increases into reinvestment,

dividends, or senior management salaries, led to a still more

disgruntled work force, and the need for internal systems of

surveillance and control far beyond anything that had existed before.

David M. Gordon’s Fat and Mean[13] refers, in its subtitle, to the “Myth

of Managerial Downsizing.” Gordon demonstrates that, contrary to public

misperception, most companies employ even more middle management than

they used to; and a major function of these new overseers is enforcing

management control over an increasingly overworked, insecure, and

embittered workforce. The professional culture in Human Resources

departments is geared, more and more, to detecting and forestalling

sabotage and other expressions of employee disgruntlement, through

elaborate internal surveillance mechanisms, and to spotting potentially

dangerous attitudes toward authority through intensive psychological

profiling.

The state capitalists, since adopting their new neoliberal consensus of

the Seventies, have been hell-bent on creating a society in which the

average worker is so desperate for work that he’ll gratefully take any

job offered, and do whatever is necessary to cling to it like grim

death.

To summarize…

… things didn’t just “get” this way. They had help. The reduced

bargaining power of labor, the resulting erosion of the traditional

boundaries between work and private life, and increasing management

control even of time off the clock, are all the result of concerted

political efforts.

The fact that we accept as natural a state of affairs in which one class

has “jobs” to “give” and another class is forced to take them, for want

of independent access to the means of productions, is the result of

generations of ideological hegemony by the owning classes and their

vulgar libertarian apologists.

Nothing in the present situation is a natural implication of free market

principles. As Albert Nock wrote,

Our natural resources, while much depleted, are still great; our

population is very thin, running something like twenty or twenty-five to

the square mile; and some millions of this population are at the moment

“unemployed,” and likely to remain so because no one will or can “give

them work.” The point is not that men generally submit to this state of

things, or that they accept it as inevitable, but that they see nothing

irregular or anomalous about it because of their fixed idea that work is

something to be given.[14]

Claire Wolfe pointed out, in her brilliant article “Dark Satanic

Cubicles,” that there’s nothing libertarian about the existing culture

of job relations:

In a healthy human community, jobs are neither necessary nor desirable.

Productive work is necessary — for economic, social, and even spiritual

reasons. Free markets are also an amazing thing, almost magical in their

ability to satisfy billions of diverse needs. Entrepreneurship? Great!

But jobs — going off on a fixed schedule to perform fixed functions for

somebody else day after day at a wage — aren’t good for body, soul,

family, or society.

Intuitively, wordlessly, people knew it in 1955. They knew it in 1946.

They really knew it when Ned Ludd and friends were smashing the machines

of the early Industrial Revolution (though the Luddites may not have

understood exactly why they needed to do what they did).

Jobs suck. Corporate employment sucks. A life crammed into 9-to-5 boxes

sucks. Gray cubicles are nothing but an update on William Blake’s “dark

satanic mills.” Granted, the cubicles are more bright and airy; but

they’re different in degree rather than in kind from the mills of the

Industrial Revolution. Both cubicles and dark mills signify working on

other people’s terms, for other people’s goals, at other people’s

sufferance. Neither type of work usually results in us owning the fruits

of our labors or having the satisfaction of creating something from

start to finish with our own hands. Neither allows us to work at our own

pace, or the pace of the seasons. Neither allows us access to our

families, friends, or communities when we need them or they need us.

Both isolate work from every other part of our life…

We’ve made wage-slavery so much a part of our culture that it probably

doesn’t even occur to most people that there’s something unnatural about

separating work from the rest of our lives. Or about spending our entire

working lives producing things in which we can often take only minimal

personal pride — or no pride at all…

Take a job and you’ve sold part of yourself to a master. You’ve cut

yourself off from the real fruits of your own efforts.

When you own your own work, you own your own life. It’s a goal worthy of

a lot of sacrifice. And a lot of deep thought.

[A]nybody who begins to come up with a serious plan that starts cutting

the underpinnings from the state-corporate power structure can expect to

be treated as Public Enemy Number One.[15]

The chief obstacle to the latter process, she wrote, was “government and

its heavily favored and subsidized corporations and financial markets…”

How Bad Do the Options Have to Be?

Now before we go on, as a market anarchist, I have to stipulate that

there’s nothing inherently wrong with wage labor. And in a free market,

employers would be within their rights to make the kinds of demands

associated with contract feudalism.

The problem, from my standpoint, is that the reduced bargaining power of

labor in the present labor market lets employers get away with it. What

deserves comment is not the legal issue of whether the state should

“allow” employers to exercise this kind of control, but the question of

what kind of allegedly free marketplace would allow it.

The question is, just how godawful do the other “options” have to be

before somebody’s desperate enough to take a job under such conditions?

How do things get to the point where people are lined up to compete for

jobs where they can be forbidden to associate with coworkers away from

work, where even squalid, low-paying retail jobs can involve being

on-call 24/7, where employees can’t attend political meetings without

keeping an eye out for an informer, or can’t blog under their own names

without living in fear that they’re a web-search away from termination?

I’m not a friend of federal labor regulations. We shouldn’t need federal

regulations to stop this sort of thing from happening. In a free market

where land and capital weren’t artificially scarce and expensive

compared to labor, jobs should be competing for workers. What’s

remarkable is not that contract feudalism is technically “ legal,” but

that the job market is so abysmal that it could become an issue in the

first place.

As Elizabeth Anderson already suggested in the quote above, the key to

contract feudalism is the reduced bargaining power of labor. Timothy

Carter puts the alternatives in very stark terms:

where the real power to gain a lion’s share of the mutual benefit lies:

with the power to walk away. If one side can walk away from the table

and the other side cannot, the party that can leave can get almost

anything they want as long as they leave the other party only slightly

better off than if there was no deal at all…

What creates an imbalance in the power to walk away? One situation is

need. If one side has to make the exchange, their power to walk away is

gone.

… For most people, a job is the ultimate need. It from the earnings of

job that all other needs are satisfied.

So how can we make the exchange more fair?… The liberal answer is to

have the government meddle in the labor-capital exchange…

There is another way. The need for government meddling could end if the

balance of negotiating power between labor and capital were equalized.

Currently, the imbalance exists because capital can walk away, but labor

cannot.[16]

For a Genuine Free Market

Contrast the present monstrous situation with what would exist in a

genuine free market: jobs competing for workers, instead of the other

way around. Here’s how Tucker envisioned the worker-friendly effects of

such a free market:

For, say Proudhon and Warren, if the business of banking were made free

to all, more and more persons would enter into it until the competition

should become sharp enough to reduce the price of lending money to the

labor cost, which statistics show to be less than three-fourths of once

per cent. In that case the thousands of people who are now deterred from

going into business by the ruinously high rates which they must pay for

capital with which to start and carry on business will find their

difficulties removed… Then will be seen an exemplification of the words

of Richard Cobden that, when two laborers are after one employer, wages

fall, but when two employers are after one laborer, wages rise. Labor

will then be in a position to dictate its wages, and will thus secure

its natural wage, its entire product…[17]

The authors of the Anarchist FAQ described the libertarian socialist

consequences of Tucker’s free market, in even more expansive terms, in

this passage:

It’s important to note that because of Tucker’s proposal to increase the

bargaining power of workers through access to mutual credit, his

individualist anarchism is not only compatible with workers’ control but

would in fact promote it (as well as logically requiring it). For if

access to mutual credit were to increase the bargaining power of workers

to the extent that Tucker claimed it would, they would then be able to:

(1) demand and get workplace democracy; and (2) pool their credit to buy

and own companies collectively. This would eliminate the top-down

structure of the firm and the ability of owners to pay themselves

unfairly large salaries as well as reducing capitalist profits to zero

by ensuring that workers received the full value of their labour. Tucker

himself pointed this out when he argued that Proudhon (like himself)

“would individualise and associate” workplaces by mutualism, which would

“place the means of production within the reach of all.”[18]

So instead of workers living in fear that bosses might discover

something “bad” about them (like the fact that they have publicly spoken

their minds in the past, like free men and women), bosses would live in

fear lest workers think badly enough of them to take their labor

elsewhere. Instead of workers being so desperate to hold onto a job as

to allow their private lives to be regulated as an extension of work,

management would be so desperate to hold onto workers as to change

conditions on the job to suit them. Instead of workers taking more and

more indignities to avoid bankruptcy and homelessness, bosses would give

up more and more control over the workplace to retain a workforce. In

such an economy, associated labor might hire capital instead of the

other way around, and the natural state of the free market be

cooperative production under the control of the producers.

[1] Elizabeth Anderson, ‘Adventures in Contract Feudalism’, Left2Right,

February 10 2005,

http://left2right.typepad.com/main/2005/02/adventures_in_c.html

[2] ‘Company’s Smoking Ban Means Off-Hours, Too’, New York Times,

February 8 2005,

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/02/08/business/08smoking.html

[3] Patrick Barkham, ‘Blogger Sacked for Sounding Off’, The Guardian,

January 12 2005, http://www.g u a r d i a n . c o . u k / o n l i n e /

w e b l o g s /story/0,14024,1388466,00.html;

http://cyber-junky.co.uk/joe/

[4] Harold Meyerson, ‘Big Brother On and Off the Job’, Washington Post,

August 10 2005, http://www.w a s h i n g t o n p o s t . c om/wp- d y n

/ c o n t e n t /article/2005/08/09/AR2005080901162.html

[5] Self-published. Fayetteville, Ark., 2004,

http://www.mutualist.org/id47.html

[6] The Libertarian, May 1 1969,

http://www.mises.org/journals/lf/1969/1969_05_01.pdf

[7] ‘The Lesson of Homestead’, Liberty, July 23 1892, in Instead of a

Book (Gordon Press facsimile of Second Edition, 1897, 1972), pp. 453–54.

[8] ‘Capitalism & Unfreedom’, Lenin’s Tomb, April 1 2005,

http://leninology.blogspot.com/2005/04/capitalism-unfreedom.html

[9] Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Capital vol. 1, vol. 35 of Marx and

Engels Collected Works (New York: International Publishers, 1996) pp.

704–5.

[10] Franz Oppenheimer, The State, trans. by John Gitterman (San

Francisco: Fox & Wilkes, 1997), pp. 5–6.

[11] Albert Nock, Our Enemy, the State (Delavan, Wisc. Hallberg

Publishing Company, 1983), p. 106n.

[12] (Knopf, 1984)

[13] (Free Press, 1996)

[14] Our Enemy, The State, p. 82.

[15] Claire Wolfe, ‘Dark Satanic Cubicles’, Loompanics Unlimited 2005

Main Catalog,

http://www.loompanics.com/cgi-local/SoftCart.exe/Articles/darksatanic.html?L+scstore+ckrd3585ff813181+1108492644

[16] Timothy Carter, Alternatives to the Minimum Wage’, Free Liberal,

April 11 2005, http://www.freeliberal.com/archives/000988.html

[17] “State Socialism and Anarchism,” Instead of a Book, p. 11.

[18] “G.5 ‘Benjamin Tucker: Capitalist or Anarchist?’” Anarchist FAQ,

http://www.infoshop.org/faq/secG5.html