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Title: “Contract Feudalism” Author: Kevin Carson Date: February 25, 2005 Language: en Topics: feudalism Source: Retrieved on 4th September 2021 from https://mutualist.blogspot.com/2005/02/contract-feudalism.html
That’s not my term, but Elizabeth Anderson’s at Left2Right. It covers a
wide range of events that have been in the news lately. One is described
by Anderson in her blog post. According to the New York Times, Howard
Weyers, president of Michigan-based Weyco, has forbidden his workers to
smoke--“not just at work but anywhere else.” The policy, taken in
response to rising cost of health coverage, requires workers to submit
to nicotine tests.
As Anderson reminds us, 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 (unless they lived in a factory town,
where one’s boss was also one’s landlord and regulator of their lives
through their leases). Again, in the early phase of industrialization,
this was small comfort, given that nearly every waking hour was spent at
work. But as workers gained the right to a shortened workday--due to
legislation as well as economic growth--the separation of work from home
made a big difference to workers’ liberty from their employers’ wills.
At the same time, Anderson points out, this separation of work from home
depends entirely on the relative bargaining power of labor (“competition
for workers”) for its enforcement. I’ll elaborate on this theme later in
the post.
Another recent example of “contract feudalism” is the saga of Joe
Gordon, editor of the Woolamaloo Gazette blog, who was fired from
Waterstone’s (a UK chain bookstore roughly comparable to B&N) when it
came to his bosses’ attention that he’d made the occasional venting post
(quite mild, from my perspective) after a particularly bad day at work.
Gordon, who arranged book promotions and was friendly with a number of
prominent science fiction authors (including Ken MacLeod, via whose blog
I first heard of this), brought Waterstone’s business worth many times
his salary; and although he was ostensibly fired for bringing them into
“disrepute,” those despicable shitheads have themselves done more to
that end than a thousand of their employees’ blogs could possibly have
done.
B.K Marcus, in discussing his experiences with libertarian writers who
later attempt to remove their writings from the Web, hints that some of
them might be motivated by the fear of what an employer might stumble
upon. If that is indeed what he’s talking about, then the danger is a
very real one. Having been involved in a job search myself not too many
months ago, I know firsthand how paranoid a job applicant can become
that the Human Resources Thought Police are Googling him, and perhaps
deciding on the basis of a high internet profile in radical political
circles that he “ain’t got his mind right.” Although it may not be
standard practice everywhere yet, it’s likely to become so sooner rather
than later in our downsized and overworked future, as increasing levels
of employee disgruntlement and corporate authoritarianism interact
synergistically to transform the employment relation beyond our worst
nightmares.
Naturally, when such incidents become fodder for debate in the
blogosphere, many self-styled “free market” advocates rally
instinctively around the bosses. One commenter, for example, said this
in response to Elizabeth Anderson’s Left2Right post: “It’s a free
market. If you don’t like your employer’s rules, then work somewhere
else.” Fairly typical, I’m afraid.
Uh, no--this is not a free market. 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 forge-master 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....
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 restrictions on self-organized credit and on 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. These facts, alone, were enough to force the owners’ agents to
take on the character of plantation overseers in dealing with their
exploited and disgruntled work force.
The problem was exacerbated at the turn of the 20^(th) century by still
higher levels of government 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 model of business
organization that was far larger, and far more hierarchical and
bureaucratic, than could possibly survive in a free market.
The state’s subsidies to the development of capital-intensive
production, as the 20^(th) 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. (There is an
excellent body of literature on this theme by authors like David
Montgomery, William Lazonick, etc.) 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
(Knopf, 1984),
[I]nvestigation of the actual design and use of capital-intensive,
labor-saving, skillreducing 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.
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 (Free Press, 1996) 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.
Contrast this monstrous state of affairs with what would exist in a
genuine free market: jobs competing for workers instead of the other way
around.
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
that workers would 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. Gary
Elkin described the libertarian socialist consequences of Tucker’s free
market in this passage from the Anarchist FAQ:
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.”