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Title: Capitalism and Un-Freedom Author: Kevin Carson Date: April 12, 2005 Language: en Topics: capitalism Source: Retrieved on 4th September 2021 from https://mutualist.blogspot.com/2005/04/capitalism-and-un-freedom-more-on.html
A bon mot from Lenin’s Tomb (via Freiheit und Wissen):
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. David Ricardo chortled from beyond the
grave. 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.
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 person for some mysterious reason needed the
means of production and the labor-fund that were so graciously
“provided.” The old bourgeois nursery tale of primitive accumulation is
still a favorite, although it has been thoroughly discredited by
commentators ranging from the statist 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.
to the free market socialist Franz Oppenheimer.
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. Since these virtues are
pre-eminently those of a bourgeois society, the capitalist rule, thus
sanctioned by natural law, is just and unassailable. As a corollary to
this theorem the claims of Socialism cannot be admitted....
For them, class 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.
As a free market anti-capitalist, of course, I have to stipulate that
there’s nothing inherently wrong with wage labor. There’s nothing
inherently wrong with someone owning means of production, and hiring the
labor of another to work them--if (and it’s a big if) there was no
coercion involved in acquiring the means of production, and no coercion
is involved in the terms under which the worker must sell his labor.
Under such circumstances, the owner’s means of production are simply his
own crystallized labor, and his returns from ownership are nothing but
the cost of amortizing that labor. The natural wage of labor, under such
circumstances, is its full product. And all exchanges are exchanges of
labor. After all, as Benjamin Tucker put it, the whole point of
socialism, rightfully speaking, is that labor should be paid its full
product--not that being paid is a bad thing.
[Johann] Most being a Communist, he must, to be consistent, object to
the purchase or sale of anything whatever; but why he should
particularly object to the purchase and sale of labor is more than I can
understand. Really, in the last analysis, labor is the only thing that
has any title to be bought or sold. Is there any just basis of price
except cost? And is there anything that costs except labor or suffering
(another name for labor)? Labor should be paid! Horrible, isn’t it? Why,
I thought the fact that is not paid was the whole grievance. “Unpaid
labor” has been the chief complaint of all Socialists, and that labor
should get its reward has been their chief contention. Suppose I had
said to Kropotkin that the real question is whether Communism will
permit individuals to exchange their labor or products on their own
terms. Would then Most have been as shocked? ....Yet in another form I
said precisely that.
Now these principles would be a great guide to practice, if we lived in
a free market society that had evolved peacefully from the society of
the High Middle Ages, based on free exchange between peasant proprietors
living on their own land and self-governing tradesmen in the town
communes.
As it is, however, 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 Europe were driven
off the land by state-approved robbery, and driven into the factories
like cattle. Their movements during the early industrial era were
restricted by what amounted to an internal passport system, and their
bargaining power in the labor market restricted by draconian Combination
Laws enforced by administrative fiat. And even in the so-called “free
market” that ensued, owners of capital and land were able to exact
tribute from labor, thanks to state policies that restricted workers’
access to cheap, self-organized capital, and forced them to sell their
labor in a buyer’s market. So 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.