[p2p-research] against human rentals

[Kevin Carson]

On 8/4/10, Michel Bauwens <michelsub2004 at gmail.com> wrote:

> I sense the book below is making a very important argument, and I'd like to feature it as book of the week,
>
> however, I'd like assistance in contextualizing the debate, I'm thinking of Kevin in particular here?
>

I just can't see the moral equivalency (as just a difference of degree
in a qualitatively similar phenomenon) between the permanent
alienation of agency involved in a slavery contract and a revocable
agreement to show up and take direction from someone else at specified
periods.

I agree with Ellerman that wage labor is undesirable, all other things
being equal.  But I can't consider it as morally equivalent to slave
rental.

I also think Ellerman makes some good arguments regarding the
inalienability of moral agency.  But in my opinion they're mainly
practical arguments for why the wage relation is an inefficient way of
organizing production, and why hierarchies with top-down authority
relations have all sorts of agency and incentive problems.

Absent structural conditions that make wage labor artificially
prevalent, I believe these agency problems would cause self-employment
and cooperative organization to be more common.

So my approach is to remove the structural conditions that make wage
labor artificially prevalent, and to increase the bargaining power of
labor so that wage labor has less of a "master-servant" character
where it exists.  Or to paraphrase Clinton abortion, to make wage
labor "safe, legal, and rare."



-- 
Kevin Carson
Center for a Stateless Society http://c4ss.org
Mutualist Blog:  Free Market Anti-Capitalism
http://mutualist.blogspot.com
The Homebrew Industrial Revolution:  A Low-Overhead Manifesto
http://homebrewindustrialrevolution.wordpress.com
Organization Theory:  A Libertarian Perspective
http://mutualist.blogspot.com/2005/12/studies-in-anarchist-theory-of.html