[p2p-research] against human rentals

[Michel Bauwens]

I agree with your points,

my main issue is that in the current system, self-employment is rarely
better than wage labour, as it replaces wage dependency with market
dependency ... except for the few that make it, self-employment is a very
hard and insecure path, though of course with obvious advantages ..

my approach would be to combine a commons ownership of immaterial resources
and vital natural resources, with maximum individual possession of the means
of production, and cooperative possession of all means that cannot be held
individually

ideally, a coop should make all participants cooperators, and not hire
labour

in many cases where this happens we see exploitation of hired labour by an
elite of owner-cooperators,

Michel

On Fri, Aug 6, 2010 at 3:03 AM, Kevin Carson <
free.market.anticapitalist at gmail.com> wrote:

> 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
>
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