Why capitalism is theft even if it is voluntary and consensual, and a case for universal worker democracy
“Neo-Abolitionism: Towards Abolishing the Institution of Renting Persons”
The talk argues that capitalism is invalid on the basis of the theory of inalienable rights. Inalienable means can’t be given up or transferred even with consent. Capitalist apologists often appeal to contractual consent to defend the system, so this changes the debate
There are legal tests to test whether a worker is an independent contractor or an employee such as the control test. You shouldn’t be able to declare a de facto employee as a de jure independent contractor. The factory with only independent contractors wouldn’t be able to exercise the same managerial authority over the workers as if they were employees. If these contractors cooperate directly, they are almost certainly in a de facto worker coop.
https://www.ellerman.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/01/UsingESOPsInPlatformCompanies.pdf
Right, and that’s the Uber distinction. Drivers for Uber set their own hours and can log off any time they want and stop working. Uber does not have the ability to dictate what hours they work, nor even which deliveries/fares they accept and which ones they reject. Uber’s power in the relationship comes from their ability to set how much money is offered for a given delivery/fare, and which ones are offered to which drivers.
The hypothetical no employee factory I’m thinking about would not have regular employees who are needed to operate machines for entire work shifts. The factory would be mostly automated and the work which is performed by humans would mostly consist of contracted, scheduled maintenance and upgrades to the tooling and other machinery. The day to day operation would supervised by the owner from a single, computerized command centre.
While this may seem like science fiction, you can already see this sort of large scale operation in agriculture. A single farmer operating a large, modern combine harvester can harvest thousands of acres all by himself and deliver it to silos on his farm. He can then operate the other equipment to process it or unload it into trucks to be delivered to market later.
The number of farm workers in the US was around 14 million in the early 1900s. Today that number is about 3 million. In the same time, the US total population when from 92 million to 335 million. This is a change from just over 15% of the population employed in agriculture to less than 1%, a 15-fold decrease.
All of this is to say that I don’t know that Neoabolition would represent as radical of a change as expected. Maybe that’s the point though, because the total abolition of private property seems way too far-fetched these days.
The link argues that uber drivers are employees.
The no employee factory as described sounds fine. Ellerman’s philosophy doesn’t just imply a worker coop mandate. Since natural resources aren’t the fruits of anyone’s labor and the equal claim to them of future generations, we should apply common ownership arrangements to land and natural resources and artificial monopolies.
Neo-abolition doesn’t solve every problem.
Social ownership of capital is orthogonal policy issue
So for the Uber case we’d expect a worker coop app owned by the drivers? That makes sense to me.
My dad drives for Uber Eats and one of the issues for him is that there are too many drivers with not enough demand a lot of the time. He ends up spending a lot of time sitting around waiting for orders to come in.
I think in a worker coop model you’d probably see a restriction in the number of drivers in an area. But then you could also see competing apps show up.
I’m really not sure what would happen!
