This keeps coming up, can we get a typology and system of quick rebuttals going? Also I would like to read the names of some of the writers who have put these ideas out there. Quotes, for illustrative purposes, are fine too. Finally any thoughts on qui bono with respect to this argument are appreciated. We will start with old man marx.
marxism is the big one, they consider gainful employment to be exploitative because “the worker doesnt get his fair (or full) share of the product of his labor.” this is why Marx invented the labor theory of value, in order to equivocate on the term “value” and also dismiss the contributions of capitalists. He knew what he was doing, engels worked in a factory and both were doubtless at least superficially familiar with the production process. So the two main arguments there are:
1)“value” is a verb, everyone does it differently
2)it takes work to accumulate the means of production, that man (the capitalist) necessarily deserves compensation for his efforts.
Traditionally the beneficiaries of a marxist ideology are the higher ranking people in the movement that implement it, as the practice of communism is all about murder & rapine, and rhetorical pseudo-justification. Marxism provides ammunition for the latter.
Ok, mutualism. For the sake of expediency I used wiki as my reference. They also believe in a labor theory of value. See above
“cost the limit of price” basically they think its immoral to charge more than it cost to produce something. This fails for four economic reasons. So, they neglect the importance of a functioning price system at allocating scarce resources, they dont understand the role of profits in stimulating production, they neglect the accumulation of capital that made it possible to produce things at a lower subsequent cost, and they neglect to account for the depreciation of aforementioned capital, as those machines will need to be replaced one day. I’m not sure who benefits, unless its a group of bandits who steal capital goods and then depreciate them.
I’d like someone to write a book someone called ‘The Philosophy of Profit’ which would examine profit in theory.
From Isabel Patterson’s God of the Machine:
Production is profit ; and profit is production. They are not
merely related; they are the same thing. When a man plants
potatoes, if he does not get back more than he put in, he has
produced nothing. This would be obvious if he put a potato
in the ground today and dug up the same potato tomorrow,
but it is all the same if he plants one potato and gets only one
potato as a crop. His labor if wasted; then he must starve, or
someone else must feed him if he has no reserve from previous
production. The objection to profit is as if a bystander,
observing the planter digging his crop, should say: “You put
in only one potato and you are taking out a dozen. You must
have taken them away from someone else; those extra potatoes
cannot be yours by right.” If profit is denounced, it must
be assumed that running at a loss is admirable. On the contrary,
that is what requires justification. Profit is self-justifying.
When any institution is not run for profit, it is necessarily at
the cost of the producers. One way the non-producers go
about destroying a free production system by degrees is to
persuade men of wealth to endow foundations for “social
work” or for economic or political “research.” The arguments
sought by such research will generally be in justification of
parasitism, favoring the creation of more sinecures by extension
of the political power.
When you labor to produce something, you must get back a larger return than your labor put in, or else you have produced nothing. The labor theory of value is simply incorrect. Similarly, the basis of earning a profit price is that X can produce something cheaper than Y could produce it for himself–typically because X has the advantage of specialization and of a good amount of productive capital as well.
This is the reason that Y is perfectly happy to buy X’s product, because Y is actually saving money and time by buying X’s product, because if Y had to do it for himself he’d both spend more money to make it (no economies of scale in buying materials), achieve a poorer result (lacking productive capital), and lose a lot of time as well (have to learn the trade, in part specializing himself to it).
In every voluntary transaction then, both parties benefit. X because he doesn’t actually want the product he produces, he has way too much of it. He’s just got a comparative advantage in prooducing it because he has specialized in its production. And Y because X’s product satisfies a want and does so far cheaper than he could do it for himself.
Arguments that derive from a different concept of ownership: rent is illegitimate, and usage/occupation is necessary for ownership (no absentee owners). Strictly speaking this isnt a fallacy inasmuch as it is a rejection of mechanisms of social order. In the same way, rape isnt a fallacy, its a crime. So people who propose a radically different notion of property have a different set of arguments they employ, which ends up harder to rebut because the libertarian is put in position of justifying an axiom. Ownership is a social relation, an agreement, youre trying to justify it to someone who doesnt agree, its maddening and the only final answer is “if you come onto my property without authorization, or violate my terms of use while in an authorized state of occupancy, I will have you removed.”
or you appeal to utilitarian/consequentialist grounds, why your counterpart should accept the libertarian notion of ownership. Neither of these rebuttals is wholly satisfactory, because in essence you are arguing with a potential criminal about why he shouldnt rob you. Hence argumentation ethics, and exposing weaknesses in your opponents position.
theres also the appeal to animal kingdom examples of territoriality inside a species, where continuous occupation is not necessary, but willingness to defend it is. From acceptance of these examples as instances of “well functioning communities” one can extrapolate that, homo sapiens, being a social animal and possessing of a social order that includes structural engineering and division of labor, may create, enforce, and maintain and recognize territorial propertarian claims in a well-functioning social order without continuous occupation. This would lead to the utilitarian argument.
I’ve never accepted that property norms are only a social relation. They are also necessary simply to live. If one has a right to live then surely one has a right to the corollaries that produce life.
One of these corollaries is property. Because property means the right to make sole decisions about and dispose of an item as you alone decide and to section it off for your sole use. This is a more than adequate description of what happens when you eat something.
If you cannot dispose of food for your sole use you cannot live. And if you cannot produce food via sole-ownership of land, then you cannot live either. Thus we walk back the argument to abstract property rights over even land as all corollaries from the right to life.
If you cannot own land then it would be perfectly legitimate for society to kill you by denying you any use of the products of land. And if you look into the history of Ukraine, this is exactly what the communists did to the Ukrainians, killing something like 10 million of them by starvation, using troops to ship all of the food produced in the Ukraine out of that land, as a form of political murder.
Similarly, Mao’s Great Leap Forward communized the land and farms and resulting in the deaths of some 30 million people.
Communism has always screeched to a bloody halt the world round at trying to actually implement the theory on food production where, if things go wrong, people starve. The recovery from Mao’s Great Leap occurred when one village secretly agreed to pretend they had communized everything in front of authorities but to go back to owningand working their own plots amongst each other.
Get this, the way they were finally caught is that their village was so productive the authorities finally noticed the lack of privation and asked what the hell was going on
After that, their village was used as a model to de-communize the rest of the country.
For hundreds of thousands of years humans produced food through shared ownership of land and they survived, albeit with a standard of existence that we who call ourselves “civilized” consider barbaric. Its possible but life is different because calories are orders of magnitude more scarce. The only difference is the technology of totalitarian agriculture where we can produce effectively, as much food as we want. This involves exclusive ownership of land.
I find that labour theory of value is routed in a few misconceptions.
That individuals are victims of their circumstances.
Individuals have the opportunity and choice available to them that negates this argument. Observably I have seen people that were born in to poverty and grew up to be successful and prosperous and I have seen individuals born in to wealth that grew up to be bums and drug addicts.
That individuals are forced to work out of necessity to survive and thus slaves to labour itself.
Individuals are not forced to work, individuals are forced to survive however as a consequence of life itself. Labour is the result of the application of the action that facilitates survival.
That the value of labour should be proportionate to the profit achieved as a result of that labour, regardless of the input that labour required in proportion to the overall input that was required.
Value of labour could never be dictated by the labourer because the labourer would always value his labour at a higher rate than that would make the individuals labour possible. ie the labourer would always value his job at a rate that would make his job not viable to the employer.
Well the best way to refute labor theory of value is to introduce marxists to marginal utility.
That things are really valued due to their marginal utility and not what inputs are required to make it.
So for example, i could use very little labor to produce 1 cup of water, but it is highly valuable in africa. And i could use a lot of labor to produce a cell phone but its worth nothing compared to a gallon of water in africa.
Marx didn’t invent the labor theory of value. It’s been around since at least the Middle Ages, and in the modern period Ricardo (1772-1823) popularized it long before Marx came along.
Anyway, the idea that employment is illegitimate cannot stand without some theory of objective value for labor; i.e. if the value of labor is not objective, then there is no basis for saying that the market price for labor falls short of the labor’s “true value.” Theories of objective value are pretty easily refuted, so I’d say that’s the best route to attack this anti-employment nonsense.
EDIT: And, I’d say it’s also fairly easy to demonstrate that employment does not involve “alienation of labor” at all, and the argument against employment from a criticism of the alienation of labor is altogether a strawman.
Well, Isabel would have a pretty good argument if she simply replaced the term “Production” with “Gain”, but I’m afraid that the eqivocation renders her argumet fallacious., ..unfortunately. Production is NOT profit. Production is Production.
Mutualism is not based on labor theory of value, but on Roussauan (not Lockean) labor theory of propety, and can perfectly function on the subjective theory of labor. Best perspective of the mutualist perpective on value is: http://www.mutualist.org/id47.html
"“Inalienable” Means Inalienable Even With Consent"
No, inalienable means it cannot in fact be taken away, as a function of reality. That is certainly not true for the products of labor which can quite easily be sold and separated from your person.
Inalienability always has to do with inhering rights in the person of an individual. Not their products.
Which I don’t know who spoke against, and the topic is not about transferability of the product of labor, which is sale, but the alienation of labor, which is employment.
I wonder how repair work could ever get done in a socialist utopia. I mean, you can obviously repair something you own, but what if it’s something you don’t know how to fix?
would it be permissible to pay someone to fix it?
Wouldn’t that mean it must be permissible for someone to accept money for fixing it?
Wouldn’t this be an employer-employee relationship?
As I explained multiple times, doing a service job is not employment.
This is obvious from examples of service providers that have bosses.
The service provider provides the service (e.g. fixing something) to the customer (and not to the employer) and the customer payes the employer (not the employee). Again the employee does not provide service to the employer (but to the third party- customer) but alienates (/transferes the title over) his labor to the employer, and then the employer gets payed for the service, as if he did it, which he didn’t.
So if you need something fixed, you would call a self-employed handyman, or would call a fixing things coop and use their services.
Suppose A produces a wiget and sells it to B. This is legitiimate in your view.
Suppose A produces a widget, which upon being produced is the property of C (A’s employer), who then sells it to B. This you say is illegitimate.
But I fail to see the difference. It seems to me that in both cases A is selling the product of his labor (as opposed to alienating his labor - whatever that may mean), the only difference being that in the first case A sells the product to B post-production, whereas in the second case A sells it to C pre-production (i.e. by labor contract).
Now, if you’re going to attack the legitimacy of A selling the product of his labor in advance to C, on what grounds would you do so that would not also challenge the legitimacy of all contracts involving not-yet-existent property? For example, loan contracts, where a borrower transfers ownership of his future property to a creditor? Is that illegitmate too? And if so, how are the workers in a cooperative supposed to obtain their capital in the first place: since they can’t be employed by someone with the capital, and also can’t borrow it?
N.B. Note well that the employer-employee relationship can be fully described by saying that one person sells the product of his labor in advance by contact to another person, without any reference to selling/alienating labor.. The entire concept of labor alienation is superfluous ontological baggage inserted into the employer-employee relationship for the sole purpose of (fallaciously) arguing against its validity. As I said elsewhere, it is a strawman argument.
Impossible in socialism. Rent of means of production is in direct contradiction with right to property (which can be according to strict interprentation of Labor theory of property called right to the full product of labor).
When I make something, it is mine, that’s the basics of property. It is illegitimate that tools that I use to make that do not belong to me because then that what I make doesn’t belong to me, but is taken by the owner of the means of production, even though he didn’ exert labor, which is central to property.
Who said they can’t borrow money?
Read the links I gave. The section from Anarchist FAQ gives anwers to many question that arise when talking about legitimacy of employment:
That case would have a totally different application in practive then alienation of labor that we have today. In the case where the workers sell their product in advance, who then sells it to someone else is ennacted in cases where worker cooperatives make products, sell them to retailers, who then sells it to other people.
Alienation of labor is the essential difference between that and employment, and not it any way superfluous, unlike for the vain attempts to picture employment as a service provision, which it is not.
Again, read the links. Or better, read some chapters of Ellerman’s book Property and Contract in Economics, which can be found here:
