Exactly. That’s why Brad has the term “wage oligopsony” and I the term “wage injustice”. The point is to distinguish between a completely free agreement and one that takes place under a context of statist intervention.
Call it what you like.
How doesn’t deviate from market anarchism, ergo everything he says is correct?
Yet, you forget about the barriers to entry not just for labours but for capitalists and entrepreneurs. Only, they’re not poor, or they’re bourgeoisie, thus they don’t deserve our sympathy. That’s whole point anyway, slavery isnt the correct term, it’s a term borrowed from Marxists and the like, using it just pandering.
Right. If it weren’t for the state, the guy mopping the floor would be driving to his software development firm in a Lexus and the guy currently developing software and driving a Lexus would be mopping floors. Oh the injustice! Oh the oligopsony!
‘Wage-slavery’ is a bit of a hydra. Here are three heads:
- Workers are ‘driven’ (by privatizing ‘collective’ goods, etc.) from their agricultural work and self-employment into the clutches of wage-work employment.
- Workers are faced with the choice of ‘work or die’, therefore their choice to accept wage-work is not a real choice. (If superior options were available to them, such as syndicalist enterprises in which the workers own the machines they work on, etc., then the workers would surely prefer these.)
- Even if it is obvious that workers voluntarily seek out wage-work, and benefit from it in merely absolute terms, this is irrelevant: such a worker earns less than the capitalist (who does no work) does when the latter sells the goods that the worker has done everything to produce. Workers provide $3/hour value to their employers who in turn only pay $2/hour; the employer thus extracts an unearned excess from the production process, which would otherwise reward the workers the full value of their labor. Thus wage-work, although voluntary, is a form of slavery. (And if you disagree with this point too strongly, think of the income tax. After a year you’ll find that a third of your production was not for you or your interests, but for the state. The Bible called ‘slaves’ people who paid less than this.)
Kevin Carson has argued the first, and you can probably find counterargument on Mises.org – I personally don’t care about this head. I’m not quite sure why even its supporters care about it, except to caricature people who unapologetically praise the Industrial Revolution.
The ‘work or die’ choice faced by workers is actually the ‘produce or die’ choice faced by all humans everywhere. Even Robinson Crusoe, alone on his island, had to go and actually pick berries before he could eat them – or else die. Wage-work is just the best way for many people to produce rather than die. To understand the sort of amazingly coddled person who would forget that cakes do not rain from the sky into our open mouths, listen to Larry Sechrest’s The Anticapitalists: Barbarians at the Gate (mp3, 46’56"), or Ralph Raico’s The Role of the Intellectuals (mp3, 55’45").
The third head is the famous Exploitation Theory of Interest, thoroughly refuted by Böhm-Bawerk in Book IV of his Capital and Interest. Robert Murphy has an excellent Mises daily summary of this refutation, and the quick refutation in Hoppe’s Marxist and Austrian Class Analysis was met by an attempted refutation that you may have noticed discussion about on the Mises.org blog. I had a reddit thread with the author of the ‘refutation’, where he immediately concedes the time-preference explanation but then comes up with unimportant new hydra-heads like ~“well, if people had their basic needs met, they would all have the same time-preference and wage-work wouldn’t be possible.” Unfortunately I was already pretty annoyed with this person, so I don’t start the thread well.
The ‘superior options’ that could be available to workers, finally, have problems that people coming at them from an “anti-‘wage slavery’” perspective don’t think about – or much appreciate hearing:
- In abolishing the person of the capitalist it must spread the role over the workers: whereas for wage-workers the firm’s failure just means that they need to get a job as if they’ve quit, the failure of a cooperative takes with it worker’s savings. A capitalist is not actually a guy in a top-hat who does no work. It’s a role in the production process that you’ll learn about if you slog through (my initial feeling :-/, although it’s proved its value) the five ‘production’ chapters of MES. People who want to abolish the capitalist but don’t know what this means can advocate bringing the capitalist back into the business in pernicious form: creditors who can load the workers with debt.
- Democratic governance sets people with varying time-preference against each other, in that people with high time-preference can e.g. slaughter cows that people with low time-preference would keep to milk. “We’ll make much more money over time.” is simply variously compelling to people. To grow or maintain capital or consume capital is not a technical problem and cannot just be solved with a calculator for a yea or nay answer. This person claims that co-ops bias against capital accumulation, preferring to eat their surpluses.
There’s other fun talk about egalitarian pay, the ‘advantage’ of being able to drive wages down until the final product has a competitive price (you think I’m putting words in the mouth of the anti-‘wage-slavers’. I’m not.), etc.
Thanks. I now have more than just Spanglers stuff to link to on the subject. Good piece.