Response from Carson, Pt. II
anonymous
August 28 2007, 05:22:28 UTC
(Cont.)
Do libertarian socialists in general, and you, Kevin Carson, in particular, support saving poor oppressed employees by killing, imprisoning, fining, despoiling or otherwise coercing the employers and forcing employees to either join collectives or effectively starve, under the pretense that employers are making wage-slaves out of employees, and that the relationship between them is one of feudalism? I can't speak for you, but that's exactly what your writings suggest, and this norm is indeed adhered to by all socialists I know, libertarians or not.
The feudalism is not a "pretense." If you believe this is a genuine free market, and that the present distribution of wealth and income results from voluntary exchange, then we are at an impasse. On the other hand if the state functions as an executive committee on behalf of organized capital, then it makes perfect sense to see the employment relation as a zero-sum game. The state intervenes to keep capital artificially scarce and expensive in relation to labor, so that the labor market is transformed into a buyer's market, characterized mainly by the competition of labor for jobs, rather than the reverse.
I repeat, I advocate seizure of capital only in the same instances as did Rothbard: when a firm gets a majority of its profits from state intervention in the economy. Of course, my assessment is much more radical than Rothbard's: my guess is that the Fortune 500 is a pretty good proxy for the sector of the economy that is essentially parasitic on state intervention. But I have no objection in principle to wage labor. I believe that if all the special privileges of capital were eliminated, and capital were forced to compete in a truly free market, cooperative ownership and self-employment would be a much larger portion of the economy, and wage labor would be much smaller. But it would probably still exist on a considerable scale; the difference is that, with the greater bargaining power of labor, wages would be much higher and workers' influence over working conditions would be much greater, so that even wage employers would take on to a large extent the character of a cooperative. --Kevin Carson
Do libertarian socialists in general, and you, Kevin Carson, in particular, support saving poor oppressed employees by killing, imprisoning, fining, despoiling or otherwise coercing the employers and forcing employees to either join collectives or effectively starve, under the pretense that employers are making wage-slaves out of employees, and that the relationship between them is one of feudalism? I can't speak for you, but that's exactly what your writings suggest, and this norm is indeed adhered to by all socialists I know, libertarians or not.
The feudalism is not a "pretense." If you believe this is a genuine free market, and that the present distribution of wealth and income results from voluntary exchange, then we are at an impasse. On the other hand if the state functions as an executive committee on behalf of organized capital, then it makes perfect sense to see the employment relation as a zero-sum game. The state intervenes to keep capital artificially scarce and expensive in relation to labor, so that the labor market is transformed into a buyer's market, characterized mainly by the competition of labor for jobs, rather than the reverse.
I repeat, I advocate seizure of capital only in the same instances as did Rothbard: when a firm gets a majority of its profits from state intervention in the economy. Of course, my assessment is much more radical than Rothbard's: my guess is that the Fortune 500 is a pretty good proxy for the sector of the economy that is essentially parasitic on state intervention. But I have no objection in principle to wage labor. I believe that if all the special privileges of capital were eliminated, and capital were forced to compete in a truly free market, cooperative ownership and self-employment would be a much larger portion of the economy, and wage labor would be much smaller. But it would probably still exist on a considerable scale; the difference is that, with the greater bargaining power of labor, wages would be much higher and workers' influence over working conditions would be much greater, so that even wage employers would take on to a large extent the character of a cooperative.
--Kevin Carson
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