Struggle slavery; you're not free not to struggle on the face of the Earth, otherwise you will not survive. Man, how dare the universe spring forth creatures, yet foist that on them.
Wage labor is an imposition on people by people with power, wage labor is not a natural law or state of being. It is not unlike feudalism in that respect.
People engage in wage labor because they find it preferable to alternatives like hunting and gathering berries.
However meager is their lifestyle, it's better than what it would be under the alternatives. That's what people are slaves of: consumption. People engage in wage labor because it sustains a certain level of consumption that alternative activities wouldn't.
It isn't a dichotomy between wage labor and living in the woods picking berries. You can have extremely similar production and economies that we have now, but without wage labor. One other option is worker ownership, as owning the fruits of one's own labor is not the same thing as wage labor. There are plenty of examples of historical and contemporary worker ownership, and none of them involve living in the woods.
Worker cooperatives are legal and there are some around today. There's nothing stopping workers from owning the fruits of their own labor. Yet most workers choose not to join or start cooperatives, and instead prefer wage labor. Why is that?
It seems that most workers prioritize a steady wage without the risk of being an owner. And it's difficult for worker cooperatives in capital-intensive industries to attract outside investors; investors who put in significant amounts of money quite rationally want some control over the enterprise rather than leaving the decisions up to workers.
One of the most prominent examples of employee ownership was with United Airlines. Employees gained majority ownership in 1994. That kind of worked for a while but ultimately failed, ironically partly due to labor union disputes. It seems the workers had trouble deciding how to share the fruits of their labor.
A good elaboration of this point is Greg Dow's "Governing the Firm" and "The Labor-Managed Firm".
In short, worker-owned businesses are rare because individual workers are poor (relative to the capital that's needed) and they can't get external funding because the investors want control in return, which labor management can't provide.
That's why most large-scale worker-owned businesses are part of a federation supported by a bank - e.g. Mondragon's Caja Laboral. Institutional design indeed does matter.
Funding is a huge part, for sure, but also getting incorporated. Talk to a lawyer and your state about founding an LLC or sole proprietorship. Ezpz. Done in an hour.
Talk about founding a workers co-op that's democratically run? With shares issued to each worker? There's just no template for it. It's days of work to get it over the line.
This really is the same as the YouTuber "how I bought a house within a week of watching this video"
"Ownership is so easy, imagine if you not only have to work, but also have to deal with ownership problems such as maintenance, insurance, business and real-estate, logistics, marketing, depreciation, and management. - and, best of all, you don't own any of it if you stop working!"
In order to own the fruits of your labor, you have to pay for all the tools and materials you need, and the space where you apply the tools to the materials.
The material suppliers and toolsmiths also own the fruits of their labor, and don't owe them to you.
Capitalism exists because individual worker ownership doesn't scale beyond simple trades. If a worker gets enough wherewithal to scale his or her operation to just a small shop, there are going to be workers there, who are either wage labor, or else customers who pay to use the shop.
I'd encourage you to read The Conquest of Bread for some high level thoughts on other ways we could arrange things that a) aren't primitive and b) aren't capitalism.
> People engage in wage labor because they find it preferable to alternatives like hunting and gathering berries.
They don't exactly choose.
If a person wants to live by hunting and gathering, or by subsistence agriculture, he first has to acquire fertile land. And all that land is taken. In the United States, you don't even have the Right to Roam. Nor, on the public rights-of-way, do you have any right to so much as a sidewalk.
The ability to live an "indigenous" lifestyle no longer exists. The whole place has been terraformed.
You are trapped by the actions of everyone else. Mathematically, it's some kind of game theoretic equilibrium. But what it feels like is a prison.
Now you're just making excuses. In the USA at least, there are still small parcels of fertile land available very cheaply in isolated rural areas where no one else wants to live. Look for places in Alaska or Appalachia. If someone wants to live the 18th Century subsistence farmer lifestyle then it's totally possible. Get off the Internet and go live your dream.
This is very short sighted. 10 billions people cannot live off the land like that, and the land won’t stay cheap or undefended for long if millions of people suddenly spread out of the cities to do what you say.
We’d just end up with tribes defending their land because isolated people are vulnerable. It won’t solve the issue of involuntary labour, if anything it would make it worse for quite a lot of people as it is easier for leaders of smaller groups to exercise absolute control. We’ve been there before and there is a reason why we ended up in our current situation. The life of the average urban dweller is still better than that of a medieval serf.
I never claimed that billions of people can live that way. I was merely responding to @FooBarBizBazz's comment above, pointing out that they can live that way if they really want to. There are others living that lifestyle voluntarily right now. Personally I think it would be miserable, but the option exists for those who really want it.
In developed countries at least, most labor is voluntary. There are certainly cases where people have been trafficked and essentially held as slaves, and we should do everything possible to stop those, but such cases are rare.
There are quite a few Amish communities that pretty much live like that. We are lucky in the US- we still have quite a bit of wilderness, plenty to lose yourself in, and live a hunter gatherer lifestyle. I think it would be significantly harder to get away with farming without buying the land, at least in the contiguous states.
I think a typical Amish family farm is nowadays worth $1-2M, maybe more. And I believe their children have been moving to new places in recent years, in search of more affordable land.
> farming without buying the land
Illegal cannabis farms apparently operate in national forests. There are surreptitious irrigation systems, and there's a whole cat-and-mouse game to find and destroy them.
> We are lucky in the US- we still have quite a bit of wilderness, plenty to lose yourself in, and live a hunter gatherer lifestyle.
You're right though. Particularly, I would bet, up in Alaska.
Maybe I was confusing amish with Quaker? I think it was a quaker village near where I grew up, they still use horses to plow fields and stuff like that.
Either way, they're obviously not all living like that, but whichever one it is, they have communities here and there where they live old school
> Illegal cannabis farms apparently operate in national forests
This is a million times easier to do than grow crops. Of course it's possible people could get away with growing crops in national forests, but the risk/reward just isn't there like it is(was?) for weed.
Worker ownership is not the same thing as wage labor. Wage labor bifurcates people into an asset owning class and laborers who don't own the assets they're forced to depend on to eat. Wage labor divorces workers from owning the fruit of their labor in place of wages, whereas worker ownership doesn't.
Wage labor was imposed upon people hundreds of years ago with the enclosure and privatization of common lands that people had relied on for centuries to provide for themselves. It was imposed because people voluntarily chose not to become wage laborers, as they preferred their lifestyles as is. To rectify this, a landless class of people was created, that could only rely on selling their labor to survive, through the enclosure of the land they had relied on in the past. People did not freely accept becoming factory workers, for example, they were forced into situations where it was the only option, and in many places, those that chose not to work were arrested and forced to work anyway.
Worker ownership is at least a respectable alternative. But it has a problem with capital-intensive industries. The workers typically don't have the resources to pool their funds and build a semiconductor fab.
They "freely accepted" it as an alternative to starvation when they were forced off of the land they were previously farming so that it could become a large private farm.
A lot of the land that was enclosed wasn't even productive after privatization. Some of it just stood (and still stands) idle, despite previously providing sustenance prior to enclosure. Big estates with an abundance of non-productive land was a popular thing at one point.
There lies the problem: in todays society, I’m not free to choose how I live outside of a pre-approved selection of careers due to a small portion of people deciding they wanted this specific setup.
There are an incredible variety of careers to choose from and there are countless unconventional jobs out there that people have never heard of. There is no small portion of people creating a pre-approved selection of roles that we have no choice but to follow. Even if there were, it definitely begs the question of 'who are these people' and 'how do they have this power'?
Nope. Customers choose what kinds of pursuits receive monetary compensation.
You have something you want to do (and get paid for) that investors won't pay you to do? Can you get customers to pay for it? Then just go do it. Nobody's stopping you.
