Reading Giblin and Doctorow’s Chokepoint Capitalism and they used a term “freedom of contract” I hadn’t heard before, and which I realized that I have over-valued in my brain.
I’ve already broken through in a few spots, for instance employment contracts can obviously be exploitative and workers have little ability to negotiating the terms on their own.
Or bank loans, not because of the negotiation so much as the moral stigma attached to defaulting on loans. I can see that the bank took a risk, they can take the consequences too. Why add moral consequences to an action that already carries financial consequences?
I think this loans issue comes back to an association of business contracts with social promises, which I’ve spent some time breaking down.
The employment issue is another kettle of frogs. That comes back to consent and whether a person who is not entirely free can consent. I guess that’s the whole point of a revolution though. Any attempt to make contract law fairer to respect the fact that some parties are signing under duress will be thorny, because all people are under duress under capitalism.
There’s barely a question in there, but … thoughts?
If you have to participate in wage labor to not suffer and die, then there is no free association of peers via a contract. This can be applied to most kinds of contracts under capitalism. Mutual Aid is the antithesis of this.
If you have any other specific sticking points, lay them out and hopefully we can resolve them.
ugh I should read more Marx; this statement makes such sense intuitively and is counter to free market doctrine - capitalists say that the bargaining power of a worker is proportional to their scarcity. That idea of course has some merit, but that power is bounded by the worker's need for survival, which are relatively constant across people (everyone needs so many calories, etc), vs the productive capacity of a worker is hugely variable, from an expert CNC operator to someone hand-knitting sweaters. So productive workers effectively have less bargaining power because they are worth so much to the employer, but if the market allows, can always be underpaid down to starvation wages.
Thanks, that's certainly a step towards chopping the head off this worm.
TBH my sticking points are all vibes based. Listening to Chokepoint capitalism, I learned that the creators of Spiderman sold their work for about $150 and didn't see another cent until the first movie was in production, and then through a public shaming campaign, got some $$. My reflex opinion was "Well of course they didn't see another cent, that's only right because they sold their work. The potential value of that work was unknown, and they made a bad forecast and it bit them in the ass. Sorry chumps." My next thought was that they probably didn't have much choice in the matter, and needed to take what they could get to feed their families. I want to eliminate that first thought. Talking about it here is helping, I think.
Firstly I'm no Marx scholar or anything, so I'm not a definitive source for this, just my own understanding from lots of different readings over the years.
I think the concept of 'socially necessary labor' might help with this part. Using the CNC operator, their productive capacity is dependent on lots of other labor that may not be considered in that calculation. So this sort of discounts the concept of individual productivity as being the reference point of determining value of that labor. This is very counter-intuitive in some ways, but I think it's an important aspect to comprehend. Basically capital only really cares about 'abstract labor' or 'labor in aggregate' for the most part. There's some edge cases like the CNC operator, but that only exist because of the ideology embedded in that logic.
This is a longish read, but it gets at a lot of the stuff that might be missing from your vibes.
https://ianwrightsite.wordpress.com/2020/09/03/marx-on-capital-as-a-real-god-2/
I'll try to pull some of the relevant quotes for you later.
e:
Here's the part I was thinking about:
This leads into the main topic of the blog post which is this abstracting control loop concept at the heart of how capitalism functions.