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?
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.