Is unregulated wage slavery worse than actual slavery?

[Radivis (Michael Hrenka)]

Sorry for answering so late, I have been quite busy the last days.

@Leth_MacRon

In fact, slavery hasn’t been abolished. Leaving aside places where it’s practised openly, even in the USA slavery is still legal: among the prison population. Surprise, those with the least power over their own lives are the ones being subjected to literal forced labour. This is informative.

Yes, very informative. Thank you very much for reminding me of this fact! Law enforcement is a very convenient excuse for ignoring basic human rights.

@Leth_MacRon

To understand why our system produces these outcomes, it’s necessary to provide an account of how decisions are made. I’m not going to go into detail today, but the short answer is that decisions are made by a tiny elite for their own benefit. Modern businesses are, in Chomsky’s terms, ‘private tyrannies’. Any and all proposals to implement a new system, at odds with the interests of the power elite, requires a proposal for ending their power monopoly.

Yes, it seems to be the case that this is true. However, it may be possible to convert a part of the power elite to a new, less harmful system. They would be powerful allies, if they fight for the right side. Of course, converting them will be extremely hard, but if they see how they could profit from the new system, and feel that the old system has little chances for survival, they may be convinced.

@Leth_MacRon

As a result, as Maximo_Ramallo says, the obvious solutions all sound like marxism. I share your reservations about collective ownership’s inefficiency, and believe it comes about because of an inadequate signalling system between producers and consumers.

That is an interesting hypothesis. It reminds me of some ideas about more interactive markets I have entertained a few years earlier on the Doctrine Zero / Zero State mailing list. In interactive markets, consumers and producers would develop a product design collaboratively. And consumers might then pre-order those products, so that the consumers have some minimum guarantee for selling some of their new items. These interactive markets could also be called markets 2.0. Markets 1.0 do have an important signalling function, but it’s far from ideal. The internet can enable much better signalling solutions.

@Leth_MacRon

Our ownership model holds that capital holders employ workers through wages, and own their output. So, in trying to internalise benefits and externalise costs, the travail of wage slavery comes about. My proposed solution is worker control of workplaces - not state control, because 100% centralised power is even worse than the mostly centralised power we have today. This is a revolutionary proposal (in the sense that I am proposing a revolution, not in the sense that this is a new idea; it’s actually just straightforward marxism without the leninism), but it can actually be implemented business-by-business in contemporary capitalism.

What kind of revolution do you propose then? A non-violent revolution in which more and more co-ops emerge and displace the old centralized corporations? What would drive this transformation? Or do you think the people or the government need to intervene via (changing) the political system somehow?

@Leth_MacRon

Instead of capital holders employing workers, workers can employ capital holders.

I might be interested in actually doing this. I need to develop a reputation economy.

@Leth_MacRon

Workers in a co-op own their own output. Obviously this doesn’t solve all capitalism’s problems but it does solve the problem of workers being coerced under duress of poverty.

I wonder why the co-op model is not more popular. What do you think are the reasons for that?

@Leth_MacRon

I think that rather than propose detailed mathematical models seeking to account for all necessary variables, we should rather create the conditions for those closest to the issues, to make decisions for themselves. Our ‘back-end’ should be primarily creating the organisations and tools to radically empower and inform the whole population. People are experts in their own lives and they are best placed to set goals, priorities, and values. Technicians have a role to play in evaluating ways of achieving those goals, but must be under the direction of the populace themselves.

This is completely in line with the ideas in the milestone book Reinventing Organizations. See

Reinventing Organizations

Today I’ve stumbled upon a very interesting book that has been promoted on Facebook by highly esteemed sources. It’s the book “Reinventing Organizations” by Frederic Laloux: It’s basically about a newly emerging type of organization applying revolutionary (un- / self- / non-)management practices. There’s a short vimeo video about the core concepts in the book: And there’s a longer talk by the author about the book in which he goes into more detail and presents some examples and …

@Leth_MacRon

Our mathematical models also have a role to play in signalling between firms. I’d love it if all decisions could be made by informed participants, but I think we need to abstract out supply and demand into some sort of voucher system that I’ll just go ahead and call ‘money’ for now.

Humans may not be good enough at dealing with too complex / too much information. But with AI support they just might make really good decisions. Of course, this AI support would need to be really good. Something like this may be helpful:

Personal preference swarms and the quantification of intention

http://darkai.org/?p=243

@Leth_MacRon

Parecon holds that everyone should have a ‘balanced job complex’, that is, a mixture of tasks providing the same enjoyment, stress, empowerment, creativity, and drudgery, as everyone else. Then, not only can everyone be paid roughly the same amount, but they actually deserve it, even under today’s outdated and superstitious concept of deserving. Also, people who devote more time to unpleasant labour get paid more; people who work less get paid less. As it should be; leisure is a form of payment and so a simple ‘to each according to need’ actually means some people get more than others.

While this is an interesting and intuitively appealing idea, I think it would have suboptimal results. There seems to be the implicit assumption that humans should do some form of unpleasant labour. I don’t buy that! My hope is that for each kind of work, there are a few people who really enjoy doing that. Maybe there are some things that nearly everyone hates, but those tasks should be really automated in that case. Why should you do some work you don’t like, when there’s someone else who would like to do that job? It’s just a coordination problem! People usually do a much better job when they actually enjoy their work. Forcing people to do tasks that are unpleasant for them creates economic inefficiencies, apart from the unnecessary psychological suffering.