I agree that employment is voluntary in the legal sense. Voluntary transaction occur if both parties perceive that they will benefit from the arrangement. The problem is that responsibility can’t be transferred.

You know that there is no de facto transfer of de facto responsibility happening in the employment contract. If you thought that a transfer of de facto responsibility occurs in employment, you would think that the employer is solely legally responsible for crimes committed

@politics

Employment is a voluntary transaction, but there has to be some corresponding factual transfer to actually fulfill the contract. No such de facto transfer of de facto responsibility occurs to match the assignment of legal responsibility in the employment contract. The contract is not ever fulfilled nor is it, in principle, fulfillable. The only arrangement where legal and de facto responsibility match is a worker coop. Labor is nontransferable at a factual level. You accepted as much

@politics

The tenet that legal and de facto responsibility match, when applied to property theoretic questions, is the tenet that people have an inalienable right to appropriate the positive and negative fruits of their labor. The latter is the principled basis of property rights. Since employment violates the former principle, it also violates the latter. Employment contracts violate property rights’ principled basis.

Labor isn’t transferable.

The foundations of capitalism need destroying

@politics

Thank you for making my argument for me. Now, what morally relevantly changes when workers cooperate to produce a widget on behalf of the employer instead of committing crimes for the employer? Do they become non-conscious non-responsible robots? No.

Legal responsibility matching de facto responsibility implies that all firms should be mandated to be worker coops, and rules out employer-employee contracts. In worker coops, the workers are jointly legally responsible for the results

@politics

I’m aware of the standard line.

De facto responsibility can’t be transferred from the employees solely to the employer to match the legal responsibility assignment in the employer-employee contract. A thought experiment showing this is to consider an employer and employee cooperating to commit a crime. The employee can’t argue that they sold their labor, and are not responsible. The law correctly applies the principle of legal and de facto responsibility matching. Both are criminous

@politics

An employer, in principle, can hire both labor and capital, so they don’t have to own capital. In practice, employers tend to be corporations that own capital due to bargaining power.

Workers consent to employment terms, but they can’t fulfill them. The problem is that consent is not a sufficient condition to transfer de facto responsibility.

Abolishing employment doesn’t infringe on property rights. Employment contracts infringe on labor’s property rights to the fruits of labor
@politics

Workers are de facto responsible for creating the opportunities that employers gate keep. Employers violate workers’ inalienable rights. The workers are de facto responsible for using up inputs to produce outputs, but the employer gets sole legal responsibility for the positive and negative results of production. This violates the principle that legal and de facto responsibility should match.

No one is responsible for creating land. Landlords deny everyone’s equal claim to land

@politics

Liberalism developed the theory of inalienable rights that showed that slave trade, non-democratic constitution, coverture marriage, later capitalist property relations, and later non-democratic firms are invalid. Inalienable rights theory rules out the application of property rights to persons or their actions. Inalienable means consent is not a sufficient condition to transfer or extinguish the right. This is especially important for criticizing voluntary self-sale and employment @politics

Marx incorrectly cites private property as capitalist appropriation’s basis. The employment contract is what enables the employer to appropriate the entire positive and negative result of production. Now, capital ownership does play a role in increasing bargain power to get favorable terms during contract negotiations. By emphasizing value, he missed out on a critique based on property rights. In property terms, the employer gets 100%

Morality can be analyzed in less idealist ways @politics

Marxism:

A scientific analysis that gets basic facts about the structure of property rights in the capitalist system wrong, and uses value theory to critique a property system

Moral arguments can help make people class conscious and recognize their oppression. Morality can motivate people to act, gives them a coherent structure for guiding action, and give direction. Morality is an important tool that enables people to coordinate without authority
@politics

I have a specific theory of rights in mind. This theory of rights proposes worker coops as the only rights respecting way of organizing labor relations based on the inalienability of responsibility. I’m not using rights in a general vague sense to refer to harm.

Worker coops view workers differently than capitalist firms. They see labor as a fixed factor e.g. worker coops cut wages not jobs during economic, downturns.

The theory of rights I have in mind can fit in a license @programming

Far left as in explicit restrictions on capitalist firms using the software without paying for it while still allowing full software freedom for worker coops, which don’t violate workers’ rights.

Copyfarleft should set up a whole family of licenses of varying strengths and its own alternative ideology from the FSF. The first principle is an almost complete rejection of permissive open source licenses as enabling capitalist free riding @programming

I wouldn’t say FSF is too ideological. They just don’t have a political strategy for how they will bring about the changes they desire. To really change things towards a new mode of production, you need a way for people in the new mode of production to earn a living. Also, their ideology is wrong in its lack of emphasis on software workers’ rights and the relations of production

If you look at property rights, the contrast is even stronger. The employer owns 100% of the property rights to the produced outputs and owes 100% of the liabilities for the used-up inputs. Meanwhile, workers qua employee receive 0% of both. This is despite their joint de facto responsibility for producing those results violating the basic principle of justice.

We need to move towards a copyfarleft model that considers the rights of both software users and developers unlike copyleft

Because the employing class and their political power won’t let us.

Capitalism denies people their humanity and treats people like things. For example, 1 test for whether a system recognizes people’s humanity is whether or not it holds them responsible for the positive and/or negative results of their action. Capitalism fails there because it holds the employer solely legally responsible for workers’ joint de facto actions in the workplace.

Marxism is not the only alternative @politics

No @lemmyshitpost

You’re right that wasn’t very clear.

Capitalism is exploitative due to the employment contract not non-worker capital ownership. The employment contract is bad because it gives the employer 100% of the property right to the produced output (i.e. ownership of new cars in a car firm) and 100% of the liabilities for the used-up inputs (i.e. factory machine services) while employees get 0%. The workers don’t create the output out of nothing they use input materials @lemmyshitpost

The payment to investors in this case isn’t based on a non-worker solely appropriating the fruits of labor. The payment is satisfaction of the liability workers jointly appropriate as part of the negative product. Paying covers the costs of the negative product. It is compensation to the investors for the capital they supplied and the work they did building up that much capital @lemmyshitpost

The workers aren’t exploited in a worker coop. The workers jointly appropriate the positive and negative fruits of their labor. The workers don’t create the product ex nihilo they use up inputs (e.g. the services of capital). Paying lease is satisfaction of liabilities for using up capital services. Leasing out labor’s product allows workers to sell a part of the product’s services rather than sell the entire product. The employment contract gives the employer the product @lemmyshitpost

The point is not necessarily about profit rather about what the profit comes from namely the positive (property rights to produced outputs) and negative product (liabilities for used-up inputs), which together are the whole product. A basic tenet of justice that capitalism violates is that legal and de facto responsibility should match. In a worker coop, the workers are held jointly legally responsible for the whole product matching their de facto responsibility for producing it @lemmyshitpost