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Self-employment
So... having spent a few days trying to see the world from a serious left perspective, I now have come to an obstacle of great difficulty.
There is always the narrative that the world is divided into "capitalists" and wage workers. The capitalists are exploiting the wage workers because they have no alternative but to submit to this exploitation.
The underlined part above is the problem. Why is self-employment ignored as an alternative to working for the capitalists?
I understand that it is not possible to arrange self-employment in capital intensive industry without starting capital, but there are a lot of work intensive industries that require little to no capital investment to get started.
tl;dr: Why not self-employment?
Me in short: Swedish speaking finn, engineer, father.
Because petit-bourgeois small enterprises are systematically out-preformed and pushed out of the market by large-scale centralised capitalist entities, as is only sensible given the regressive nature of the petite bourgeoisie at this stage of the development of the productive forces.
Have you ever worked for a large corporation? Do you know that most people that work for large corporations sit around making useless posts on revleft.com half the time? Small business will always have a competitive edge, in efficiency, against large corporations. And the more labour intensive the industry, the more of an edge does the smaller actor have.
...but this is not what I find to be a problem (the competitiveness or the lack thereof for self-employment businesses).
The narrative of the capitalist and the wage worker seems to intentionally disregard the third alternative of self-employment. The very existence of the alternative of self-employment makes the argument that wage labour is coercive in nature kind of silly really. If a large population of wage workers quit their jobs in order to pursue self-employment endeavours then the employers would have to offer increasingly higher wages in order to lure them back.
I simply cannot make myself see the coercive nature of wage labour. Why is wage labour coercive?
Me in short: Swedish speaking finn, engineer, father.
The Marxist understanding of class isn't that there are two blocks, rigidly defined but that they are permeable groupings where individuals can move from one class to another depending on their material conditions with, fundamentally, a working class and a capitalist class. However, it's not so easy to simply become self-employed. In order to be successful you need start-up capital and most working class people are living pay-check to pay-check or have other responsibilities like children or elderly relatives that they must look after and unable to even consider such an enterprise. And, as Vincent West points out, even if you do manage to somehow find the time and money to start up a business of your own you'll find yourself a small fish in a pond full of sharks. Higher efficiency means jack shit to the sort of market saturation that large companies can achieve and unless you are lucky you'll find yourself out-competed no matter how hard you work.
Modern democracy is nothing but the freedom to preach whatever is to the advantage of the bourgeoisie - Lenin
Yes, life as an entrepreneur is hard. Life as an employee is easier. Where is the coercion now again?
Are the employers paying coercively high wages, making self-employment not even worth considering?
I could be a self-employed tattoo-artist tomorrow! What is stopping me? ah... the comfortable working hours and high wage of my current job. Damned capitalists...
Is it really fair to compare wage labour to slavery?
Me in short: Swedish speaking finn, engineer, father.
Well that was just absolutely ridiculous. Small businesses and self-employment have a competitive edge over large businesses? As the productive forces increase, individual property is destroyed, a historical trend that cannot be reconciled with your statement. Small manufacturers were driven out of business by factories and the now dispossessed workers were compelled to sell their labour-power to the owners of such factories. Today, capital is more concentrated than ever, logically. Today's large supply and production chains impair usefulness of small businesses and especially self-employment.
How is self-employment in fabric and clothing feasible today? One person producing clothing on a massive scale for consumers globally?
How is self-employment in chemical industry feasible at all? Am I supposed to have my own little chemical manufacturing plant I can operate alone in my backyard?
Even a local one-man bakery has many disadvantages compared to a small family-owned bakery.
Self-employed nurses, doctors? Self-employed road constructors? Self-employed academics? Self-employed fire fighters? Self-employed insurance providers? Come on, this is completely ridiculous.
pew pew pew
No it's not. Ever heard of kings and queens? Or of the Soviet Union?
My dentist is self employed. But Drowned Phoenix made it pretty clear that a single person can not compete with larger organizations in several fields, what are you trying to achieve by listing them?
I have heard of kings and queens, and they did not buy surplus value derived from wage-labour to buy more commodities to use in production to generate more surplus value. In the USSR capital was highly concentrated, more than it is in today's Russia, yes, so in that sense no capital is not more concentrated today than in 1980.
I did not read he said self-employment is not feasible in capital intensive industries, nonetheless, self-employment is not easy in labour-intensive industries neither.
pew pew pew
Doesn't really matter what they did with their capital as I see it, they seemed to own a shitload of it. Good to hear that capital accumulation is decreasing since there has been political decentralization in Russia though.
Well, nobody is saying it is easy, his point as I understand it is it's doable, but working for someone else is actually easier and more profitable, that's why people do it.
What I think he gets wrong is that calling wage labor exploitative is a moral value judgment, when it only means that employers profit from employing laborers, or at least they hope to.
There are self-employed people in every one of those categories you mentioned. Some are making quite well for themselves (the doctors I imagine), while other are seriously struggling (the poor idiots that are trying to manufacture clothing for export markets single-handedly I imagine).
In some businesses it is an advantage to have a large organisation, like heavy industry. In some businesses it is impossible to build enormous corporations precisely because the small actors are so efficient. But as I have already tried to say, I'm not interested in endlessly discussing which fields of business and industry are suitable for small business and which are not. There clearly exists the alternative of self-employment.
I should not have to argue in order to prove that there in fact are people that are self-employed!
What I really want to know is how the argument is made that wage labour is coercive or even slavery, when the alternative of self-employment is there?
Last edited by Drowned Phoenix; 22nd May 2014 at 19:34. Reason: wrong letters in wrong places
Me in short: Swedish speaking finn, engineer, father.
Self employment is an option for some, and about 15% of the labour force is considered self-employed. That leaves 85% who rely on wage income from a typical employer/employee relationship.
The entire capitalist system relies on exploitation. In some ways, self-employed persons are more exploited, since they do not have minimum wage and other protections granted to other workers. For me it is simple: it can never be justified to exchange one's liberty for money.
Your continued survival in capitalism relies on your ability to be a commodity or allocate and exploit commodities. This is the what is coercive: your liberty must be suspended in order for you to put food on the table. You must exploit or be exploited to survive. In capitalism, the suspension of liberty comes in different forms. An employers survival in the marketplace relies on their ability to exploit others. This is a restriction placed on their liberty; profit requires exploitation. It unjustly and unnecessarily pits one person's livelihood against another's. By threat of legal tort, in the US, a corporate board member is coerced into making the most exploitative decisions possible.
Perhaps that is not the most Marxian way to look at things, but capitalism deprives everyone of liberty. It's just it's not a big deal to be deprived of a liberty most don't seriously care about, like being able to choose not to exploit others.
Ironically, capitalism preys on the fact that most people care more about other things than money. Otherwise, it wouldn't work since people would demand their fair share. Capitalism will not work without a population of people to exploit. It requires a large group of suckers--some who have succeeded and go around to extol it's virtues. Then another, larger group that gets pimped hope and dreams of success that keep the economic engine running.
