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?
A critique of the moral framework of debt:
Michael Hudson: …and forgive them their debts
Clean Slate debt cancellations (the Jubilee Year), used in Babylonia since Hammurabi’s dynasty, first appear in the Bible in Leviticus 25. Jesus’s first sermon announced that he had come to proclaim it. This message – more than other religious claims – is what threatened his enemies, and why he was put to death.
This interpretation has been all but expunged from our contemporary understanding of the phrase, “…and forgive them their debts,” in The Lord’s Prayer. It has been changed to “…and forgive them their trespasses (or sins),” depending on the particular Christian tradition that influenced the translation from the Greek opheilēma/opheiletēs (debts/debtors). On the contrary, debt repayment has become sanctified and mystified as a way of moralizing claims on borrowers, allowing creditor elites and oligarchs the leverage to take over societies and privatize their public assets, especially in hard times.
Historically, no monarchy or government has survived takeover by creditor elites and oligarchs (viz: Rome). In a time of increasing economic and political polarization, and a global economy deeper in debt than at the height of the 2008 financial crisis, …and forgive them their debts shows what individuals, governments, and societies can learn from the ancient past for restoring economic and social stability today.
Michael Hudson interview: Debt and Power
This is good shit. Also connecting that to the english peasant rebellion (can’t remember which one) where they went to London and burnt all the records, so nobody knew who owed whom.
hits bong
coughs loudly for an uncomfortable period of time
Duuuuuuude what if like your future self was a distinct person who shouldn’t be bound by a previous incarnations will? You’re just signing away the consent of an individual yet to exist.
/ends bit
Serious response: I don’t get the issue? You’ve already realized that it’s a tool to enforce one individuals will upon on the other should they try and back out of a prior arrangement. Under capitalism this has obvious flaws, and under socialism it was very very different. There is legal scholarship comparing American and Soviet contract law if you’re interested in seeing what was kept and what wasn’t. A solid chunk of it goes over my head though so I can’t break it down well.
No you’re right, I have the intellectual understanding to combat this, I just haven’t finished the work.
I’m super excited about the analysis of soviet vs. american contracts, I will look for a lay-accessible source on this.
Hell yeah comrade
On the basis of political economy itself, in its own words, we have shown that the worker sinks to the level of a commodity and becomes indeed the most wretched of commodities; that the wretchedness of the worker is in inverse proportion to the power and magnitude of his production; that the necessary result of competition is the accumulation of capital in a few hands, and thus the restoration of monopoly in a more terrible form; and that finally the distinction between capitalist and land rentier, like that between the tiller of the soil and the factory worker, disappears and that the whole of society must fall apart into the two classes – property owners and propertyless workers.
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.
that the wretchedness of the worker is in inverse proportion to the power and magnitude of his production
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.
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.
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:
The content of value, or abstract labour
So let’s begin with the first mystery: what is the abstraction of exchange-value? What do those money quantities actually denote?
Marx argues that exchange-value refers to a special, common property shared by all commodities — that of being the products of labour. So caviar and clicks are the same because, to manifest them as commodities in the marketplace, requires the sacrifice of someone’s labour.
Marx then says that the common property cannot be specific kinds of labour — because fishing for caviar, or writing advertising software, or clowning, or making bullets — are very different activities.
The act of exchange abstracts from the individual peculiarities of different labouring activities, leaving something common to all of them, which Marx calls “human labour in the abstract”, or abstract labour. Commodities, according to Marx, have economic value “only because human labour in the abstract has been embodied or materialised in it”.
Now, we have to be careful with the term “embodied”. Marx doesn’t literally mean that abstract labour inheres within the material body of the commodity. Abstract labour is not a physical property of a thing. What he means is that some definite fraction of the total labour time of society must be used-up, or expended, to produce the commodity and bring it to market.
So abstract labour is not concrete labour, not a specific type of labouring activity, but something else, something deeper and more general. As Marx states, abstract labour has “the character of the average labour-power of society”. So a good first approximation is to think of abstract labour as denoting the causal powers of the typical or average worker. That isn’t quite right, but it will do for now.
So, according to Marx, the titanic abstraction achieved by commodity exchange refers to a specific content, which is a property of the material world that he calls abstract labour.
How do we measure abstract labour?
Marx then immediately asks the obvious question, “How, then, is the magnitude of this value to be measured?” and he answers, in a seemingly straightforward way, that it is measured “by its duration, and labour time in its turn finds its standard in weeks, days, and hours.” So we’re talking about units of time.
We might suppose, therefore, that we can immediately pull out our stopwatches and start measuring the amount of time people spend working, and then correlate our measurements with the prices we observe in the market. Because if prices really do represent labour-time then we should, in-principle, be able to scientifically verify this claim.
But that would be too hasty. Before we can even consider empirically verifying Marx’s theory of value, we need more clarity on what that theory actually is.
Now I’m not sure how deliberate this is, especially as I read Marx in translation. But it might be noteworthy that Marx does not ask, “How should we measure quantities of abstract labour?”, and neither does he answer by saying that “we can measure it by its duration”.
And that’s because we don’t measure abstract labour. Something else measures it.
This property of Marx’s theory — that money refers to labour time in virtue of our collective, social activity and independently of our thoughts about it — is radically different from the classical political economy of his day, and also modern economic theory.
The abstraction is not ours because our cognition is not performing the abstraction. We are not the abstractor. Instead, the mysterious abstractor is taking the measurements about labour time and connecting the form of value, which is money, to its content, which is abstract labour.
So, as scientists, our first job isn’t to start measuring labour time. Our first job is to understand what the abstractor is, and how it connects its abstraction to its world. We need a theory of this abstracting entity, and its powers, before embarking on empirical verification. Who or what is the abstractor?
So we have a partial answer to the first economic mystery. The abstraction of exchange-value, or more plainly money, represents “abstract labour”. So let’s turn to the second mystery: who is doing the abstracting? Who or what is the mysterious abstractor?
In fact, Marx has already told us who it is. Sometimes mysteries hide in plain sight. The big clue is Marx’s choice of the title for his magnum opus. The abstractor is what Marx calls “capital”.
But the term “capital” can mislead. First of all, it gets us thinking about large sums of money. A capital sum. But capital is much more than that. And, second, modern economic theory has reduced the term “capital” to a vanilla accounting term that mixes-up, in a confused way, capital equipment with large sums of money.
But capital, for Marx, is first and foremost a social practice. Capital denotes a collection of activities that certain people regularly do embedded within a system of property rights, contracts, and coercive power. Capital is a circuit, where an initial capital sum is “invested” in production, and then typically returns with a profit increment. Capital enlarges itself, whenever it can. This circuit is mediated not only by money, but also economic production itself, including the disciplining and exploitation of workers.
Marx’s standard language — of capital, of social relations of production, circuits of accumulation, and so on — doesn’t fully evoke what’s really going on, and I think that’s why he often turned to religious language.
So instead of saying “capital” I’m also going to say “the controller”. Because capital is a control system, not merely in the political sense, but in the more profound and scientifically important sense of being a negative feedback control system. Capital is literally a controller. So if capital is a controller, then how does it work, and what does it control?
This leads into the main topic of the blog post which is this abstracting control loop concept at the heart of how capitalism functions.
Our existing frameworks for consent aren’t very good, probably for these reasons. It’s tough to draw the line between inducements and coercion. Contracts are OK if they’re a fair agreement, but unless the two agents have an equal power balance they’re not going to sign a fair contract. For instance, a job contract will take surplus value for the employer. Presumably, it’s better to approach this by eradicating class than at the individual level of tweaking how contracts work.
Absolutely. I think this is the core of what I need to take from ‘here’s a thing I understand intellectually’ to ‘this is how I feel about the world on a gut level’
Contracts are there to bind you to the production apparatus in both time and space. At least that’s the case if I read this week’s reading for the Foucault seminar I’m taking close enough.
On contacts:
Only a slim majority in Congress recognized that the freedpeople needed substantial assistance and were willing to grant it under the general welfare clause of the Constitution. The bureau had four divisions: Land, Educational, Legal, and Medical. The ex-slaves were sick and needed care; they were largely illiterate and needed education. Health and literacy seemed obvious requirements for contract freedom that would involve negotiating the sale of bodily labor. The Legal Division would supervise the contracts the freedpeople negotiated with their ex-owners
<Snip>
With Johnson having blocked the redistribution of land, the Freedmen’s Bureau put enormous pressure on the freedmen to enter into contracts. Agents regarded labor as the quickest way to wean the freedmen from dependence on the government, to resurrect the Southern economy, and to teach the freedmen the lessons of free labor. Contracts, as Howard put it, were not only a mark of freedom but a form of discipline: “If they can be induced to enter into contracts, they are taught that there are duties as well as privileges of freedom.” By signing contracts black people would prove that they “deserved” freedom
<Snip>
Actual labor contracts, however, varied widely and were often hard to mistake for freedom. There were standard bureau contracts, but there were also contracts written by the employers. And there were oral contracts. In some places, such as the sugar fields of Louisiana, slaves would use contracts to their own benefit. The bureau hoped to supervise all contracts, but white Southerners often had the contracts executed before a local magistrate. Given the discrepancy in the power and status of those making the contracts, the illiteracy of many ex-slaves, and white Southerners’ resort to violence and coercion, the possibilities of abuse were manifold.62 The first labor contracts negotiated by the Freedmen’s Bureau certainly seemed evidence that the new order differed only in the details from the old. In South Carolina, Charles C. Soule, a white officer in the black Fifty-fifth Massachusetts Infantry, described how he talked to thousands of whites and blacks, explaining to the whites “the necessity of making equitable contracts with their workmen, of discontinuing corporal punishment and of referring all cases of disorder and idleness to the military authorities.” In this, he seemed a messenger of a new order. But to freedpeople he also said, “Every man must work under orders … and on a plantation the head man who gives all the orders is the owner of the place. Whatever he tells you to do you must do at once, and cheerfully. Remember that all your working time belongs to the man who hires you.” Soule told the freedpeople “you will have to work hard, and get very little to eat, and very few clothes to wear,” and husbands and wives on separate plantations would not live together. The new freedom might seem reminiscent of the old slavery. But, “remember even if you are badly off, no one can buy or sell you.” Soule thought, “only actual suffering, starvation, and punishment will drive many of them to work.” It was no wonder that many ex-slaves initially regarded men like Soule as “rebels in disguise.”63 Contracts could produce exactly the kind of subordinated labor force ex-slave owners desired. The bureau’s fear of black dependency often created black dependency by driving freedpeople into contracts that impoverished them and made them reliant on their old masters. Bureau agents were right in thinking that the mere fact of a contract forced the white employer to recognize the black employee as his legal equal, but this triumph was purely nominal and yielded only marginal benefits to black laborers. At their extreme, contracts were little more than slavery under another name. In South Carolina in the immediate aftermath of the war, William Tunro in South Carolina asked his former slaves to sign a contract for life. Refusal led first to the expulsion of Robert Perry, his wife, and two others from the plantation, and then to their pursuit and murder by Tunro’s neighbors.64 Contracts could replicate conditions that the freedmen thought emancipation had ended forever. In many areas of the South contracts ran for a year. The freedmen agreed to labor “for their rations and clothing in the usual way,” which is to say the same way as they labored under slavery. Many often received very little beyond this. The New Orleans Tribune, the most consistent advocate for the rights of the freedmen, attacked the idea that an annual contract was compatible with free labor. Why, it asked, was it necessary for freedmen to have to sign yearlong contracts when northern workers could quit their jobs and take another at any time? Answering its own question, it said the aim of the contracts was to replicate the old system and tie the laborers to the plantation.
This is from The Republic For Which It Stands
This is great stuff (by which I of course mean it is terrible).
