Brad,

Thank you for the mention. And for the kind words.

I also have a problem with the “free-market anti-capitalists” assuming that there would be no hierarchical firms in a freed market…

Well, I think the claim is usually not that there will be no “hierarchical firms” in a free market, but rather that firms will be (much) less hierarchical on average, and that hierarchical firms will be (much) less prevalent and (much) less central in the broader economy than they are today under the rigged state-capitalist economy. At least, that’s my view. (Similarly, it’s not that I think a free economy with a rich bed of mutual aid networks and wildcat unions will result in there not being any employer-employee relationships anywhere at all; rather, what I think is that those kind of relationships will no longer be the overwhelmingly predominant means for workers to make a living, and that those workers who do agree to them will be much less dependent on them for their economic survival.)

In any case, these theses aren’t just something that we’re “assuming.” They’re the conclusion of an argument. (Or rather, of several converging lines of argument. Having to do with, e.g., ways in which the state burns out informal-sector alternatives to hierarchical firms, subsidizes hierarchical firms over grassroots alternatives through government-granted monopolies, cartelized captive markets, corporate welfare, “development” policy, etc., privileges politically-connected big landlords, mobilizes tremendous amounts of money to support capital-intensive forms of production, big agribusiness, large-scale resource extraction, and long-distance shipping, etc.) Maybe these arguments don’t go far enough to establish their intended conclusions; but I think that they are at least a pretty substantial line of argument that needs to be engaged with by those who predict business-as-usual to continue, even if with greater competition from the bottom, when the gigantic firms you see running today pretty much all depend very heavily (as in fact they do) on government privileges that would be abolished in a freed market.

Many poor people are pretty much responsible for their own problems insofar as they haven’t made the best of things within the current system.

Well. Everybody makes mistakes. Certainly I’ve made my own, and I have lots of friends who got themselves into all kinds of financial trouble through their own bad decisions. Not least the college-educated kids from well-off families who enter their mid-20s with tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt to repay and no clear plan on how to do it. But I think the interesting thing is how far people have an economic support structure, or available economic opportunities, to cushion the fall and to get back up on your feet after it, once you’ve made your mistakes.

But the situation faced by the economically comfortable, and the situation faced by the poor, in these respects are very different. Things like whether or not you have access to credit, whether or not you have access to alternative housing, what your options are for alternative ways of making a living if your current arrangement falls through, whether or not you are constantly being socked with new expenses that knock you back, whether or not you have access to insurance to cover emergency expenses, etc. And I’d say that in each case, the differences between rich and poor in these respects are in no small part the result of either direct government assaults on poor people’s property rights and alternative survival strategies (as I discuss in “Scratching By”) or else indirect ripple-effects of cartelizing, rigidifying, and subsdizing interventions by the state into the market. Everyone walks a tightrope, and people of all classes fall off from time to time; the real question is whether you’re allowed to work with a net, or whether the government has cut it down and taken it out from under you.

Micha,

Thanks for your thoughtful comments.

I agree with you that worker ownership of the means of production wouldn’t instantly solve all the problems of labor, and that — for all I’ve said in the King Ludd post — there might be other reasons why it turns out not to be viable, or at least not universally practicable. My main point was just to show that one alleged problem with unionism, presented by De Coster and others as if it were intrinsic to unionism as such, was actually only a problem with the particular model of union organizing that both anti-union business types and the establishmentarian union bosses fetishize, and which the Wagner/Taft-Hartley system actively subsidizes and protects in the name of “industrial peace,” at the expense of competing organizing models — like, for example, the worker-ownership model of the IWW. Those other organizing models may have problems of their own, but they don’t have the problems that De Coster treats as intrinsic to unionism.

After all, one of the myriad justifications for profits going to the capitalist is that the capitalist takes on the most risks, using her own money as an entrepreneur to start an uncertain business, with a high failure rate, and also extending in time when she will get recompensated, assuming the business becomes successful. Whereas a poor laborer just scratching by may not have the wherewithal to take such a large risk, nor be willing or able to withhold present consumption for the chance at a bigger future payoff – the poor laborer just wants a certain payoff now, in the form of wages.

Well, O.K., sure, but two things.

First, insofar as this argument works, it seems like it’s an argument for capitalists to take a role and get a cut in the high-risk start-up period for a firm; not necessarily much of an argument for capitalists remaining as residual profit recipients after the firm is already well established. It’s perfectly possible to have both an infusion of working capital during the start-up period and a worker co-op at the end (either because the capitalist agrees to those terms, going in, or because the workers organize after a while and use their stronger bargaining position to convince her to disentangle herself and find a new entrepreneurial opportunity). The question is why that sort of thing doesn’t happen now. Maybe it’s because there’s some other reason why it’s not viable, but I’d suggest that a lot of the reason has to do with the way in which prevalent business models and prevalent union organizing models are supported and rigidified by government economic regimentation (as well as the establishmentarian business and union culture that that regimentation promotes).

Second, it’s true that, especially for very low-paid wage workers, a lot of their economic decisions are going to be made as a reaction to the extremely precarious economic situation that they are in. This will naturally tend to make people more risk-averse and more interested in certain and quick pay-offs than they might otherwise be. But the precarity isn’t a fixed natural fact; it’s largely the product of specific government policies which ratchet up fixed costs of living while ratcheting down opportunities for homesteading and labor, with workers’ livelihoods caught in the squeeze. Eliminate those policies and you’ll begin to see workers with more of their costs of living safely covered and with more in the way of back-up options should their current arrangement fail.

But becoming an investor and a risk-taker generally presupposes some level of acquired wealth, where you have taken care of basic needs and have some money left over to risk and save. Poor laborers aren’t generally going to have access to that sort of capital, and they are the ones who seem to benefit from organizing their labor the most.

Well, organizing your labor and providing a cushion of wealth to fall back on aren’t mutually exclusive options. Unions themselves can (and, in the past, often did) provide an institutional vehicle for helping cushion workers from economic falls — by improving wages, but, more importantly by providing institutions that help workers on the bum to find new work (e.g. union hiring halls, now illegal under Taft-Hartley) or for workers to help each other provide for themselves and their families during lean times (e.g. mutual aid societies, now partly illegal, or heavily regulated — if they do anything that might be construed by the government as selling insurance — and in any case crowded out by government welfare).

If it turns out that one aspect of radical labor solidarity (worker ownership of the means of production) works out best when accompanied by another aspect of radical labor solidarity (a vibrant network of mutual aid), well, I’m happy enough with that conclusion.