i go weeks without posting then one right after another. qualitatively and quantitatively my work could be compared to constipation and diarrhea but nevermind.

i was perusing wiki as i do. i find it a really good way of getting a wide overview of ideas you are unfamiliar with and then using the sources as a stepping off point.

so id surfed my way through a few links in various political-philosophy articles on there and arrived at wage slavery. an idea that motivates quite alot of my views. unfortunately alot of the references to anarchism in the article seem to refer to the hard socialist form of anarchism. the one that supports statist coercion in favor of a their own subjectively and arbitrarily defined group (little different to right-libertarians). i dont think there is any such thing as right or left anarchism. and i dont think there is a need for such discrimination either. certainly in an effort to rebuke accusations of being apologists for crony corporatism many anarcho-capitalist theorists have devoted great efforts to explaining how it is the coercion of the state that generates and perpetuates most of the injustices and inequalities that concern these anarcho-socialists. so we can see that absent the state voluntary legal systems are unlikely to uphold anything resembling the current favourable environment the state offers certain clients. limited liability is a pure externalisation of risk. polycentric market law necessarily has to be reciprocal. why would anyone volunteer to carry the risk of a corporation? there probably will be no such entity under anarchy.

that had been my understanding of the argument against 'evil' corporatism under anarchy. however on reading the wiki article about wage slavery another argument caught my eye.

im interested in the Freeman movement. in my days of engaging with statist 'libertarian' bloggers i would frequently defend the Freeman movement because i thought they were on to the same ideas as voluntarist anarchists. the Freemen challenged the concept of the social contract motivated by a desire for freedom from unjust coercion. this philosophical validity of contracts has always been a central issue whether it concerns capital, land or labour.

thus the following excerpt from the wiki article on wage slavery that focuses on some contractual criticisms of the current employer/employee labour/capital relationship is extremely interesting in the context of whether voluntary law would be able to uphold a continued universal application of this relationship.

 

Employment contracts

Some criticize wage slavery on strictly contractual grounds, e.g. David Ellerman and Carole Pateman, arguing that the employment contract is a legal fiction in that it treats human beings juridically as mere tools or inputs by abdicating responsibility and self-determination, which the critics argue are inalienable. As Ellerman points out, "[t]he employee is legally transformed from being a co-responsible partner to being only an input supplier sharing no legal responsibility for either the input liabilities [costs] or the produced outputs [revenue, profits] of the employer’s business."^[104] Such contracts are inherently invalid "since the person remain[s] a de facto fully capacitated adult person with only the contractual role of a non-person . . ." as it is impossible to physically transfer self-determination.^[105] As Pateman argues:

"The contractarian argument is unassailable all the time it is accepted that abilities can ‘acquire’ an external relation to an individual, and can be treated as if they were property. To treat abilities in this manner is also implicitly to accept that the ‘exchange’ between employer and worker is like any other exchange of material property . . . The answer to the question of how property in the person can be contracted out is that no such procedure is possible. Labour power, capacities or services, cannot be separated from the person of the worker like pieces of property."^[106]

Critics of the employment contract advocate consistently applying "the principle behind every trial," i.e., "legal responsibility should be imputed in accordance with de facto responsibility," implying a workplace run jointly by the people who actually work in the firm.^[107] The people who actually work in a firm are de facto responsible for the actions of said firm and thus have a legal claim to its outputs, as the contractarian critics argue. "Responsible human action, net value-adding or net value-subtracting, is not de facto transferable."^[108] Suppliers (including shareholders), on the other hand, having no de facto responsibility, have no legal claim to the outputs.
While a person may still voluntarily decide to contractually rent himself, just as today he may voluntarily decide to contractually sell himself, in a society where "the principle behind every trial" is consistently applied, neither contract would be legally enforceable, and the rented/sold individual would maintain at all times de jure responsibility for her/his actions, including legal claim to the fruits of their labor. In a modern liberal-capitalist society, the employment contract is enforced while the enslavement contract is not; the former being considered valid because of its consensual/non-coercive nature, and the later being considered inherently invalid, consensual or not. The noted economist Paul Samuelson described this discrepancy.

"Since slavery was abolished, human earning power is forbidden by law to be capitalized. A man is not even free to sell himself; he must rent himself at a wage."^[109]

Some advocates of laissez-faire capitalism, among them philosopher Robert Nozick, address this inconsistency in modern societies, arguing that a consistently libertarian society would allow and regard as valid consensual/non-coercive enslavement contracts, rejecting the notion of inalienable rights.

"The comparable question about an individual is whether a free system will allow him to sell himself into slavery. I believe that it would."^[110]

Others like Murray Rothbard allow for the possibility of debt slavery, asserting that a lifetime labour contract can be broken so long as the slave pays appropriate damages:

"[I]f A has agreed to work for life for B in exchange for 10,000 grams of gold, he will have to return the proportionate amount of property if he terminates the arrangement and ceases to work."^[111]