Abolish Human Rentals ~ Support Worker Cooperatives

Abolish Human Rentals

Support Worker Cooperatives

 

 

What is a human rental?

Human rentals describes how most people earn a living, they rent themselves in exchange for a salary or wage. The self rental typically describes the state of being employed by a firm. Human rentals involves two key features.

The first aspect is the agreement to follow orders within terms of the rental. For example some standard orders would be: produce this, provide this service, design this, or manage these people. The employee generally concedes authority over how the work is performed and under what conditions. The main issue is the delegation of positive governing control. The employer has the ability to command the worker to perform certain actions: work faster, work harder, produce higher quality parts, etc. Or more commonly today, dump these toxins, deny these medical claims, issues these predatory loans, or manage public relations so we can continue doing these things. The rented person must obey, or risk being fired.

The second aspect of a human rental is the transfer of responsibility for the actions of the person while at work. The most obvious is the transfer of responsibility for any profit or loss that results from the worker’s actions. That responsibility is shifted to the owners of the business.

It is important to note that both the alienation of governing control at work and the transfer of responsibility cannot in fact take place. A person can not alienate their authority to a state or firm without a say in the governance, at least if one believes in inalienable rights and democratic theory. At best a person can choose to cooperate, which the legal system then pretends is an actual alienation of authority and fulfillment of the rental contract. This is precisely what our judicial system does with regard to human rentals today.

The transfer of responsibility for personal actions is clearly inalienable as illustrated by the commission of a crime. The judicial system correctly traces criminal responsibility back to all persons involved. It matters little if a person is “hired” to commit a crime. Being contracted to provide services in a crime does not shift responsibility and get a hired criminal off the hook. However, responsibility cannot be transferred in the positive case either, that of productive labor. In this case the legal system closes its eyes and pretends that the employment contract actually transfers responsibility between parties. It thus allows the transfer of profit resulting from labor to be appropriated by another party not responsible for its creation.

 

© 2013 - Abolish Human Rentals Worker Cooperatives Worker Cooperatives are democratically run, worker-owned businesses. They are the alternative to the an alienating employment system, involving collaborative self-employment by groups of individuals.  Governance of a worker cooperative is based on one member, one vote. People that provide labor are required to become members (after a trial period) so their rights to governance and profit appropriation are protected. Here is a map of worker cooperatives in the United States. More information on worker cooperatives can be found here.          © 2013 - Abolish Human Rentals   Marxism as a Capitalist Tool David Ellerman Abstract Just as the two sides in the Cold War agreed that Western Capitalism and Soviet Communism were “the” two alternatives, so the two sides in the intellectual Great Debate agreed on a common framing of questions with the defenders of capitalism taking one side and Marxists taking the other side of the questions. From the viewpoint of economic democracy (e.g., a labor managed market economy), this late Great Debate between capitalism and socialism was as misframed as would be an antebellum ‘Great Debate’ between the private or public ownership of slaves. Even though the Great Debate between capitalism and socialism is now in the dustbin of intellectual history, Marxism still plays an important role in sustaining the misframing of the questions so that the defenders of the present employment system do not have to face the real questions that separate that system from a system of economic democracy. In that sense, Marxism has become the ultimate capitalist tool.