A summary of grievances addressed to my 19th Century anarchist chums re their concepts of exploitation and wage slavery.
a/ non-sequiturs
Inferring something moral (exploitation) from an accounting fact (<100% of revenue in wages) is a non sequitur and runs afoul of the is/ought problem.
The non sequitur arises because in this case the accounting fact doesn't actually imply the moral one. Further steps would be needed to connect these two different facts, whether an LTV or the will of some deity.
For another link describing the is/ought problem, first formulated by David Hume, maybe anarchist econ needs a guillotining.
b/ metaphysics
Avoiding the non-sequitur problem requires a metaphysical theory of value that is invalidated by observable reality and serious contemporary logical inquiry - namely falsification (Karl Popper) & the maths and quantum mechanics behind incompleteness (Kurt Godel) and uncertainty (Werner Heisenberg) respectively.
Completeness/objectivity as a frame of reference/point of view doesn't exist in reality, but rather must always be an act of estimation extrapolated FROM a subjective reference frame, including abstractions of what other subjective reference frames appear to have perceived according to subsequent investigation.
This means that the reference frame from which to observe the movement of value out of a worker, into their creation, etc, doesn't exist, thus the claim is metaphysical. See Philip Wicksteed and George Bernard Shaw.
Objective value theories (cost, labour, energy) aspire to knowledge that cannot be had (quantification of economic value) whereas subjective value theories do not.
Uncertainty pervades the very nature of reality itself, including all perception of it, so nobody knows what will happen when they expend resources - say by investing or lending money *wink wink* that is spent on wages, capital goods and utilities. This makes all models that claim to describe economic activity from a fixed viewpoint/frame of reference fallacious as they assume everything to be known in advance when, by very definition, reality will not allow such knowledge.
The combo of incompleteness and uncertainty invalidates the $100 sale vs $25 wage example as a demonstration of some kind of injustice.
But further, justifying your protest on a class basis is a reification fallacy - personifying all the workers at the firm as one being with volition (and a wallet) separate from and logically preceding that of the individual workers themselves. The same applies when discussing the actions of capitalists. Rather ironic.
c/ full value of what?
In your happy clappy fantasy individuals wouldn't be getting their full value anyway cos the 100% payroll has to be split amongst the workers, so each worker is only getting a [number of workers] fraction of their true value. So what was the point?
Or is 'true value' automatically calculated on the basis of revenue divided by the number of workers; just arbitrarily assumed to be total revenue / number of workers? For this not to be arbitrary a reason must be given for the neat division. Since the only reasons that can be given run afoul of metaphyiscs and axiomata they can be rejected as reasonably as accepted, robbing them of descriptive authority. Although if you really wanna hear something metaphysical...
Our third possibility; is full value something literally tied to exactly what each worker put into the goods? This would be impossibly serpentine reasoning and metaphysical to boot per incompleteness and uncertainty in point b.
For example, '100 PerCent Co-op' employs 100 workers and they get 1% of the full value (revenue) produced each, right?
So the full value = full revenue of all sales to date in whatever accounting period. And here we get into common-sense...
d/ common-sense hates you
100% payroll makes no sense. What about non-payroll business costs like utility bills, raw materials, capital acquisition, etc? How will those be paid for? Will the co-op tax its members? What's the point of the extra step?
Workers want to be paid regularly. Remember that everyone (bureaucrat, customer, entrepreneur, financier, landowner, worker) is trying to minimise the risk and uncertainty confronting them. A <100% payroll funded by finance (investment and/or lending) as well as revenue makes this relatively easy for capitalists to offer, and safe for workers to accept. That's why it's ubiquitous. But nice try.
I guess another point on which common sense and 19th Century Anarchism part ways is that, in everyday life who does what where when matters, and that includes who agrees to what. That is, agreements between actually existing human beings about labour contracts should be considered to have greater weight than metaphysical theories of value. This is a common sense objection to exploitation theory that would hold even if the other objections above did not.
The only way to avoid this axiomatically inferred exploitation is to avoid surplus, to produce solely for your own subsistence, which I suppose leads us on to history...
e/ history happened
In practice only societies that dabbled in private ownership of land advanced from primitive to lasting (inter-generational) agrarian (field, yes field) agriculture, thence to urbanisation and civilisation, with one (Harrappa) having no attested government at all, and others (Ireland, Iceland & Cospaia) not using government to protect peoples' property.
Meanwhile the common property gift societies remained primitive and/or nomadic. Such exemplars as the Maasai, Merina, Piaroa and Tiv remain so as of 2016, with no evidence of any massive economic growth spurts any time soon... and you aspire to be like them?
f/ you can leave
Wage slavery's solution is embarrassingly obvious - don't get a wage-paying job.
Become a freelancer, go into business as a sole trader, setup a partnership or a co-op, or wander off into the country and form a primitivist commune (that's how the few survivors of Ancomistan will have to live anyway once the production structure is gone and nobody's making capital goods anymore) and relax!
Alex Glisson said more than once that it's not a realistic option. In the words of the sage Shia Laboeuf... just do it. You personally can do it. That's what matters. Your insane ideas, if executed at large, would constitute the democide of about 19/20ths of all humans anyway, so who cares if not everybody can do it - JUST DO IT YOURSELF!
~~~
Falsificationism
http://medical-dictionary.thefreedictionary.com/Falsificationism
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/falsificationism
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Falsifiability
https://explorable.com/falsifiability
Incompleteness | Godel
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/goedel-incompleteness/
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/what-is-godels-theorem/
http://math.mind-crafts.com/godels_incompleteness_theorems.php
https://www.miskatonic.org/godel.html
http://www.research.ibm.com/people/h/hirzel/papers/canon00-goedel.pdf
http://www.math.hawaii.edu/~dale/godel/godel.html
Uncertainty | Heisenberg
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uncertainty_principle
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/qt-uncertainty/
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/common-interpretation-of-heisenbergs-uncertainty-principle-is-proven-false/# - not a refutation of Heisenberg, just so we're clear
Uncertainty | Knight
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knightian_uncertainty
Labour Theory of Value
http://www.dreamscape.com/rvien/Economics/Essays/LTV-FAQ.html - excellent explanation of the Marxian ltv from top to bottom - most anarchists are sufficiently useless on econ that they de facto agree with the Marxian ltv - they just infer eploitation as something normative rather than purely descriptive
http://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/the-anarchist-faq-editorial-collective-an-anarchist-faq - good for a laugh but a little light on sound argumentation or holistic data-gathering I'm afraid - and yes, I've read the whole thing
http://anarchism.pageabode.com/afaq/secC2.html - exploitation per An Anarchist FAQ
Philip Wicksteed
https://mises.org/library/common-sense-political-economy-volume-1
https://mises.org/library/common-sense-political-economy-volume-2
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Philip_Wicksteed - in case you wanna get to the action quickly
http://socialdemocracy21stcentury.blogspot.co.uk/2015/05/wicksteed-on-contradiction-in-chapter-1.html - restatement of Wicksteed's point by the post-Keynesian blogger who calls himself LK
History of Agriculture & Private Property
http://www.pnas.org/content/110/22/8830.full - Coevolution of farming and private property during the early Holocene
http://www.pnas.org/content/112/46/14218.full - Transition to farming more likely for small, conservative groups with property rights, but increased productivity is not essential
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