Capitalism is not Voluntary
April 14th, 2013
The wage system (ie. capitalism) is not a truly voluntary system. Its true under the present system most people work for bosses, but that is because most of us do not have a feasible alternative. Corporations & a small number of wealthy individuals own & run the bulk of the economy. Most of us do not own the means of production (non-human things used to produce stuff - like land & factories) and so must sell our labor to corporations (or the state) to survive. As David Graeber wrote:
You always see [capitalists] saying "if I want to hire someone to pick my tomatoes, how are you going to stop me without using coercion?" Notice how you never see anyone say "if I want to hire myself out to pick someone else's tomatoes, how are you going to stop me?" Historically nobody ever did wage labor like that if they had pretty much ANY other option.
If someone wants to employ you to make, say, widgets - and make a profit selling widgets - he will have to pay you less than what he sells the widgets for. If he spends the same amount on your wages as he makes selling widgets he won't turn a profit. So why would you work for him when you could just make & sell the widgets yourself? By cutting out the middle-man you'd make more money. For most of human history most people didn't work for wages for precisely this reason. Today most widget-makers work for wages because a different group of people, the capitalist class, owns the widget-making tools & the widget-makers thus cannot simply cut out the middle-man. That ownership was established and is maintained by the coercive force of the state.
Some capitalists like to imagine that a person would voluntarily choose to be an employee of a boss rather than join a coop/collective (or work for yourself) when both are feasible options, and the only way to stop boss-worker relationships from forming is to use coercion to stop it. Few people would want to work for a boss when joining a coop / collective is a feasible alternative. If you're in a collective you get a say in what it does, control over your own labor, and a higher pay rate. If you work for a boss you get paid less & are subordinate to someone else. In an anarchist society, if someone insisted on being a boss but did not resort to coercion he would encounter a severe labor shortage as all of his potential employees would choose to join collectives with better pay and working conditions.
To have widespread wage-labor you need to have a situation in which one group of people owns (or otherwise controls) the means of production & another group of people does not & therefore has to sell their labor to the first group to survive. This situation is not natural, nor has it always existed, although it might seem like it if you've lived your whole life under it. It originally came about in England several hundred years ago when former lords (now basically agricultural-business owners) converted much of the land into their private property, enclosing it in fences. This left much of the population - who had previously been peasant farmers - without any land, or without enough land to make a living. As a result they were forced to sell their labor , to work for wages, to survive. This seizure was eventually made fully legal (and accelerated) by parliament when it passed a series of laws called the enclosure acts. As a result, for the first time in history, there was a society where most people worked for wages.