“Inalienable Rights: Part I The Basic Argument” Against the Employer-Employee System and for Workplace Democracy
https://www.ellerman.org/inalienable-rights-part-i-the-basic-argument/
This article discusses how the contemporary system of labor relations treats employees as things rather than persons thus denying their humanity, and violating rights they have because of their personhood. Instead, work should be democratically controlled by the people doing it
Ellerman’s approach actually clarifies how the system of property and contract works under capitalism and avoids some basic mistakes that are pervasive in Marxism and neoclassical economics. Furthermore, his argument is significantly stronger and more decisive than established leftist criticisms. It establishes that wage labor violates workers’ rights even if it is voluntary.
What specific point in the article did you disagree with?
Mostly, Ellerman’s approach is weighty and unwieldy, by capturing or complicating constructs that leftists have identified as unnecessary, unrobust, and outright fictitious.
Most leftists have no need for recovering natural rights, nor even have need of natural rights.
Workers might simply rebel against the exploiters, because workers have no wish and no need for being exploited.
There is a moral principle that legal responsibility should be assigned to the de facto responsible party. Ellerman shows that the employer-employee contract under capitalism is inherently based on violating this fundamental moral principle. Natural rights are just rights that follow from certain basic principles of justice.
The capitalist account is that workers consent to wage labor. Ellerman’s argument is necessary to show that capitalism even if it was voluntary is unjust
Since workers were born into a world that affirms private property, they obviously never gave it their consent.
It is just a fiction that developed its own life by the whip, blade, and gun, and also by the pen and press.
Most of the work of leftist criticisms has been simply deconstructing entrenched doctrine, to help expand consciousness, and to build capacity for liberation.
Ellerman seems to prefer instead constructing his own layer of obfuscation.
It is worth becoming familiar with leftist criticisms of natural rights.