this post was submitted on 24 Feb 2024
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I think by this stage we're hitting the problem that there are various views and ideologies being lumped or un-lumped into terms and spectrums. Is the 'Left' the pattern of wanting public ownership, state control and/or the redistribution of wealth/ownership from employers/landowners to employees/tenants? Or is it the shared views of a particular set of people?
I didn't mean to say capitalism is freedom to trade, rather that individual ownership plus freedom to trade enables capitalism: where I'm hoping 'capitalism' is vague enough to fit most people's definition, but myself really I'm thinking of capitalism as the philosophy whereby wealth is considered fungible, and one strives to use the wealth one has, to gain more. (E.g. I have a horse, which I could trade with you for two sheep, then gather the sheep's milk, and trade the sheep plus their milk back with you for the horse plus a hamster.)
I... that's more interesting each time I re-read over your comment. I still don't think it's a fake contract, and maybe your comment's not true either. If I'm employed to fit tyres onto car wheels and deliberately misalign them so they burst, doesn't some legal responsibility come back on my head?
But if my employer says to the customer, "I have set quality checkers over all the production, so I can guarantee the fitness of the product even if individual workers make a mistake, and I will take responsibility and refund you if there is a problem," is that not valid?
I agree it easily becomes abusive. Especially when the only option for many people is to rent land, find employment at a company, rather than having the option to own and produce themselves.
By entire result, I meant the liabilities for used-up inputs together with the property rights to produced outputs. If workers step outside the employment contract or the law, the law recognizes their responsibility for the results of their actions. That isn't the problem. The problem is the law doesn't recognize their responsibility for the results of their actions in normal production where workers don't jointly get the entire result of production.
A warranty doesn't involve misimputation
So, I believe it's a thing in rail, that workers are explicitly not blamed for things that go wrong. Called a 'no fault' system. Presumably deliberate malice still falls back on them, but for a mistake, it's considered that The System is deficient: that appropriate training/oversight/checks weren't in place. This encourages employees to speak up when something goes wrong and be honest and detailed about what happened to cause it.
I certainly don't think that model should be used everywhere, and perhaps taken to its fullest shouldn't be anywhere. (But, conversely, some of that thinking should be in most places!) But I think it's an example of a legitimate separation of workers and responsibility.
I don't know if you're meaning responsibility in the sense of when there's bad effects (e.g. a worker participates in making a baby milk formula with potential heavy metal contamination) or in the sense of deserving to reap the benefits (i.e. the full profit). Either way I think I still agree there's an imbalance, but not a true separation in the way you mean: where workers receive part (of result and responsibility) and irrelevant non-workers receive part.
Managers, consultants, lenders, advertisers, are all part of the process of making a product and making it useful to people. (Okay, some are superfluous, and some are bad; but so are some physical workers.) Even the person who inspires everyone else to get together and work, is a (valuable) part of the process. And the person who helps them not squabble and not abandon each other. If this were not true, then in a land where workers have legal and physical freedom to work together, communal working groups would be more common, would they not?
The imbalance comes down to greed, a lack of wisdom, and greed. ("You said, 'greed,' twice!" "That's because...") A big tower of greed and unwise choices, of which the largest part appears to me that the people with power/wealth are able to make the decisions so that more of the wealth comes to them. If I 'own' a company, that's a legitimate work I did facilitating a place and entity where workers can come together and produce; but now I can control that I get a larger portion of the collective profits. And I can twist every decision into that favour, by an ever-growing tower of means invented by the rich and powerful, and my ever-growing leverage from my ever-growing wealth.
Once again, you've given me interesting cues to think on. Apologies if my response is over-wordy; I blame it on recovering from 'flu.