This is the first sentence in a lot of posts that has any meaning to me in this discussion.
Right. My plumber (actually, my ex plumber, he’s retired) was a one man shop. He owned his tools, he owned his time, he decided what jobs to take (he dropped 2/3 of his customers when he semi-retired. He liked me, and kept doing work in my house until his wife developed dementia and he needed to care for her full time), he set the conditions of his work, and he feels very self-employed to me, and not like a wage-laborer. Even if i did post him for a service, not a product.
Then those plumbers aren’t really relevant, are they?
South Africa may have a different attitude to hired workers, then.
I mean they’re not really relevant to the capitalism part of it, as they’re a small fraction of the wage workers.
But nevertheless they are themselves capitalist enterprises, so not exactly all that different a way.
Yes, I agreed with you - the difference was between one specific exemplar plumber and one specific exemplar baker, not bakers and plumbers as professions overall.
Huh? I brought up my plumber as an example of someone who doesn’t work for wages, and you said, “yes he does”, confusing the heck out of some of us.
So can you clarify, do you think my plumber, who sells his services, not a concrete product, works for wages? He was a one-man company. I called him and told him what my problem was, he told me when he could come and fix it, and then i paid him. Usually i paid him the minimum charge for a call. If it was a big job, like installing a new toilet, it was more.
Yes, he works for wages.
But he isn’t relevant for a discussion about capitalism, because he’s not the kind of wage labourer that is of relevance. Not all wage labourers are the same - army employees, for instance, are wage labourers but aren’t relevant to the discussion. Small business owners that sell only their own services aren’t of relevance to the discussion. Neither of those (and some other categories) of wage labour are relevant because they’re not wage labourers who are in an employee relationship with capitalists Those are the only wage labourers of real interest.
Now, a plumber who employs others is of some relevance (not a lot, as they tend not to be big employers) as a petty capitalist. But a guy who just hires out himself? Not really. I mean, he’s participating in a capitalist system, but a post-capitalist system isn’t going to hold a lot of change for him, the way it would for the kind of wage labourer that is of relevance.
So do you have a word to describe the interesting divide, which is between people whose livelihood would change in a post-capitalist world, and those who wouldn’t be much affected? Because clearly “wage laborer” is not a useful category for describing that.
No, other than “wage labourer”, which covers the territory well enough.
It used to be just the proletariat but that doesn’t cover it as well anymore, as the rise of the salariat has added their numbers to the affected group. So “wage labourer” is adequate for the task as it combines both those, with the non-affected ones being basically a rounding error.
Only for people who insist on nitpicking it to death. It’s an entirely standard expression in anti-capitalist circles, and has been since at least 1849.
OK. Thanks for clarification.
– but then you say this:
So I am feeling un-clarified again. Do you think the self-employed baker is working for wages?
I find the self-employed to be of interest. @puzzlegal appears to find them of interest.
As I said before: I think they’re of interest in this discussion as, although they may currently be a small percentage of most modern economies, they’ve been a larger percentage in the past, might be a larger percentage in the future, and offer a potential different version of an economic system than the one we’ve currently got.
They’re capitalistic in some senses, yes – but not in the senses that seem to me to be causing many of the current problems: while they need to bring in money as that’s used, in societies involving anywhere near as many people as ours, to buy things the plumber, baker, etc. need or want and don’t themselves produce: money is only a point of the enterprise for that purpose. The money itself is not making money, and the money as a thing that can be used in that fashion is not an essential part of the goal. And individuals and partners in such businesses are not working under the control of a power structure that produces nothing other than that control – and money, which can be and often is used to purchase yet more control.
I don’t think it’s a nitpick to ask clarifying questions about points that are confusing the issue. Although it’s clear that the real answer is, “it’s complicated”. My husband is an independent contractor, but he only contracts with one company. The difference between this job, and his prior job where he was an employee (and his next job, which he’s about to start) where he will be an employee are mostly administrative. (Who files which government forms, who pays for health insurance.) And I’m sure there is a continuum between the self employed plumber, who works for hundreds of households and picks up new customers on a regular basis, and probably doesn’t even know when a customer drops him, and the self employed cleaning lady who works for perhaps a dozen households and rarely loses or acquires new customers. (And my husband, with a single customer.)
Of course, other lines are blurry. I work for an insurance company that is technically a mutual company, owned by its customers. Once upon a time that might have meant something. But over the years, it has morphed into something that is all but a traditional for-profit corporation. Again, there are some regulatory differences, but the company is managed to make a profit, not to do the best it can for its policy-holders.
(Really technically, it’s not exactly a mutual company any more, but is a company owned by a mutual holding company. But the change in focus and management goals happened long before the legal change to the corporate structure.)
Yeah. As I understand it, the debate–in very fuzzy terms–is something like this:
- Post-capitalism will necessitate a move away from wages and toward a different economic structure, when it comes to folks earning their bread via their labor.
- If plumbers (in the context discussed) are wage-earners, what does it mean to move away from that structure? If they’re not, what does that mean?
It might be clearer to say instead, something like
- Post-capitalism will necessitate a move away from wages earned by workers who don’t own their tools of production and who are paid by the owners of the tools, who themselves are seeking to profit off of those workers.
A statement like that clarifies that self-employed plumbers aren’t necessarily going to go away–but that there’s be a lot fewer plumbers employed by Big Plumbing Inc.
I’ve heard a lot of arguments advocating that, in order to build solidarity, the Professional Managerial Class (PMC) should be lumpened-in with the proletariat, since they’re both wage-earners. Both work for their money, while the stockholders let their money work for them.
It’s an appealing concept, but then I consider what it is that many sectors of the PMC do that the other employees don’t: the latter make money, the latter protect it. Some professions consist of going to the boss and shareholders with “I’ve got a great idea how to make more money for you.”
Nothing wrong with that, except when the idea involve screwing the employees. Asset-stripping: taking a perfectly viable company with years of sure profitability ahead of it, and selling it off for a quick buck. Entire towns are destroyed, abandoned pets euthanized, children savagely abused by parents driven to the breaking point. (Oh don’t be so melodramatic Slithy. That hardy ever happens) Shareholders love it when they’ve told it’s fat being cut, never mind the blood.
Ever wonder why you need to go through four or more panels of group interviews, and why the reason for the sour looks on their faces? Often it’s because they have a mountain of work waiting, but some experts have laid off their coworkers and loaded the survivors. But they still now have plenty of time: because they’ve been taken off hourly and made salary. Isn’t that illegal? Not if they qualify as managers by being involved in hiring “decisions.” April fools on you with your silly job application: they aren’t really hiring at all. “We’re interviewing” = “we’re hiring” = “we’re expanding” all sounds the same to shareholders who have no idea what’s going on but can be dazzled by charts and metrics. People make a good living coming up with this stuff.
Somebody had the great idea that Pacific Gas & Electric relax scheduled maintenance and just troubleshoot instead. Vast swaths of California burned as a result. People get paid to look really carefully at OSHA regulations and see where corners can be cut. Insurance pays a set rate, listed on the so-called “meat chart” for amputated body parts. Let’s crunch those numbers against profits lost to PPE, machine guards, downtime lost on thorough lockout/tagout.
Someone was paid to come up with the perfectly legal trick of calling the schools where the children of outstanding debtors attend, following a crafted script to get them called to the office and then questioned about asking mommy and daddy to pay their bills. “Do you think your parents are good people? Do you think good people pay the money they said they would pay back?” (Yes, this shit really happens). And that’s just the tip of the poo-berg, where our brightest minds apply themselves to consumer protections.
Somebody makes a lot of money helping companies avoid paying taxes. A storefront branch in Ireland, a machine shop in Puerto Rico, and you have an umbrella that saves you paying tens of millions into the nation whose flag you proudly fly in front of HQ. And don’t worry: congress passed a law prohibiting the IRS from contracting expert lawyers to go against your PMC experts. (Funny how we can hire mercenary armies to fight our wars, but not lawyers to collect our taxes). Those leftists with their slogan “there can be no civilization without taxation” never set foot in a corporate skybox at a Seahawks game.
The PMC used to be the class that managed and regulated the working class, including the police, healthcare and education. Now they work to eliminate whole sectors of their own class, through cost-cutting policies and one-on-one backstabbing in daily culture. What hope is there for worker solidarity with this?
David Graeber was right when he identified all those bullshit jobs. But so many of them are malignancies as well.
No:
By this I was meaning a baker that just sells baked goods they made themselves.
They’re interesting in themselves, but irrelevant to the point I was making. We had people like that before capitalism, we have them now with capitalism, we’ll have them after capitalism. So they’re like the constant you can cross out on either side of the formula.
We’re never going to have an economic system where we’re mostly small-scale standalone self-employed people. That was never the norm. In the past, they may have had a slightly larger percentage, but still tiny compared to, say, peasants.
And IMO, in a post-capitalist future, the only way to get rid of capitalists will be to group together again, not continue in exactly the sort of small-scale Mom&Pop operations that the corporations picked off so easily in the Main Streets of last century.
I think it crosses over into nitpicking or something else equally non-contributive somewhere around the 4th or 5th time I explain what I mean and people still insist on having me explain the minutiae of irrelevancies like bakers and plumbers - both occupations that no doubt represent a tiny fraction of a single percentage of working people.
This is exactly what I meant by “wage labourers”. Edge cases notwithstanding.
I think I accidentally asked the wrong question. How about the self-employed plumber? Do you think that person is working for wages?
Not every place in the world even had peasants (or equivalents.)
Admittedly, those which didn’t may not have had our idea of self-employed, either.
That might be true, because of how many of us there are.
Yes.
Although I think this might be the last time I contribute to the ongoing discussion about this particular irrelevancy.
No, that’s why I only gave peasants as one example.
Then i don’t think we’ll get to a post-capitalist future without some major cataclysm. (Not just a world war, but a nuclear Holocaust or something.) Because my experience is that when collectives get large, they start to behave like capitalist corporations. Like my employer. Like my professional society, which is technically non-profit and works for society at large, but has become enamored with growth and profitability in the last few decades.
Me too, but for a different reason. I have concluded that it’s irrelevant in general whether someone is “working for wages” because that seems to be a distinction with very little relevance in today’s world.
They don’t have to get large. The idea isn’t to replace the megacorps with equivalent-sized collectives. That would, I agree, not work so well.
From Frequently Asked Questions About Small Business 2023 – SBA's Office of Advocacy.
- Most businesses are small- 99.9% of American businesses.
- There are 33,185,550 small businesses in the United States.
- Small businesses employ 61.7 million Americans, totaling 46.4% of private sector employees.
- From 1995 to 2021, small businesses created 17.3 million net new jobs, accounting for 62.7% of net jobs created since 1995.
- Small businesses pay 39.4% percent of private sector payroll.
- Small businesses generate 32.6% percent of known export value.
Maybe not “most” but certainly significant.
Whether or not they own their own tools doesn’t make someone a “wage worker”. What makes them a wage worker is the company directly profits from their labor for which in exchange they are paid a wage.
A self employed plumber with his own tools is still a wage worker.
A self employed plumber with his own tools and employees is not.
Management is typically not a wage worker, even though they get paid a wage, because the company typically does not directly profit from them. They are an oversight expense.
“We” and “America” are not synonyms.
And neither are “small business” and “self-employed”. From your cite, my emphasis:
The Office of Advocacy generally defines a small business as an independent business having fewer than 500 employees.