Capitalism and Marxism:Asking the Same Wrong Questions...

Non-Marxist advocates of economic democracy often implicitly advocate a civil market economy in which labor is not subordinated to capital via the the employment contract. We argue on Lockean grounds that the employment contract should be progressively eroded by the business community and by the people and finally abolished in favour of the implementation of democratic-republican principles to a free enterprise economy. We advocate this on Lockean grounds even if perhaps John Locke was not rigorous enough to take his own labor theory of property to its most logical conclusion.

This may at first seem a self-defeating undertaking on our part. North Americans, academics and business people alike, whether identifying themselves as 'liberal' or 'conservative' draw varying lines of separation between our freedom to choose our public officials at the ballot box and the degree of freedom we exercise in our daily lives at work, and do so while taking the names of Thomas Jefferson and Adam Smith in vain.

The apologist for capitalism is particularly eager to defend a very sharp line between the two spheres of "public" and "private", only dropping their intellectual veils long enough to suggest that our governments ought to 'operate like a business' and otherwise suggesting that any alternative to capitalism is akin to capitalism's once erstwhile enemy, Marxism.

In "Marxism: The Ultimate Capitalist Tool" David P. Ellerman argues that the largely self-referential debate capitalists have about the merits of Marxism and Capitalism has been misframed in much the same manner as a hypothetical debate about the merits of the mutually anti-social aspects of public vs. private ownership of slaves might be framed (p. 1-3). Though actual Marxism may be defeated and discredited by the victorious capitalist celebrant of private wage slavery, Marxism continues to serve as Capitalism's perfect strawman, representing all that is 'other' with reference to Capitalism. According to Ellerman, an understanding of John Locke's labor theory of property, such as that held by P.J. Proudhon and a number of Ricardian socialists, should give the advocate of capitalism pause to consider what the active embrace of Locke's theory might imply for the relationship between workers, firms and investors in a non-marxist construction of economic democracy in keeping with the founding ethics and values of the United States of America in particular:

"In political terms, the precursors of the democratic economy would look back more to the guild socialists and libertarian left than to any version of Marxism. The relevant intellectual history is the historical democratic and anti-slavery movements" that "also uncovers the true intellectual precursors of the employment system who erected a theory of non-democratic government and of slavery based on explicit or implicit voluntary contracts." (p.2-3)

In contrast to this Hobbesian state of affairs where anti-social elements of humanity are quite content to let their willing subjects voluntarily surrender their birthright of liberty for the security extended by Mammon, we ask with Ellerman what might happen when the ideas of the Scottish Enlightenment are applied to our economy. What might life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness look like in the farms, fields and factories of Canada, USAmerica and Mexico? If one believes these ought to exist in an inalienable sense in North America's workplaces then one must admit that capitalists have generally been asking all the wrong questions at best and hiding any answers they don't like at worst.

And Marxists served capitalists well in developing the capitalist framing of economic questions. The Marxist and the Capitalist both agree that capitalism is based on private property rights. The Marxist and the Capitalist both agree that the employment self-sale-rent-a-slave-by-the-hour contract is voluntary. The Marxist and the Capitalist admit of no inalienable rights in the workplace. Both belligerents generally ignore inalienable rights across the board. Marxists and capitalists are generally happy to admit a bit of sphere sovereignty in that democracy is operative in the public sphere operated by the State and capitalist firms are the private affair of investors who may use capital as the means to craft any contractual relationship they see fit to craft.

Why has capitalism, particularly North American capitalism chosen Marxism as its strawman? Capitalism remembers the strongest enemy it ever encountered on American soil: the Populist social movement. And capitalists remember that they were not strong enough to defeat it. The means of defeat was quite arguably left to Fabianism, in hindsight, the greatest capitalist tool devised in the western world.