Agorist Wally Conger brings to our attention a common pitfall of the going-into-business-for-yourself routine; the need to be stingy with information. It’s basically a matter of being assertive, which Conger says is “really a simple mental adjustment.” Of course it’s simple. Probably for some of us it’s even easy. Sooner or later I will probably have to learn it. It seems that wherever the market spreads its tentacles, there is not only the necessity of selling, but the necessity of jealously guarding one’s turf, or one’s market share, or one’s reputation, or one’s trade secrets. “Free market” or freed market, the world is your oyster if you’re the horse trader type; not so much if your strengths are in less extroverted areas like productivity, quality, ingenuity. Perhaps if you replace rentiers with entreprenoors as the leadership cadre of society, the income gap between top and bottom will be less extreme, but even that’s a leap of faith that rests on untested abstract theory. And in any case, if some are more independent than others, some are more free than others. “Lording it over” one another is still the order of the day in the mad scramble for survival in the agora.
Be The Heavy
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4 responses to “Be The Heavy”
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You wrote: “Perhaps if you replace rentiers with entreprenoors as the leadership cadre of society, the income gap between top and bottom will be less extreme, but even that’s a leap of faith that rests on untested abstract theory.” Good point.
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Sometimes I suspect that big business and small business have more in common than do small business and labor.
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Yes, it’s hard for me to see small businesses surrendering wage labor extracted rents even in the absence of state enforced cartels. Wage laborers won’t like it either, particularly when distributed production, resulting from competition, drives down their wages like off-shoring. And how long will it take to achieve the “safety net” of “comfortable subsistence,” if ever, as a consolation?
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To quote Michel Bauwens:
So the new communicative strategy is making the “precarious worker” disappear. A conservative politician won’t be caught dead saying the words. “Precarious worker” is a political label not a socio-economic category. Let’s just refer to “project worker” (it makes it nearly sound as if they have a plan), “freelance workers” (it makes it sound as if it was their choice), or “self-employed” (that is empowering!). But those “precarious workers”, those bogus precarious workers I mean, they are just the worse part of Italy.
The notion that self-employment (“free” lancing) is empowering is decidedly not an anticapitalist notion.
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