Commentaryism... No, AnComs, Wage Labour Ain't a Form of Violence...

A conversation in which somebody explains very neatly why the AnCom critique of voluntary, contractual wage labour is a non-starter, and no talk of theories of value was necessary!

In the Red and Black corner we have Cipher, and in the Yellow and Black corner, V!



Cipher

Market contracts are not voluntary. That's an insane dichotomy. An ultimatum between starvation and a corporate tithe is not a choice. Don't paint it as such, it's f****** asinine.  It discredits an already ridiculous philosophy. Anarcho capitalism is just re-bagged laissez-faire capitalism. There's nothing original about it.

Ⓥ

Who's forcing you to enter contracts? You either work, receive charity or starve under any anarchic system.

Sustenance is a biological prerequisite for survival, seems to me you're equivocating it with "force".

Cipher

A system with only contracts is not voluntary. It's orwellian doublespeak.
Slaves also had the lovely "voluntary" choice of obeying their masters or being beaten within an inch of their lives as human chattel.

There are no real meaningful choices here, only ultimatums.

Ⓥ

I shall elaborate since it seems you didn't answer my question or understand what I meant by equivocation. Force is an interpersonal dynamic. The fundamental attributes of human existence cannot accurately be characterized as 'force'.

E.g., to survive, one must eat. Eating is thus a requirement of existence. But this is not what it means to be forced to eat.

Being forced to eat would mean, e.g., a person physically putting food into your mouth against your will or threatening to harm you, if you did not eat.

Sustenance is thus a prerequisite of the entire concept of voluntary action vs. forced action. Everyone who has declined or failed sustenance is dead.

Consequently, the requirement of sustenance is part of the very definition of a group of people we are talking about when discussing force. "Humans are forced to survive" is an incoherent proposition. Forced by whom or by what?

The answer is: by their own existence and nothing else. Every human actively self-imposes this requirement or declines or fails it and dies.

You labor to produce and consume food, thus continue your existence. Production precedes consumption.

Just because you cannot decline labor for survival, doesn't mean you cannot decline, accept or terminate contracts with other individuals on mutual terms. Indeed, one could hypothetically live a completely contractless life.

I've only found anti-capitalist folks use 'force' in this way. Others mostly apply it to interactions between moral agents. What are your thoughts?

Have you ever received any other noteworthy responses to this argument?

See? Is it starting to get through one's layers of cognitive dissonance yet? There is no human agency in creating the unpleasant situation that we call poverty or the solution to that problem which we call wage labour!

If there is no human agency, then there is no moral dimension and any critique claiming one is now exposed as completely false.

EDIT; in case nobody believes that the quotes above are real, here they are in context;