The phrase “wage slavery” tends to really pique most free marketeers, who often object that the employer-employee relationship is one of simple voluntary agreement and contract.

A legitimate contract, however, assumes that relations, up until the point of “agreement,” have been absent of coercion and duress. But what if they haven’t? What if history has been a series of tragic and violent misadventures, a long list of appropriations, injustices, and other villainies carried out by the state to enrich a small ruling class?

Would we still want to defend sweatshops, or would we start to attack them on free market grounds?

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Una tipica difesa dello sfruttamento da parte dei sostenitori del libero mercato punta il dito sul fatto che “lo sfruttamento è meglio delle alternative disponibili”. Questa difesa tende anche ad enfatizzare il ruolo dello sfruttamento in un “processo di sviluppo che, alla lunga, migliora lo stile di vita”.

Quando le autorità per decenni non fanno che sbarrare la strada alle altre possibilità servendosi della violenza sistematica di stato, così da privare la popolazione di diritti e risorse, per forza lo sfruttamento comincia ad apparire come una buona opportunità. Anche la migliore.

Ma è con questa revisione selettiva della storia, ovvero chiudendo un occhio davanti alle ingiustizie economiche, che molti presunti sostenitori del libero mercato si guadagnano una reputazione. Un anarchico di mercato non capisce le ragioni di chi per difendere la libertà, il sistema concorrenziale e i diritti individuali spreca il fiato giustificando la schiavitù salariale offerta da chi sfrutta il lavoro.

L’espressione “schiavitù salariale” dà fastidio a molti difensori del libero mercato, che spesso obiettano dicendo che la relazione tra datore di lavoro e dipendente si basa su un accordo e un contratto volontario.

Ma perché un contratto sia lecito occorre che le relazioni, nel momento in cui si raggiunge questo “accordo”, siano libere da costrizioni e minacce. Ma, e se non fosse così? E se la storia non fosse altro che una serie di disavventure tragiche e violente, un lungo elenco di appropriazioni indebite, ingiustizie e abusi perpetrati dallo stato per arricchire una piccola classe di potere?

Vogliamo continuare a difendere lo sfruttamento, o vogliamo attaccarlo sulla base dei principi del libero mercato? Come scrive William Bailie, “La schiavitù salariale è semplicemente un modo moderno di dire schiavitù tout court.” Così come gli anarchici di oggi, anche Bailie non vedeva il capitalismo come un processo di avanzamento e sviluppo, ma come un “arretramento economico” che ostacola il procedere della libertà personale.

Noi anarchici di mercato crediamo nella libertà, nelle qualità imprenditoriali, e nell’individuo sovrano più di quanto non ci credano molti sedicenti sostenitori della libera impresa. Non crediamo che le persone nei paesi in via di sviluppo sceglierebbero di lavorare lunghe ore in condizioni disumane e per una paga miserevole se non ci fossero restrizioni arbitrarie come la proprietà intellettuale e l’accesso limitato a risorse comuni come la terra.

Chi giustifica lo sfruttamento tende ad ignorare il problema del monopolio terriero. Come dice Murray Rothbard, il problema è che “la proprietà terriera viene continuamente espropriata con la forza”. Per Rothbard, il legittimo proprietario di una terra è “chi veramente la possiede”, non chi “vanta il diritto di proprietà e di sfruttamento di qualcosa che è stato acquisito con la violenza”.

La storia di quelli che oggi sono considerati paesi in via di sviluppo, dove si concentra la maggior parte dello sfruttamento del lavoro, è macchiata dal furto e dal monopolio politico della terra che ha tenuto bassi i salari e innalzato le rendite. Queste violente imposizioni politiche non hanno niente a che vedere con i veri principi del libero mercato.

Viene da chiedersi se chi difende lo sfruttamento dal punto di vista del “libero mercato” creda davvero che questo sia il risultato della libertà d’impresa, cosa che renderebbe le attuali condizioni economiche completamente difendibili.

Forse chi difende questo sistema, pur ammettendo i predicati storici dello sfruttamento, pensa che sia importante riconoscere che nei paesi in via di sviluppo un salario basso e lunghe ore di lavoro rappresentano la scelta migliore per i poveri. Ma nessuno nega questo fatto di per sé. È che per un anarchico di mercato il fenomeno è semplicemente ingiusto e indifendibile nella sua forma attuale.

Traduzione di Enrico Sanna.

Typical free market defenses of sweatshops focus on the fact that “sweatshops are better than the available alternatives.” These defenses also tend to emphasize sweatshops’ role in a “process of development that ultimately raises living standards.”

When authority precludes other options, using systematic state violence over a course of decades to divest people of their rights and resources, of course sweatshop employment begins to look like a good option, even the best one.

But this selective redaction of history is just how so many supposed champions of free markets earn their reputation for turning a blind eye to economic injustice. Market anarchists find no coherent or principled reason why defenders of freedom, competition, and individual rights ought to waste our words making apologies for the kind of wage slavery offered by sweatshops.

The phrase “wage slavery” tends to really pique most free marketeers, who often object that the employer-employee relationship is one of simple voluntary agreement and contract.

A legitimate contract, however, assumes that relations, up until the point of “agreement,” have been absent of coercion and duress. But what if they haven’t? What if history has been a series of tragic and violent misadventures, a long list of appropriations, injustices, and other villainies carried out by the state to enrich a small ruling class?

Would we still want to defend sweatshops, or would we start to attack them on free market grounds? As William Bailie wrote, “Wage-slavery is merely the modern phase of chattel slavery.” Like the market anarchists of today, Bailie saw capitalism not as a process of advancement and development, but as an “economic retrogression” under which personal freedom had been retarded.

Market anarchists have more faith in freedom, entrepreneurship, and the sovereign individual than most self-described advocates of free enterprise. We don’t believe that, uninhibited by arbitrary restrictions like intellectual property law and given free access to common resources like the land, the people of developing countries would freely choose to work long hours for low pay under the most inhumane conditions.

Apologists for sweatshops tend to ignore the problem of land monopoly, as Murray Rothbard put it, the problem of “continuing seizure of landed property by aggressors.” Rothbard argued that the legitimate owners of land are “the true possessors,” rather than those “whose original and continuing claim to the land and its fruits has come from coercion and violence.”

The history of what is today regarded as the developing world, the site of most sweatshops, is marred by political land monopolization and theft that has driven wages down and rents up. Such deep political coercion has nothing to do with real free market principles.

One wonders whether “free market” defenders of sweatshops really do believe that we got to the current status quo using the free enterprise road, which would arguably make the economic conditions of today entirely defensible.

It may be that sweatshop defenders acknowledge the historical predicates of sweatshops while nevertheless seeing it as important to recognize sweatshops as the best alternative for the poor in the developing world. But no one really denies that fact on its own — on the contrary, market anarchists simply contend that these phenomena are unjust and untenable as they exist in the world today.

Translations for this article:

• Italian, Schiavitù Salariale e Sfruttamento Sono Libera Impresa?
• Spanish, La esclavitud salarial y las maquiladoras no son fenómenos de libre mercado

“…the text of the TPP is classified and members of Congress have restricted access to it. If they do read the text, they are not allowed to copy it or discuss any specifics of it. However, more than 600 corporate advisers have direct access to the text on their computers” (Margaret Flowers and Kevin Zeese, “The Trans-Pacific Partnership: We Won’t Be Fooled By Rigged Corporate Trade Agreements,” Activist Post, Oct. 2).

Matt Taibbi’s term “Vampire Squid” is as good as any for capturing the essence of this world government, so let’s call it that.

Don’t get me wrong. I don’t mean the kind of world government the Birchers and “New World Order” people talk about, created by a tiny cabal of Bavarian Illuminati, space lizards or Elders of Zion who sit around a table chuckling evilly while they worship the Eye in the Pyramid and plot to put fringes on the American Flag.

To be sure the Vampire Squid includes a lot of really evil sociopaths — especially in some of the highest positions of state, corporate and financial power — and they do a lot of really dirty stuff. And they’re not united by any esoteric ideology like Illuminism, and they don’t get their marching orders from Bohemian Grove or Davos.

To the extent that venues like the CFR and Davos are important, they’re ephiphenomena of the fact that so much interlocking corporate and state power was concentrated in so few centers in the first place. When people with power get together they conspire — just as much so as Adam Smith’s “men of any trade.” Just look at the stuff that gets discussed any time two or more county commissioners get together with their real estate developer friends at the county executive officer’s backyard cookout. But the conspiracies are a fairly minor, secondary phenomenon.

The world government’s Vampire Squid character results, by and large, not from the character of the people making it up, but as an emergent property of all their actions taken together. The vast majority of people involved in maintaining it, including many of those at its top echelons, never think of it as a world government. Most of them are well-meaning bureaucratic mediocrities who see their jobs as promoting national security and economic growth — no ironic scare quotes — and literally cannot conceive of any alternative to the system they are serving. Some are quite idealistic. At worst, among the vast majority, are the Albert Speer types who simply transfer material from their in-box to their out-box with no idea of (or interest in) what it’s about.

To the extent that there are sociopathic types involved at its top levels, most of them are simply the kind of morally colorblind types we see in corporate C-suites and the top ranks of government agencies, whose empathy and insight have atrophied from years of a Stanford Prison Experiment Effect. There are plenty of genuinely malicious sociopaths working as water-carriers for the system in places like Gitmo and Abu Ghraib, or advising Central American death squads or Pinochet’s Ministry of the Interior. But they’re just the same kind of amoral hired muscle you always find in service to any level of power, gravitating into an ecological niche created by the system itself – they’re not at all essential to its functioning.

Nevertheless, the Vampire Squid functions as a world government, and it does monstrous things. There have been heartening signs in recent years that it has been weakening in power, and a growing number of states are defying it or taking stabs at forming a counter-coalition. Still, the Vampire Squid is by far the single largest concentration of power in the world, controls virtually all international economic regulation, and can inflict massive pain — ranging from economic damage to military attack — just about anywhere in the world if it wants to badly enough. Through the U.S. military and intelligence services, it has the power over “nations and kingdoms,” in Jeremiah’s words, “to uproot and tear down, to destroy and overthrow, to build and to plant.”

The Vampire Squid is an interlocking directorate of the global financial sector, the military and intelligence services of the US hegemon and its allies (and all their black budget operations going on around the world), the global drug cartels and the most powerful industrial sectors (most of their business models centered either on “intellectual property” or the warfare-security state)

In 2011 the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology finished a global power mapping project which found that a core of 1318 interlocking companies controlled 80% of the global economic product (Andrew Gavin Marshall, “The Global Banking ‘Super-Entity’ Drug Cartel: The ‘Free Market’ of Finance Capital,” October 28, 2012). Within this core was a “super-entity” of 147 closely connected corporations (mostly banks) with major shares of ownership in each other, that together controlled 80% of world economic output.

Although conventional center-left or liberal critiques frame this as the insufficient power of nation-states to constrain this super-entity, in fact the banks and other powerful corporations comprising this entity depend on the policies of nation-states for virtually all of their wealth. Every penny that goes into this super-entity is a rent on artificial scarcities of one kind or another enforced by states: Land rents resulting from state enforcement of absentee titles to vacant and unimproved land; interest on artificially scarce credit resulting from state monopolies conferred on the banking industry; profits extracted from workers as a result of policies that make self-employment and cooperative production artificially difficult compared to wage employment; rents on the artificial difficulty and cost of replicating physical goods or information, resulting from “intellectual property”; and rents extracted from the consumer as a result of all sorts of other restrictions on who’s allowed to produce for a given market.

Without all these rents on artificial scarcity and artificial property rights enforced by states, there wouldn’t be any money flowing into the super-entity for it to use to bribe governments. It would dry up like a garden slug with salt on its back.

And it goes without saying that the considerable share of the super-entity’s total revenues resulting from the global narcotics trade wouldn’t exist without states criminalizing drug use and sales. If you stop to think about it, the biggest supporters of the War on Drugs are the drug cartels, the banks that launder their money – and governments like the U.S. that use the drug trade as a source of revenue for illegally funding death squads and other black ops.

Consider Afghanistan. One of the reasons the Taliban were so unpopular, and so easy to overthrow, was that they took a genuinely puritanical attitude toward drugs. They did their best to stamp out the production of opium poppies – a traditional source of extra income for economically pressed Afghan farmers. As a result, Afghanistan went from being the world’s leading producer of opium to producing virtually none in areas under Taliban control. Only the Northern Alliance – America’s ally – freely allowed poppy cultivation in areas under its control. When the U.S. unseated the Taliban and replaced them with a government based on the Northern Alliance, Afghanistan quickly resumed its place as the world center of opium production.

What we have is an interlocking global government composed of the biggest banks, corporations in industries whose business models depend directly on the military-industrial complex or “intellectual property” law, the drug cartels, and the military and intelligence communities of the most powerful states.

Like the European colonial empires of a century ago, the super-entity depends on local governments to act as its enforcers over the ruled population. In fact we can consider it a government in the same sense as they were acting through other governments. As Brad Spangler once argued, the bag man who pockets the loot is as much a part of the gang of robbers as the guy actually holding the gun. Government is the political means to wealth – the coercive enforcement of artificial scarcity and artificial property rights to extract rents. The corporate ruling class is the party exercising this means.

Establishment defenders of “free trade” falsely so-called refer to the Ricardian concept of “comparative advantage,” as if international trade bore any resemblance to the phenomenon Ricardo described almost 200 years ago. Most of what we call global “trade” today isn’t what people traditionally think of as trade at all – it’s internal transfers of unfinished goods between subsidiaries of larger transnational corporations, or sweatshops operating on contract for transnational corporations. And these transnational corporate headquarters wouldn’t be able to maintain the control they do over outsourced production in dozens of countries without the help of IMF and World Bank policies, patents, copyrights and trademarks. There wouldn’t even be workers in the sweatshops producing on contract for them if it weren’t for the role of national governments (in collusion with the landed classes and agribusiness) in enclosing land and driving peasants into the wage labor market.

In the real world there has never been anything resembling an “international division of labor” based on some pristine version of Ricardian “comparative advantage.” The great majority of “comparative advantage” has been artificial, created and maintained by government force. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri write in Multitude:

The classic textbooks of political economy by Adam Smith and David Ricardo present the international divisions of labor as if they were natural phenomena that intelligent capitalists, knowledgeable of the various costs and benefits, could put to use. There have always been, however, hierarchies of power that coordinate and maintain these international divisions of labor, from colonial administrations to postcolonial power relations.

Central to the current international division of labor are two forms of coercive intervention. First is the expropriation and enclosure of land and natural resources, and the eviction of peasant cultivators, going back to the earliest days of colonialism. It’s continued to the present day by post-colonial governments in collusion with local landed elites and transnational agribusiness interests – backed up, when necessary, by the military might of First World powers like the U.S. when the local peasantry gets out of hand. Second is “intellectual property” law, which enables transnational corporations to outsource actual production to cheap labor sweatshop havens abroad and then retail the output for a twenty-fold brand name markup. It took forcible expropriation and eviction to create a landless working class willing to accept sweatshop employment on the terms offered. And it took copyright, patent and trademark law to secure monopoly control of the terms on which the output of independently owned factories could be marketed in the west.

The Vampire squid is extraordinarily good at extracting blood from the peoples of the world.

Consider the typical cycle of World Bank loans and “privatization” in a Third World country. The great majority of World Bank loans since WWII have been to subsidize the infrastructures needed for Western capitalists to realize capital investments overseas. They’ve gone to build road and utility infrastructures without which the relocation of manufacturing facilities to the Third World, or the creation of large-scale export agriculture to support American consumption, would have been impossible. In many cases the country in question was ruled by a dictator or other authoritarian elites utterly accountable to their public, who ran up enormous debts on such “development” projects. Once incurred, the debt can be used as leverage to blackmail the country into adopting neoliberal “reforms” — including the sale of taxpayer-financed infrastructures to global corporations on terms set almost entirely by the latter. And in the process of such “privatizations,” Third World governments typically spend as much money upgrading the infrastructures to make them salable as they realize from the sale. In the final stage, the new corporate purchaser asset-strips the infrastructure to recoup its expenditure, hollows out its productive capacity, and jacks up rates on users.

The US warfare machine is a helpful addition to this process. The facility with which Paul Bremer’s Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq sped up this normal privatization cycle, for instance, is remarkable. The installation of friendly dictators like Pinochet or Putin is also quite helpful.

The present system referred to as “free trade” in the American corporate press is as statist and corrupt as anything done in the worst days of Warren Hastings’ rule in Bengal.

De todos os comentários pretensamente libertários que tentam colocar a tragédia das confecções de peças de vestuário de Bangladesh em “perspectiva,” o de Benjamin Powell é provavelmente o pior (“Sweatshops Em Bangladesh Melhoram A Vida De Seus Trabalhadores, E Estimulam Crescimento,” Forbes, 2 de maio). Em Bangladesh, escreve Powell,

“cerca de 4.500 confecções empregam aproximadamente 4 milhões de trabalhadores. Levando-se em consideração todos os aspectos, eles ficam em melhor situação com as confecções do que ficariam sem elas; os benefícios superam os riscos. Na verdade, em comparação com outras oportunidades em Bangladesh, a indústria de peças de vestuário paga razoavelmente bem.”

Se empresas dos Estados Unidos como a Nike reduzissem sua presença em Bangladesh e abandonassem confecções lá por temor de má publicidade, “centenas de milhares de trabalhadores em peças de vestuário poderiam perder seus empregos e ser lançados em alternativas piores.”

Bem, é mesmo — sob certo aspecto. Quando um assaltante diz “seu dinheiro ou sua vida,” fico em melhor situação entregando o dinheiro e permanecendo vivo — mas foi o sujeito com a arma de fogo que estabeleceu artificialmente o leque de alternativas. A pergunta que você se deveria fazer, e que pessoas como Powell e o pessoal de nível de chefia da Nike não querem que você faça, é: quem decide quais outras alternativas estão disponíveis em Bangladesh?

Não se passa que algum fato da natureza, sem face, inevitável, seja forçado sobre as sweatshops — ou sobre a Nike — por algum mercado anônimo. Graças à marca registrada e à lei de patentes internacionais, a Nike e umas poucas outras empresas são as únicas opções disponíveis quando se trata de empregar pessoas para fazer sapatos. Elas podem aceitar o preço da Nike ou rejeitá-lo. Há porém muitas sweatshops competindo umas com as outras, e a Nike pode facilmente fazer negócio com outras delas. O poder oligopsônico de preços da Nike significa que a empresa pode estabelecer o preço que paga a uma sweatshop por um par de tênis tão baixo quanto desejar. E a mesma “propriedade intelectual” dá a ela poder de preço de oligopólio nos Estados Unidos para vender os tênis com preço de varejo milhares de por cento acima do custo real de produção. A margem entre o que ela paga às sweatshops pelos sapatos e o quanto ela extorque dos consumidores ocidentais não é estabelecida pelo “mercado.” É estabelecida pela Nike. Ela pode estabelecer essa margem tão alto ou tão baixo quanto desejar.

E a expressão decisiva aqui é “tão alto.” A Nike preferirá maximizar a margem que ganha em seus tênis, mesmo à custa de pessoas que residem em habitações locupletadas e trabalham centenas de horas por semana por poucos dólares por dia — e por vezes têm morte lenta e horrível às centenas nos escombros de suas confecções.

A chamada “propriedade intelectual” não é propriedade legítima, e sim monopólio imposto pelo estado, exatamente tão protecionista quanto as tarifas industriais de há um século. Do mesmo modo que a tarifa, a “propriedade intelectual” cria escassez artificial em bens que não são escassos por natureza, permitindo que corporações privilegiadas extraiam rentismo dessa escassez. As corporações globais do século 21 são tão dependentes da “propriedade intelectual” para seus lucros quanto as antigas corporações industriais nacionais do início do século 20 o eram das tarifas. As tarifas pararam de ser úteis à grande empresa, e a “propriedade intelectual” tornou-se útil, porque as corporações se tornaram globais. Pelo fato de o “comércio internacional” em realidade consistir em sua maior parte de transferência interna de bens entre subsidiárias locais de corporações globais, as tarifas não mais servem aos interesses das corporações gigantes. Do mesmo modo que a tarifa, a “propriedade intelectual” é uma restrição governamental acerca de quem tem licença para vender dado tipo de bem em dado mercado, permitindo ao beneficiário cobrar o que quer que os consumidores possam pagar. Diferentemente da tarifa, contudo, que era uma forma de protecionismo que regulava a transferência de bens através de fronteiras nacionais, a “propriedade intelectual” regula a transferência de bens através de fronteiras corporativas.

Diferentemente das corporações industriais de há cem anos, empresas como a Nike na verdade não fazem coisas. Elas usam direitos artificiais de propriedade tais como a “propriedade intelectual” para controlar as condições sob as quais outras pessoas podem fazer coisas, e para criar postos de pedágio entre as pessoas que fazem as coisas e as pessoas que consomem as coisas. O dinheiro realmente, realmente grande não está na capacidade de produzir, e sim na capacidade de coletar tributo para permitir que a produção aconteça.

Sem a “propriedade intelectual,” aquelas confecções em Bangladesh poderiam ignorar a marca registrada Nike e comerciar calçados idênticos com a população local por minúscula fração do preço. E sem a Nike para impor preços uniformes em toda a indústria, elas teriam de competir por trabalhadores locais. Não haveria problema nenhum se a Nike resolvesse “diminuir sua presença” e sair de Bangladesh. O meio de vida dos trabalhadores não mais seria mantido refém do que a Nike fizesse ou deixasse de fazer.

Artigo original afixado por Kevin Carson em 20 de maio de 2013.

Traduzido do inglês por Murilo Otávio Rodrigues Paes Leme.

“some 4,500 garment factories employ approximately 4 million workers. In the grand scheme of things, they are better off with the factories than they would be without them; the benefits outweigh the risks. In fact, compared to other opportunities in Bangladesh, the garment industry pays reasonably well.”

If U.S. companies like Nike reduce their footprint in Bangladesh and abandon factories there out of fear of bad publicity, “hundreds of thousands of garment workers could lose their jobs and be thrust into worse alternatives.”

Well, yeah — true as far as it goes. When a mugger says “your money or your life,” I’m better off handing over the money and staying alive — but it’s the guy with the gun who artificially set the range of alternatives. The question you should be asking yourself, and people like Powell and the people in the C-suite at Nike don’t want you asking, is who decides what other alternatives are available in Bangladesh?

It isn’t some faceless, inevitable fact of nature that is forced on the sweatshops — or on Nike — by an anonymous market. Thanks to international trademark and patent law, Nike and a few other companies are the only game in town when it comes to hiring people to make shoes. They can take Nike’s price or leave it. But there’s lots of competing sweatshops, and Nike can easily take its business elsewhere. Nike’s oligopsony pricing power means they can set the price they pay a sweatshop for a pair of sneakers as low as they like. And the same “intellectual property” gives them oligopoly pricing power in the United States to sell the sneakers at a retail price thousands of percent above the actual cost of production. The margin between what they pay sweatshops for the shoes and how much they gouge Western customers isn’t set by “the market.” It’s set by Nike. They can set that margin as high or as low as they want.

And the operative phrase here is “as high.” Nike would rather maximize the margin it makes on its sneakers, even at the cost of people living in barracks working hundreds of hours a week for a few dollars a day — and sometimes dying slow, horrible deaths by the hundreds in the rubble of their factories.

So-called “intellectual property” is not legitimate property at all, but a state-enforced monopoly every bit as protectionist as the industrial tariffs of a century ago. Like the tariff, “intellectual property” creates artificial scarcity in goods that are not scarce by nature, enabling privileged corporations to extract rents from that scarcity. The global corporations of the 21st century are as dependent on “intellectual property” for their profits as the old national industrial corporations of the early 20th century were on tariffs. Tariffs ceased to be useful to big business, and “intellectual property” became useful, because corporations became global. Because “international trade” actually consists mostly of internal transfer of goods between local subsidiaries of global corporations, tariffs no longer serve the interests of giant corporations. Like the tariff, “intellectual property” is a government restriction on who may sell a given type of good in a given market, enabling the beneficiary to charge whatever consumers can pay. But unlike the tariff, which was a form of protectionism that regulated the transfer of goods across national boundaries, “intellectual property” regulates the transfer of goods across corporate boundaries.

Unlike the industrial corporations of a hundred years ago, companies like Nike don’t actually make things. They use artificial property rights like “intellectual property” to control the conditions under which other people can make things, and to set up toll gates between the people who make things and the people who consume things. The really, really big money isn’t the ability to produce, but the ability to collect tribute for allowing production to take place.

Without “intellectual property,” those factories in Bangladesh could ignore Nike’s trademark and market identical shoes to the local population at a tiny fraction of the price. And without Nike to impose uniform pricing across the industry, they’d have to compete for local workers. It wouldn’t matter if Nike decided to “reduce its footprint” and pull out of Bangladesh. The workers’ livelihoods would no longer be held hostage to what Nike did or didn’t do.

Translations for this article:

• Portuguese, Oficinas de Exploração Laboral – Sweatshops a “Melhor Alternativa Disponível”? Mas Quem Decide Que Alternativas estão Disponíveis?

First, let us be clear about the definition of a sweatshop. A sweatshop is not any working environment in a developing economy; it is a working environment that is considered to be unreasonably difficult or dangerous. Many factors might contribute to a factory being labeled a “sweatshop,” including long hours without breaks, low pay, overcrowding, poor lighting and ventilation, unsanitary conditions, and few to zero considerations for employee safety. Low pay is just one of these factors and may not even be the chief factor in determining whether a particular place of employment can be called a sweatshop.

The argument in favor of sweatshops, as laid out by libertarians like Matt Zwolinski and Ben Powell (as well as neo-liberals like Paul Krugman and Nicholas Kristof), is essentially an economic argument. Sweatshop labor, they argue, is often the best (or only) option individuals in the developing world have for improving their lot in life. Therefore, it would be immoral to oppose sweatshops because their absence would take away a crucial option for economic improvement.

That argument only holds up, however, if and only if sweatshops are the sole option for economic improvement in a developing economy. The individual is presented with a false choice: accept these conditions or face starvation and death in a grim struggle for survival. Under that dichotomy, it is assumed that accepting the unfavorable conditions of a sweatshop is the only sensible choice for that individual to make (it is also assumed that the employer has no control whatsoever over the conditions in his or her own factory, but more on that later). No considerations are given for alternative labor models, such as co-ops, family owned farms or businesses, mutual associations, or guilds, all of which are available to any individuals who choose to utilize them. However, the simplest alternative to a sweatshop is a factory owner that does not treat his or her employees like chattel.

Therein lies the mistake proponents of sweatshops make; it is not the poverty of the employees, but rather the conditions to which they are subjected that is the injustice. In Pope Leo XIII’s 1891 encyclical Rerum Novarum, he argued that social justice dictates that a free market must be tempered by moral considerations. “Let the working man and the employer make free agreements, and in particular let them agree freely as to the wages,” he wrote. “Nevertheless, there underlies a dictate of natural justice more imperious and ancient than any bargain between man and man, namely, that wages ought not to be insufficient to support a frugal and well-behaved wage-earner. If through necessity or fear of a worse evil the workman accept harder conditions because an employer or contractor will afford him no better, he is made the victim of force and injustice.”

It is this moral imperative that is missing from Zwolinski and Powell’s analysis. According to Zwolinski, “Left-libertarian critics of sweatshops… have offered no evidence that sweatshops, or the multinational enterprises that contract with sweatshops, can be directly implicated in the injustices that workers have suffered.” Since sweatshop owners and managers are directly responsible for the conditions of their businesses, however, the evidence is there—it just requires the observer to look beyond a worldview that measures quality of life by the number of coins in someone’s pocket.

Libertarianism is not about people just getting by; it is about maximizing human liberty. Liberty cannot be achieved as long as eking out a living in dangerous conditions for 12 to 14 hours a day is an individual’s most attractive option. In such a society, the mutually beneficial arrangements that define the world of commerce have clearly broken down. There is no reason that libertarians or other advocates of a free market need to sacrifice their moral compass at the altar of economic development. Economic development can and should be achieved in many different ways, but it will take the cooperation of both labor and capital to see that sweatshops do not continue to be an acceptable path to prosperity. I hope that libertarians will be at the forefront of that struggle.

In my opinion, a sweatshop is an antiquated form of wage slavery that does not belong in a free society any more than conscription or the Atlantic slave trade. Economists like Paul Krugman have provided an ideological foundation for sweatshops because they are an integral part of the globalist worldview, but that is a worldview that libertarians, anarcho-capitalists, and other likeminded individuals oppose. Therefore, it is in our interest to not only distance ourselves from this exploitive form of labor, but to repudiate it entirely.

The central tenant of my argument is that force and aggression do not always have to involve the threat of immediate physical harm. A person may be coerced into surrendering their property (or their labor) under a variety of conditions. For example, being tricked into signing a contract he or she cannot read or understand, having the welfare of his or her family threatened, or being required to rent equipment essential to the job while being paid barely enough to cover those expenses. All of these are common practices at sweatshops.

My purpose in attempting to apply the non-aggression principle to this issue was to provide a skeleton around which an effective, free-market argument against sweatshops could be formed. The reason the issue of sweatshops in particular needs to be addressed, as opposed to just force or fraud generally, is because there appears to be a significant number of people who claim to both support the free market (or anarcho-capitalism) and sweatshops. Not only is this position contradictory, in my opinion, but it hurts the free market cause by playing right into the hands of our opponents, who believe that a free(d) market would bring back the worst aspects of industrialization.

Gary Chartier suggests that there are two possible objections to sweatshops, one based on the Non-Aggression Principle and one based on moral grounds. In order to be both morally objectionable and inconsistent with the NAP, a sweatshop operation would have to be responsible for the dispossession that leaves potential workers with little alternative but to accept what they would otherwise regard as unacceptable workplace conditions. Even if the sweatshop operation was not responsible for this, however, the terms and conditions of employment may still be morally objectionable. This moral objection could justly lead to labor organizing, strikes, protests, etc.

There are pragmatic concerns as well. Namely, that any argument in which sweatshops are a legitimate alternative is a losing argument, especially in Western nations. It is one thing to run a thought experiment on the cost or benefits of cheap labor, but quite another to convince an assembly line worker at a factory in Pittsburg to give up his or her government-enforced minimum wage, break time, and overtime pay, not to mention his or her job security and benefits, in the name of capitalism and free competition. Even if for some reason you believe sweatshops are theoretically compatible with a free market or a stateless society, if you ever wanted to see progress toward those ends, it would be prudent to file that belief somewhere away from the court of public opinion.

The following is a short list of additional considerations:

• Opposition to sweatshops should, and can, be a position that unites everyone in the liberty movement, from libertarians to anarcho-capitalists and beyond.
• Many anarcho-capitalist and libertarian philosophers, including Murray Rothbard, have made extensive arguments against the type of unjust contracts that lead to sweatshops.
• Even if sweatshops were a byproduct of a free market, they should be opposed on pragmatic and moral grounds.
• This is not a “left or right” issue. The dignity and welfare of the working individual should be a concern to everyone.
• Just because the West industrialized in a certain way, doesn’t mean that others must industrialize in that same way. They can learn from our mistakes.

It is my hope that further discussion of this subject will yield a consensus that removes this persistent but antiquated obstacle to convincing working people that a free market is in their best interest. I am confident that most of the people reading this have always opposed sweatshops (as well as other excesses of industrial capitalism), but to those who still harbor doubts, I will say this: Think long and hard about what you are supporting and how that support appears to the average person. Do not make things easier for our intellectual opponents by defending this untenable position.

Sweatshops are generally considered to be factories or workshops in which employees, often children, work over nine to ten hours a day for wages that barely allow for the purchase of basic necessities. Furthermore, the working conditions at these factories or workshops are often considered to be hazardous or unsafe. Sweatshops do not provide their employees any benefits, such as health insurance or worker’s compensation, and employees do not enjoy any form of job security. Today, sweatshops can be found all over the world, but they are most common in developing nations, such as India, China, and Mexico.

Most arguments in favor of sweatshops, which are common to every socioeconomic theory (libertarian or otherwise), consist of two general propositions: “workers are better off in the sweatshop than they would have been otherwise,” and “no one forces them to work there.” Neo-liberal economist Paul Krugman (in)famously made those arguments in his 1997 article in Slate Magazine, “In Praise of Cheap Labor.” Responding to “self-righteous” critics, Krugman pointed out that working in a sweatshop in Manila for $20 a week is preferable to scrounging around a garbage dump for scrap metal or scratching out a living on a subsistence farm. “A policy of good jobs in principle, but no jobs in practice, might assuage our consciences, but it is no favor to its alleged beneficiaries,” he concluded.

These arguments are fallacious for two reasons: 1) They depend on a narrow definition of “force” and a generous interpretation of “choice,” and 2) They wrongly presuppose that sweatshops are the only alternative to bare subsistence in those economies.

If, borrowing a scenario posed by Jean-Jacques Rousseau in The Social Contract, a thief were to hold you up at the edge of the woods and demand your purse, that would be an example of naked force and aggression. The thief offers you a choice: surrender your property or face injury or death. No reasonable person would argue that this is a fair choice, but as Rousseau pointed out, there is an element of choice—you could attempt to hide your purse, in which case you would no longer be compelled to hand it over. You could also simply refuse to surrender your purse, thus risking your life. The fact that you have these choices, however, certainly does not make the thief’s actions moral or legitimate.

Therefore, hopefully, we can agree that the practical application of the non-aggression principle means having freedom of action in the absence of force, which applies neither to the thief nor the sweatshop. A sweatshop does not arise as the result of men and women who agree to sell their labor in a mutually beneficial arrangement. Although no one holds a gun to the worker’s head, he or she is given a false choice between skeletal wages and dangerous working conditions and exposure and starvation. This arrangement and the thief in the woods are equivalent agents of aggression. Yes, you can choose not to work at the sweatshop, just like you could choose not to surrender your wallet to the thief, but this is not a fair and free choice because of the perception of self-preservation.

Perhaps the most revealing question to ask is this: If, with access to all the information about their industry, workers employed at sweatshops were able to decide the conditions of their labor, would they choose to continue to perpetuate their current condition? If the answer is “no,” then the exploitation of these workers is obvious. No human being, given a free and informed choice, would work under sweatshop conditions. Sweatshops can only exist under a lopsided arrangement, perpetuated by force and fraud, in which one party (the company) exploits ignorance and desperation to reap 90 percent of the benefits.

Any agreement between libertarians, market-anarchists, and neo-liberals like Paul Krugman on economics should be followed by some serious self-reflection, especially if that agreement relies on a false dichotomy and a distorted notion of choice. Even if sweatshops take advantage of and promote the notion that they are the only alternative to starvation, that is not the case. In a free market, workers – should they choose to enter into the field of manufacturing – have a wide variety of options, whether those factories are simply unionized, cooperatively owned, or based on individual agreements between a worker and the factory owner. In all of these situations, if all parties adhered to the non-aggression principle, the conditions that give rise to sweatshops would not exist.