Will You Review "Neo-Abolitionism"?

An interview with David Ellerman.

David Ellerman’s 2021 book Neo-Abolitionism lays out a fascinating critique of our society’s institutions. It’s not the critique that you’re used to, it’s well-argued, and it merits engagement.

My hope is that this piece will bring attention to Neo-Abolitionism and will get some excellent scholars to review Neo-Abolitionism. Time will tell if I’m successful in my quest to get some reviews for this important book. It would be incredible if one review led to another, and then another, and then another!

I love situations in our society where X is high-magnitude and very much in the shadows, since you can shine the spotlight on X and illuminate X and bring attention to X.

Neo-Abolitionism’s “About the Book” section describes the book as follows:

The most problematic institution in the economic system throughout most of the world is not the market or private property but the employer–employee relationship. In the technical terms of economics, the employer is renting the employees. The abolition of slavery ended involuntary slavery but also ended any voluntary contractual form of buying labor “by the lifetime.” In its place, we have a system of voluntarily renting people by the hour, day, week, or any specified time period. A critique of voluntary forms of slavery and autocracy was developed in the Abolitionist and Democratic Movements. Based on the recovery and modern formulation of those old critiques, the neo-abolitionist critique of the human rental system is based on three theories that converge to the same conclusion: (1) the theory of inalienable rights that descends from the Reformation notion of inalienability of conscience, (2) the development of the modern natural rights or labor theory of property that people should appropriate the (positive and negative) fruits of their labor, and (3) democratic theory based on the distinction between non-democratic social contracts of alienation (pactum subjectionis) versus democratic contracts of delegation. The conclusion, common to the three arguments, is that the employer–employee relationship should be abolished in favor of the system of workplace democracy.

Noam Chomsky offered this blurb for Neo-Abolitionism when I contacted him:

Deeply grounded and scrupulously argued, Ellerman’s Neo-Abolitionism is a major contribution to envisioning, and creating, a truly free and just world.

See below my interview with Ellerman that I edited for flow and added a hyperlink to.

1) What are the main ideas in your new 2021 book Neo-Abolitionism?

The main idea is that the basic social-economic question has been completely misframed. 

The misframing pits “capitalism” (private employment) against socialism/communism (government-employment at some level). 

But it’s a complete misframing because the main institution is the renting of persons whether privately or publicly, not “ownership of the means of production”.

2) Who has reviewed your 2021 book so far? 

I only know of the Jacobin review, but the person didn’t understand the issues at all.

3) What will it take to break through and get the right people to review this book? 

It will be a slow process absent a miracle.

4) What are the strongest objections that you’ve seen to the arguments that your 2021 book puts forward? 

That I didn’t spend more than a paragraph on how this would apply to public employment. 

The point is that governors/managers in any democracy or democratic organization will have powers delegated to them from those who are governed/managed, but these governors/managers can’t “self-govern” in any aspect of their work that involves the exercise of those delegated powers. 

They can only self-govern within the broader group of people who delegated the powers to them, and also in any aspect of their work that doesn’t involve the exercise of those delegated powers. 

5) What are the most common misconceptions/confusions that you’ve seen about the arguments that your 2021 book puts forward? 

Too many to name. 

A big one is the failure to understand that the inalienable-rights argument is not just a bald assertion. It’s an actual theory based on the facts of human nature that mean that we can’t by some voluntary act alienate our factual responsibility for our actions’ results. If we could do that, then hired criminals would’ve discovered it long ago to escape the factual (and then legal) responsibility for their actions’ results. 

And many people also fail to understand the difference between factual and legal responsibility, or fail to understand the basic imputation-principle that we should assign legal responsibility according to factual responsibility.

6) What objections do you expect people from different ideological camps to put forward in response to the 2021 book? 

Marxists will say I don’t understand Marx.

Libertarians might say that “inalienable rights” contradicts our freedom to sell ourselves into slavery, to rent ourselves out, and so on. 

7) How would you respond to the objection that society is under no obligation to confront inconsistencies in our legal theory, and that this is a vexation for the ivory tower to fret over? 

Abolitionism, women’s rights, and other changes started in the ivory tower or with thinkers/writers who were outside the power-centers that slave-owners, sexist men, or others controlled. 

8) How would you respond to the objection that there might be unacceptable consequences—for workers, for companies, for the economy—if we abolish the human-rental contract? 

Workers, companies, and the economy would be fine. 

The consequences would be “unacceptable” for the employers/managers in big corporations who enjoy the employer’s right to hire/fire that the shareholders delegate to them (in the same way, abolitionism was unacceptable to slave-owners and actual slave-overseers).

9) What kind of world would we live in if we abolished the human-rental contract? What exactly would be different? Can you paint a clear picture for skeptics? 

We would live in a genuine private-property system. 

People would get the positive and negative fruits of their labor, all organizations would be democracies, and the very idea of renting other persons would be beyond the pale (just like the idea of buying another person is unthinkable right now).