This article discusses how the contemporary system of labor relations treats employees as things rather than persons thus denying their humanity, and violating rights they have because of their personhood. Instead, work should be democratically controlled by the people doing it
Ellerman, according to my understanding, has tended to approach liberal defenses of private property by attaching further abstractions and obfuscation that produce no particular further clarity above established leftist criticisms.
Mostly, Ellerman’s approach is weighty and unwieldy, by capturing or complicating constructs that leftists have identified as unnecessary, unrobust, and outright fictitious.
Most leftists have no need for recovering natural rights, nor even have need of natural rights.
Workers might simply rebel against the exploiters, because workers have no wish and no need for being exploited.
Since workers were born into a world that affirms private property, they obviously never gave it their consent.
It is just a fiction that developed its own life by the whip, blade, and gun, and also by the pen and press.
Most of the work of leftist criticisms has been simply deconstructing entrenched doctrine, to help expand consciousness, and to build capacity for liberation.
Ellerman seems to prefer instead constructing his own layer of obfuscation. It may antagonize the wage system, but it declines to deconstruct the deeper nature of moral ideals, social constructs, and legal frameworks.
It is worth becoming familiar with leftist criticisms of natural rights.
The best account for natural rights is that it provides elegant packaging for values and norms already shared. The danger emerges because whoever controls the packaging also controls what becomes elegantly packaged.
