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Furthermore, an anarcho-syndicalist legal order, stateless or not, would obliterate the intertemporal division of labor and reduce mankind to squalor.
Improved productivity depends on capital goods, which in turn depend on delayed consumption.[5] People who choose to delay consumption extensively can come to own a stock of capital goods beyond what they can physically use themselves. If such people cannot hire labor to work with those goods without thereby losing title, they will consume their capital and stop saving.
A left-libertarian I recently debated responded to this point by asking how a factory could be "consumed." I explained to him that except for particular cases, such as seed corn, capital consumption is not generally the literal eating of capital goods. Capital consumption is the failure to direct enough materials away from consumption in order to maintain the capital goods. A factory is consumed when it is allowed to fall into complete disrepair, converted to less-productive processes (like a simple process that could be handled by the owner alone), or broken down and sold in parts or for scrap.
Another left-libertarian then chimed in, saying that the workers in such a factory could then simply take over the factory, rather than let it go to waste.
I pointed out that, yes, workers could take control of the factory. But the classical-liberal legal order doesn't prevent cooperatives, so if they were so good at running their own factory enterprise, why could not those same workers form a cooperative and pool their wages or borrow money to create or buy their own factory in the first place? If it is because the "absentee-owned" factory was run more competently in light of ultimate consumer evaluation, and thus they would not have been able to compete, then this new turn of affairs will only be to the detriment of the general public.
The entrepreneurial judgment and capitalist providence of any and all would-be employers whose qualities happen not to be best suited for worker-owned enterprises would be underutilized. And the judgment and providence of any and all would-be employers whose qualities happen not to be at all suited for worker-owned enterprises would be completely unutilized. Because nature spreads her gifts un-uniformly, virtually all would-be employers would fit one of those two categories.
Collaborative production (the division of labor) is so bountiful because it allows people to specialize: to focus on what they are good at and then exchange with each other. Perhaps in a handful of occasions, the people who are best at supporting and directing an enterprise are the same people who are best at operating the equipment. But because of human and natural diversity, that will virtually never be the case. By confining human interaction such that the direction and support of an enterprise can only ever be done by those operating the equipment, anarcho-syndicalists would be precluding innumerable mutually advantageous exchanges between savers and workers.
A capitalist/worker arrangement is effectively an intertemporal exchange. Workers are advanced present money in exchange for enabling the capitalist to own and sell a future product. Abolishing wages would therefore be injurious to both would-be consenting parties.
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