Impediments to Rethinking Today’s Economic System: The Story of the Happy Consciousness

Abstract

Every stable society cultivates a "Happy Consciousness": the conviction that its basic institutions are sound and that only their implementation needs reform. This paper argues that the Happy Consciousness of contemporary market societies conceals a structural flaw analogous to slavery in the antebellum South. That flaw is the employment relation, understood as the voluntary renting of human beings. Orthodox economists such as Samuelson and Knight openly describe wages as rentals for persons. Yet the legitimacy of renting people is almost never debated, and the paper examines how this blind spot is maintained. Economics replaces the actual asymmetry of property rights in the firm, in which one party (the employer) owns the whole product (input liabilities and output assets), with a symmetrical picture of distributive shares. It also redefines the juridical notion of responsibility (which only applies to persons) as causal efficacy (shared with things), and it uses the public/private distinction to confine inalienable rights of self-determination to political life. Drawing on jurisprudence, the paper shows that only persons, not things, can be de facto responsible. The hired-criminal example shows that responsible human agency cannot in fact be transferred from employee to employer. When a crime is committed, the law sets aside the employment contract and treats employer and employee as partners. But employees are equally de facto responsible in normal non-criminous work. The employment contract therefore rests on a legal fiction. The paper concludes that the responsibility principle and democratic theory both point to the democratic, worker-owned firm as the alternative to human rentals.