Mike Konczal said something on Twitter that pointed out the odd resonance between this Will Wilkinson post at the Economist and the rant against obsessing over “job creation” that I wrote for The Activist. Actually, I originally wrote it for the newsletter of the political organization that I’m a member of, the Democratic Socialists of America, and my argument was directed at my fellow leftists who I think sometimes lose sight of our historic criticisms of wage labor as a source of alienation and domination.

Wilkinson, by contrast, is kind of a softcore libertarian. And yet here he is echoing a longstanding commonplace of Marxism:

David Ellerman, one of my favourite challenging thinkers, argues that the employer-employee relationship is more like the master-slave relationship than we are inclined to believe. I know this sounds a little crazy, and I don’t entirely buy his argument. But take a look; he’s on to something. Philosophical questions of self-ownership and the alienability of labour aside, I am convinced that autonomy is profoundly important to most of us, and that the sort of self-rental involved in the employment relation is regularly experienced as a lamentable loss of autonomy, if not humiliating subjection. I think a lot of us would rather not work for somebody else.