David Ellerman’s arguments are quite rigorous and thus are quite refreshing. Anyone should read them and use them. I am, though, going to show that the workers alienation of their rights is not the only reason that exploitation exists.

David seems to start from the axiom that everyone should own the products of their labor and be free to produce what one wants and that this human right is irrevocable. He ,then, goes to prove that the employment contract that is currently used is an alienation of the workers rights and that it is has no difference to that of a slave contract.

Davids theory is correct and consistent. The question though remains: Will this society not have inequalities? Should we accept the initial axiom without checking the consequences to society?
It is important to note that initial axiom is individualistic in nature. Society though consists of many people and their happiness is expressed by a societal welfare function. Since society is based on the cooperation of many people, it is wrong to create our axiomatic approach with individualistic axioms with no regard to the possible maximization of certain welfare functions. Individualism in a societal context has no ethical support if society at large “suffers”.

Unfortunately, even if workers are not alienated form their rights, they will continue to be exploited because the owners of the means of production are able to exercise their right to control their assets arising from the first fundamental axiom. It is here that the battle of coercion vs consent can keep going on. But consent or coercion is nothing more than semantics that try to justify or not what is happening.
The interesting part is to understand the outcome of this ability of the capitalists derived from the initial axiom. When a worker cooperative is given the choice of renting the assets or not, he checks the 2 possible outcomes. If the asset increases productivity by 10x, the capitalist has the ability to rent the asset so that he receives 8x of the production in rent while the workers double their production. The worker cooperative would be stupid not to accept the offer of the capitalist.

In other words, accumulation of the value by the 1% continues to be possible. In other words, while Davids exposition is rigorous and correct, accepting the initial axiom leads to very bad results on the societal welfare function.

Marx, in other words, was right in this. But putting all the means of production to the commons is only one way of solving this problem. One though is certain.
The initial individualistic axiom should be revised. It should still hold when you live alone but it should be relaxed when you are part of society and you own means of production.

My solution: All means of production should be sold (or rent) at a price lower or equal to the price that they were acquired. Of course that creates a problem of logistics, finding the initial price. This is still under research and has to do with the technologies that currently exist in computers, especially graph processing. I am referring to a digital representation of contracts and their use as currency.

One specific reflection relevant to P2P and the Commons:- these days, software devs are often asked to sign contracts that waive various rights to attribution of their creative work, and/or sign over rights to _all_ their creative software ideas to their employer, whether the software was developed on the job or off it. A clear illustration of where current systems can almost institutionalise ignoring rights that were won through the legal system.

Also: taking Ellerman’s critique on board, I think the traditional left argument of what would represent non-exploitative conditions for making ‘genuinely’ non-coercive agreements about employment is useful. IE if we want to keep some sort of ideal of personal responsibility, isn’t the notion of informed consent under fair conditions still pretty important?