Do You Own Your Labor, Or Does Your Boss?

In this episode of American Socrates, I take on the question of who really owns our labor and what it means to be free in a system that rents out our lives by the hour. Drawing from Locke, Marx, and the reality of working-class struggle, we unpack alienation, wage slavery, and the dream of reclaiming ownership of ourselves. I don’t want this to be an academic debate, but instead a bold call for working people to question the systems that make them feel hopeless and isolated, to help them imagine a life beyond debt and dead-end jobs, and to demand true freedom. If you’ve ever felt drained by work and wondered if there’s more to life than the next paycheck, this episode is for you.

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Transcript

[Auto-generated transcript. Edits may have been applied for clarity.]

Do you own your own body? I think most of us would like to say yes, but do you always own it? Did you not lease it out this morning when you clocked in at work? Every shift, you work for somebody else. Don't you surrender your hands, your back, your voice, your time, everything that makes you, you and your boss. Don't they get to use it as they want every hour you're on the clock.

As a Starbucks barista. Let's say you don't just pour lattes. You hand over your speed, your smile, your patience, your sense of humor. A hospital nurse doesn't just check charts. She hands over her endurance, her compassion, her empathy, her steady nerves, and the chaos of the E.R. Doesn't an HVAC tech working for some big company? They don't just fix broken air conditioners. He's going to hand over his body by crawling through attic spaces, by sweating through fiberglass so that somebody else gets the cash. A slightly bigger check. 

The philosopher John Locke once said, your body is your property, and because it's yours, the work of your body, that is your labor makes things that you work on your property as well. But in the modern workplace, you don't own your labor. You sell it. You rent out your time, your strength, your mind, your skills. And when you do, your boss owns not just the product of your work, but a little piece of you while you're on the clock.

Welcome back to American Socrates. I'm your host, Charles M. Rupert.

Marx argued that when you sell your labor power, you risk becoming alienated, cut off from both yourself and from the things that you create. That's not abstract philosophy. It's the concrete reason why a barista can feel invisible behind a counter, why a nurse can feel drained even though they've been saving people's lives. Why a tradesman can feel like a cog in the machine that he repairs.

So today I want to ask the question if your labor is a part of your body and you don't own it at work, can you really say that you own yourself? Okay, so when you clock in, you sell yourself by the hour. That's what I mean by temporary slavery here. It's not just a hyperbolic way of talking about work. It's a description of what really happens for a wage you sell yourself. You don't belong to yourself while you're on the clock. You belong to whoever is paying. Your owner then, can tell you how you can act, where you can stand, when you can sit down, how you're allowed to wear your hair, your makeup, your jewelry, your clothes. They own you from 9 to 5, maybe more, if you have to request time off or you don't set your own schedule. And if you can't get high or drunk even on your day off because you might get called in to work.

Now we might argue and say it's not slavery because you can quit at any time. And sure, legally you can walk out. But think about what's really at stake if you quit your job. It's not like your rent goes on pause. Your bills don't stop. Your kids do still need to eat. And so you sell yourself again the next day. And even if you did quit, where would you go? Every other boss can treat you exactly the same. And they will. There's not another option out there where you work for somebody else and they don't own you.

So it's not a free choice and thus it's not really full self-ownership. It's survival under terms that you didn't write and probably wouldn't have agreed to if you had any other option. So this might sound really dramatic, but if you slow down and think about it, what does it mean to own yourself? Because if we don't know what that is, we won't know if we're selling ourselves out here or not. 

So back in the 1600s, the philosopher John Locke argued that every person owns their own body simply by nature. It's your possession if you ever had one. He was trying then, to ground the idea of private property in something bigger than the divine right of kings. His logic went something like this. Nobody else has a natural claim over you because you're a free born person. That's what makes slavery, you know, the permanent kind, so evil. It robs a human being of what should be their most basic property. Themselves, their body. And since you own your body, Locke argued, you own whatever that body produces. You own the fruits of your labor. So when you mix labor with the natural world, say, by by farming land or by building a house, you've created something that simply would not exist without you.

You have mixed a part of yourself with the world through that labor. And so, by extension, whatever it was that you made or created or grew or whatever it ought to be yours.

Locke's words then gave the early liberal thinkers a foundation for individual rights, and later the American Revolution would draw on this same idea. Locke's vision for self ownership has by this time become just simply part of the American DNA. You own yourself. We talk about freedom. We talk about independence and about being your own person. But in practice, most people don't really get to live life that way. They have to sell themselves slice by slice, day by day, year after year, until they're too old to sell whatever's left. Maybe the better question then, for us is whether your society really allows you to own yourself in a meaningful way. Because if every path to survival requires you to rent out your body by the hour, then self-ownership has simply become a slogan a dream, not a reality.

If your body is your property, then what happens when you do sell your labor to a richer person? Look, Locke didn't live in a world of Starbucks or HVAC techs who were grinding it out for corporate contractors. He was imagining small farmers, craftsmen and tradesmen, people who use their own hands and tools to produce directly for themselves, for their trade. To him, then, owning yourself meant that what you made with your own work was yours. The farmer's wheat, the blacksmith's iron, the carpenter's table. Each man took his labor, mixed it with the world, and claimed the result as his property. 

But that's not how modern jobs work. When you walk into a Starbucks, when the barista pulls a shot of espresso and steams milk for a latte, the drink, it doesn't belong to them. It belongs to Starbucks. She might hand it to you with a smile, but the company owns both the product and the profit. The nurse on her 10th patient doesn't own that care. It's the hospital's service. They logged it. They billed for it. They converted it into revenue. And when the HVAC tech crawls through a dusty attic in July's heat, the check that's written out by the homeowner isn't made out to him. It's cashed by the company that employs him. Dave only gets his hourly wage. The company gets whatever's left. So what does it really mean to own yourself in this setup? The moment you rent yourself out, a chunk of yourself is no longer under your control. You're leasing your property, your very self, to someone else who can say what to do with it. Unlike leasing a car or an apartment, you can't get the exact same thing back again when the contract ends. When those eight hours are up. Those 12 hours may be on the floor or six hours up in a crawl space. They're just gone. You can't repossess your time or your energy once it's been lent. The ledger never completes the balance.

Modern jobs then hit harder than Locke ever imagined, because you're not just alienated from the products you make. You're alienated from your own life. The law doesn't belong to you. The patient's care is counted as the hospital's. The HVAC repair belongs to the company's box. And in this case, the hours you poured in, the effort you gave the parts of yourself you burned through. Those don't belong to you anymore, either. They were sold. And once sold, they vanished. If we think about this in concrete terms, the barista doesn't decide how many shots to pull or how fast the line should move. The company's system is going to dictate all that. The nurse doesn't decide how many patients that they can safely care for. That's set by staffing ratios imposed from above based on profit margins and often stretched to the breaking point. Dave, our HVAC tech, doesn't choose which job to accept or how much to charge for it, or even what brand of parts to use. The company decides all that. Dave just executes their orders. In each case parts of the worker, then their time, their strength, their skill is effectively taken on and possessed by the company for at least the length of their shift.

I should note here, too, that Locke himself wasn't writing for workers' rights. He was defending the right of property owners in his mind. The two were the same thing. The craftsmen owned his own tools, and thus he owned his own business. And so he was both capitalist and at the same time, worker. So ultimately, this was defending the right of property owners and upper and upper-middle-class English society to claim and keep land without express permission from the Crown. His theory was tied up with colonialism, with slavery, with the enclosure of common lands. In other words, his idea of owning yourself was never really meant to empower this barista, this nurse, this HVAC repairman. It was meant to justify property claims for the already rich.

But we don't have to keep Locke in that box. Philosophy isn't caged by the intentions of the author. We're allowed to take that idea and just push it farther. If Locke says you own yourself, then it follows that when you sell pieces of yourself just to survive, something has gone wrong in our idea of ordered liberty. Because if you truly owned yourself, you wouldn't sell yourself into temporary slavery. You shouldn't sell your labor and it should belong to you, not your boss. That's the contradiction we're setting up, and it's the contradiction that Mark seized on the way. Capitalism takes the most basic kind of property, that is your body and your labor and alienates it from you.

So this is where Locke hands the microphone off to Marsx. Locke gave us the idea. Your body is your property and your labor makes things yours. Marx asked the hard follow up to that. What happens when you're forced to sell labor just to live?

Do you still get to own yourself, or does someone else own you? Without your thinking of yourself as a slave? So Marx argues that people sell their labor power because they have no other option. If you went to trade school to become an electrician, you graduated. But you don't own your own truck, or your own tools, or your own supplies, or you have a ready list of clients just waiting to buy your services, then you're going to have a hard time getting started.

In Locke's day, you would apprentice to earn those things, but those apprenticeships would all end at some point. Today, however, most of us just apprentice forever. We become the permanent employee of somebody else.

If you're frugal and you're really lucky, you can undercut your old boss and maybe strike out on your own and form your own business. But oftentimes that is discouraged by market forces, and it's difficult to do. Marx says that when you think about the fact that you don't own the product of your labor and that that product has a fixed price set by the market, then there's always going to be a battle between you and your employer for just how much of the value of that product or service really each of you should get. 

In this battle, in this negotiation over your wage, the employer always seems to have the upper hand. This is because they're going to purchase your labor in advance, and they already have some kind of idea of what the product is likely to fetch at the market. So they would know how much to offer you without offering you more money than it's worth. So they're going to have to offer you less than the full value you're going to produce for them if they plan on making any kind of profit at all. So the less that they offer you in the form of wages, the more profit they make off of each piece of labor that you create for them, whether that's that's building a product or offering a service or whatever. Now the more you get in wages, the more you make. Obviously, the business won't last long if they pay you more than the products that you're selling. But you could imagine it moving all the way up to the very price of the product itself.

So if you're getting paid in wages, you know, after the costs of and whatever have been absorbed, if you are getting paid in wages, the total amount of that, then there's simply nothing left over for the profit of the owner. If the owner ends up making a mistake and offers you too much wage, they're going to pull back and renegotiate your wages or reduce your hours, or reduce your benefits, or maybe entice you to quit and or just simply fire you outright.

So if you think about it from the owner's perspective, you do the same thing. If you paid your employees precisely the value of the labor that they generated, there would be nothing left to profit on. So you're just handing over business to this other person. So you have to make it less. And the lesser it is, the more profit you make. This is what Marx calls the antagonism of capitalism. It sets employees and employers against each other, even though they all work together in the same business. They're actually competing over the amount of profit each one can make from the services and the business that it operates. Each one then profits at the other's expense. So this is just a classification issue. 

If everyone were co-owners of the same business and they each got their own individual share, then there wouldn't be any more competition. The more anyone made, the more everyone would make. The more business and work you did, the more money you bring into the the whole of the business, and the more money everyone gets. So you can work harder and longer and make more money. Whereas in this system, the system of wages. That's not necessarily true. You could work harder and longer and just make more money for your boss because you got paid an hourly wage and that would be the same no matter how much you work. So if the barista slings ten drinks or a hundred, they get paid the same wage. If the nurse has two patients or 20, she makes the same salary. If you get paid per job, like on full commission.

That's kind of worse. Now you go and find the work yourself. You do all of the work yourself, but you still have to pay your employer a fee for something. It's like being self-employed, at least as far as creating and finding and doing the work, but like being someone else's employee when it comes time to get paid. There's a word for why this happens in capitalism. And that word we've already heard before, it's alienation. It is the real wound at the heart of wage labor. This is not just about low pay or long hours, though those matter a good deal too. It's about being cut off from yourself, from your work, from other people, and even from the world around you.

Marx said it rather brutally when he said the alienation of the worker is expressed thus the more he produces, the less he can consume, the more value he creates, the less value he has. Labor produces fabulous things for the rich, but misery for the poor. Machines replace labor and jobs diminish while other workers simply get turned into machines. Think about that. The harder you work, the less you make. That's because you can be paid hourly, and every bit you work beyond whatever it took to create your wage is just more for your boss. That's the essence of it. By alienating yourself from your own labor that you just can't get ahead by working harder. None of that hard work goes to you. You know this feeling already. You clock in and the shift just isn't yours anymore. The time, the pace, the rules, the uniform, the smile you have to wear. All of that gets spoken for. This is just a name for that feeling.

Marx describes four different dimensions of alienation, and I think it's wise to go through all of them. Let's see, as I go through each one how it hits for you. Now, we've already talked a good deal about the first one, alienation from the product of your labor, the idea that when you work for wages, what you produce doesn't really belong to you. The product of your labor is ripped away the moment it leaves your hands. You never get to see for yourself what it is that you create. You can't say, you know that's mine. I did that. It's a reflection of me. That's what I built with my hands and my mind. You know, farmhands don't feed people just because they happen to till the soil, plant the seeds, water them, raise them, and harvest the crops. Farmers feed people even when they have never once set foot on any farm land. That's the logic of the markets and the logic of alienation. The people doing the work of farming and growing food and bringing it to market aren't the farmers. It's the people who happen to own the land. And that could be an investment firm somewhere. 

But it's not just the products that we lose. And under alienation, you lose the process itself. The very act of working labor at its best, should feel like an expression of your abilities. Human beings are makers of things. We're builders. We're creators. When you use your skills freely, the act of labor is fulfilling. It's part of your dignity. It's fun. But under wage labor, the act of working itself is stolen from you. It becomes something you have to endure, not something you live for. You start working for the weekend since you can't really work for yourself. Your work, your movement, your pace. Those get dictated by somebody else. You don't choose when to speed up or slow down. You don't choose when you're too tired to make any more money and you want to go home. You don't choose when you can stop, when you can rest. Even the shape of your day isn't really yours. This is alienation from the activity of your labor. You become a stranger to the very work that you're doing, because it's no longer an extension of your own will. It's forced. It's regimented. It's disciplined. It belongs to the boss, not you. And of course, the boss wants you to work as hard as humanly possible, since they're going to make the most money that way. They don't care if you're tired. They don't care if you're sick. You were there to make them money.

Alienation isn't just about you and your work either. It poisons your relationships with other people too. In a workplace, your coworkers should be your allies. They're in the same boat as you. You're all in this together. But under capitalism, even relationships at work get twisted in this way. The barista isn't just working alongside other baristas. They're competing with them for hours, for wages, for tips. Who gets the good shifts? Who gets promoted to shift lead? Who gets hours cut when sales go down? Management pits people against each other. This is the alienation from your fellow humans, the system that sets you against the very people who should have your back, your nation, your community, your friends, your family. All of them are reduced to rivals in some manner. It reduces human bonds then to market competition, all for the benefit of owners. It makes friendship fragile and solidarity a rare thing. 

And it doesn't stop at work because when you come home feeling drained, it's also harder to show up for your family, for your friends, for your neighbors. The work has already taken the best part of your day. All of your energy. And so what's left over isn't always enough to get you through. That's another form of alienation. The job takes you away from the people that you love most.

Finally, and this is maybe the deepest cut of all alienation from yourself, from your own human potential, from your own human nature. Humans are more than just survival machines. We're dreamers. We don't just eat and sleep and reproduce like animals. We want to create. We want to plan. We imagine something that doesn't exist, and then we bring that thing into reality. That's what makes us the most human and what makes us the most human. Often is what makes us the most happy. But under capitalism, that part of us gets stifled. Labor isn't free, and so it's just reduced down to survival. You don't get to decide on what to build. The market will decide that, or more realistically, your boss. You don't get to explore your own skills at your own pace. The boss is going to do that for you. You don't get to express your human essence in the act of creation. You get to sell your time so that someone else gets to have their vision made happen through your work. This is why work can often feel so much like death by a thousand cuts.

It's not just that it's tiring. It drains the spirit right out of you. It blocks your deepest capacities. You know, you could be more than this. You know you have more to give, more to express, more of yourself. To use up in the light of the world. But the system only wants what it wants from you. And that's rote, impersonal and unfeeling labor. And it doesn't stop with you either. Alienation also cuts you off from nature itself. Think about how our HVAC worker, instead of feeling connected to the physical craft of, you know, working with the air, heat and heat and human comfort. His job is reduce the natural world to units per day. Think about our barista. Coffee isn't a living plant cultivated in soil. It's more of a button they have to push on a machine over and over and over again. Or our nurse. This. In this case, it's probably the worst. The care, which should be a natural human bond, is merely just something they have to do in order to get their paycheck. It's a line item on an insurance claim and nothing really more than that. It's artificial care. Even the natural world then becomes alienated from us, and it stops being something that we're a part of that we feel like we're a part of and just becomes raw material to be exploited, to be consumed, to be packaged and sold.

You already know what it feels like to be rented out by the hour, to give away your body and your skills and your strength, allowing someone else to cash in on your life's work. The freedom to sell themselves into slavery is not the kind of freedom that anyone should have. And if you've ever gone home physically and emotionally exhausted, too tired to live your own life after giving everything to your job, then you know exactly what I'm talking about. 

Here's the truth. You were more than a cost on somebody's balance sheet. You were not just labor power to be bought and sold. You're a human being with a body, a mind and a spirit that deserves more. You own all of those things. Or at least you ought to. The question you should be asking is, do you want to keep renting yourself out forever? Or do you want to reclaim what should rightfully belong to you? The system will tell you that this is all there is. That the best you can hope for is to climb a rung or two.

Maybe find a slightly better boss, maybe get a little more pay out of selling yourself. But don't mistake a longer leash for removing the collar, because the truth is that the system is terrified of you imagining something different. It's terrified of you asking, well, what would it look like if workers weren't just surviving but actually started thriving? What if your labor actually built up your life instead of providing someone else with their fortune? That's not a fantasy. That's the seed of a revolution in your mind. And it's the first act of freedom to refuse to accept their definition of reality. The second is daring to picture the life you and everybody else actually deserves.

Once you can see that, you can start to name it, and once you can name it, you can fight for it. And once you start fighting for it well together, no power on earth can really take it out of your hands. So here's the challenge I want to leave you with. Don't just clock in tomorrow. Don't just put on an apron or scrubs or a tool belt or, you know, whatever to go through the motions. Just ask yourself in the quiet moments, how much of the day really belonged to you? What am I really working at in this job? And if the answer doesn't sit right in your gut, don't bury that feeling down.

Don't suppress it the way you have been long trained to do. Let it burn down there. Because that fire, that refusal to live a lie any longer, that's the beginning of a better life for you. The beginning of taking control of yourself back, the beginning of a world where you and your brothers and sisters at work can stand up and stop renting yourselves out and start owning yourself again, demanding that you be treated with dignity and not just used as a tool of the wealthy. If you can do that, you should share what your experience was on my page so that I and others can hear what it's like to be you. Maybe, just maybe, through that sharing you won't feel quite so alienated anymore.

Thanks for tuning in to American Socrates. If today's episode of philosophy got you thinking in new ways, make sure to subscribe so you'll never miss an episode. New full episodes drop every Wednesday. If you enjoyed the show, leave a review. It helps others find us and it means a lot. And if you know someone who could use a little more practical wisdom in their life, share this episode with them. Want more? Visit AmericanSocrates.buzzsprout.com for show notes, resources, and exclusive content. You can also follow me on Facebook, Blue Sky, or TikTok to keep the conversation going. Until next time, keep questioning everything.