What it builds toward
What this builds toward is the second and third exclusions, each with its own ground and its own work still to do, and both finishing what the first began. The first said a person cannot be owned, and made it true only for those on the list. The second says a person cannot be rented either; the third, that no being for whom things go better or worse can be owned. Neither is a new principle. Neither is a new principle. Each is the first abolition, carried past the list, and taken together they abolish the list itself.
Oughts are not the problem. Every arrangement runs on them. The problem is an ought that pretends it was found rather than made — natural law, or that’s just what she is. An ought people admit they built can be questioned, tested and rebuilt. One that claims to come from nature can only be obeyed.
So the question is not whether to build oughts but how to build them well, and the argument already has two parts for it. A limit: no one may be used as an input. That is the floor, and it does not go to a vote — a majority cannot vote it away, and it is not handed out by list. And a procedure: arrangements are made by the ones whose lives they are. That is democracy, carried past elections into workplaces, commons and institutions. Elinor Ostrom’s work on the commons is the evidence that this is not wishful thinking: communities often govern shared resources better than either the state or the market, when the people affected make the rules. In practice, that is the abolition of master and sovereign alike: no one holds a life that is not their own. So it is anarchism, and the rules remain, along with courts and law; what goes is anyone’s power to make them for others without them.
Neither part is a blueprint. Dewey treated democracy as a method of inquiry — try something, watch what happens, correct it, with everyone affected in the loop. Popper warned against utopias drawn up as a plan and imposed from above, and argued for change small enough to undo when it fails. Erik Olin Wright kept the word by changing what it means: real utopias, institutions such as cooperatives and participatory budgeting that already exist somewhere, can be studied, and can be grown. Utopia as experiment, not destination. David Graeber put the same point in the plural: not one utopia but as many as people care to try. This argument adds one condition: none of them may run on a list of who counts, and where some sorting cannot be avoided, it is kept to the bare minimum and settled by looking.
Kevin Carson’s Exodus (2021) takes Wright’s idea of growth in the cracks and makes it a strategy. Change comes less by seizing the old institutions than by building new ones inside their shell, cooperatives, commons, local platforms, until people can walk out of the old into the new. It is the “Can they leave?” check turned into a program, and it refuses the vanguard for the same reason this argument does. But exodus works only for those who can walk. It is a real answer to the rental: a worker can leave the wage for a cooperative. The sow cannot leave the crate, and no alternative institution reaches her until someone opens it. That is why the third exclusion cannot be left to exit. It has to be made by others, and for her reasons.
The hard part is who takes part when some of those affected cannot speak. Sue Donaldson and Will Kymlicka’s Zoopolis (2011) first answered with citizenship: domesticated animals as co-citizens, their interests represented by others, as is already done for young children and for people who cannot speak for themselves. Their later book, Animals and the Right to Politics (2025), goes further and turns on that answer. Speaking for someone is wardship, and wardship is still standing handed down. Animals already make collective decisions in their own communities, and the deepest exclusion is not denying them moral standing but refusing to see them as political beings at all. The long effort to widen the moral circle has had real success, they note, and it is not enough, which is the list again, reached independently. The burden set out earlier stands: an arrangement has to register ends it cannot be told. What the newer book adds is that many of those ends are already being stated, in forms the arrangement has not learned to hear. Even so, their own map of animals, domesticated, wild and liminal, sorts every being by its relation to us, so the move turns up again in the work that names it.
That is what humane-ism under the humanist umbrella comes to. It is not an extra value bolted on. It is the democratic procedure, run without the list.
What the second exclusion leaves alone
Ending human rentals does not mean no one may ever pay anyone to do anything. It ends one contract, the one that sells the direction of a person’s acting. The line between that contract and every other way of paying for work is not new, and the law already draws something close to it: the usual test for whether someone is an employee or an independent contractor turns largely on who controls how the work is done. Three cases show where it falls.
The raked yard. A neighbor’s kid rakes your leaves for twenty dollars. They bring the rake, pick the afternoon, and decide whether to start at the fence or the porch. You are buying a raked yard. Nobody’s acting changed hands; the kid did the work and sold what came of it. That is a sale, not a rental, and nothing here touches it. Change the terms and it changes: ten dollars an hour to do whatever you say until dark, and what you are buying is no longer the yard but a person’s afternoon. The money is the same. What is being done is different.
The app driver. A rideshare driver is called an independent contractor, which on paper means they sell results, rides, the way the kid sells a raked yard. But the app sets the fare, assigns the trip, watches the acceptance rate, and can switch the driver off. The platform keeps the control a rental buys and hands the driver the risk a contractor carries: the car, the insurance, the slow nights. It is the rental with the employment protections stripped off. And the label is doing the work a list does. Independent contractor settles what the driver is, so nobody has to look at what is being done. Drivers who feel cheated by it are running the first check without having heard of it, and the answer some have reached is the one this argument reaches: own the platform. In New York, The Drivers Cooperative, co-founded in 2020, is owned by its drivers, sends its profits back to them, and puts the decisions that govern their work to their vote.
The co-op. Most people already know what work without a rental looks like, because they want it. Be your own boss is the everyday version of the second exclusion. Freelancers and tradespeople with their own business live it alone; partners in a law or medical practice live it together, and no one calls a partner rented. A worker cooperative makes the same arrangement available to everyone in the building: being your own boss, jointly. Its members still direct one another, through managers they elect and rules they can change. That is delegation, not alienation. The acting stays theirs, and the people directing it answer to them.
The edges are real and worth naming. A co-op that takes on temporary help without membership is running a small rental inside a non-rental, and the usual answer, a path to membership after a trial period, is the right one. Household work is harder. A nanny or a cleaner works in someone else’s home, on someone else’s schedule. But domestic workers have built cooperatives too, selling care and cleaning on terms they set. The work was never the problem. The contract form was.
Renting things. The second exclusion rests on one claim, that a person’s acting cannot be handed over. It says nothing against renting a thing. A lathe, a van or a field has no acting to transfer, and whoever uses it is the one responsible for what it helps make. Ellerman draws the line in the same place: a cooperative may lease its equipment or borrow its capital, and the lender is owed a price for the use, not the product and not the direction of the work. So leases, loans and rents survive the exclusion. What it removes is the claim that owning the means of work makes someone the owner of what others do with them.
Fair prices. Whether what a lender charges is fair is a further question, and the second exclusion does not settle it. The mutualist tradition answers it, and its answer shows where the question leads. Mutualists hold both a labor theory of property, about who should own what is made, and a labor theory of value, about what things would cost in a genuinely free market. Josiah Warren’s principle, cost the limit of price, is the ground of the civilized cannibalism met earlier. Applied to lending, it allows the lender the real cost of the loan, the wear on what is lent and the work of arranging it, and nothing for ownership as such. The mutualist doctrine of occupancy and use does the same for land, tying title to the people actually using it. Joined to Ellerman, these give a single framework: inalienability against the renting of persons, cost pricing against interest, occupancy against rent, securing the whole product to those who make it. But the last two steps lean on a theory of value, and that is contested ground. For mutualists, profit, rent and interest come from monopolies that hold prices above cost, so a free market would dissolve them. For Marx, exploitation is built into commodity production and survives every fair exchange. Mainstream economics has largely set both aside, though Marxian economists still work within the labor theory of value. The second exclusion needs none of this. It ends the rental of persons because agency does not move, and that holds whatever one concludes about interest and rent. Carrying it further is a question this argument leaves open.
None of this asks anyone to give up hiring help. It asks them to notice what they are buying. A result can be bought. A person’s acting cannot, and the contract that claims to buy it by the hour is the one the second exclusion ends.
Sources and further reading
- John Dewey, The Public and Its Problems (1927).
- Karl Popper, The Open Society and Its Enemies (1945).
- Elinor Ostrom, Governing the Commons (Cambridge University Press, 1990).
- Erik Olin Wright, Envisioning Real Utopias (Verso, 2010).
- Kevin A. Carson, Exodus: General Idea of the Revolution in the XXI Century (Center for a Stateless Society, 2021).
- Sue Donaldson and Will Kymlicka, Zoopolis: A Political Theory of Animal Rights (Oxford University Press, 2011) and Animals and the Right to Politics (Oxford University Press, 2025).
- Benjamin R. Tucker, “State Socialism and Anarchism” (1888), collected in Instead of a Book (1893). Interest, rent, and profit as forms of usury sustained by legal monopolies on money, land, tariffs, and patents, expected to fall toward cost under free competition rather than to be banned.
- William B. Greene, Mutual Banking (1850). Credit at the cost of operating the bank, with risk pooled among members.