A critique of self-employment

Abstract

Self-employed work participates, like subordinate work, in the logic of the capitalist social system of production. The legal system has built a false notion of autonomous work, that is, ‘free’ from heteronomous constraints and conditions, which does not correspond to the reality of social relations of production. Through a rereading of Marx’s Trinitarian formula and of the Slave-Master relationship in Kojève’s reading, the author proposes a critical reading of autonomous work, and, in a Weberian perspective, hopes for a progressive liberation of autonomous work through the intellectual work of science and politics.