Why Starting a Business Does Not Free You from Masters

Introduction

Most working people carry the same question somewhere inside them. Should I really stay at this company? Even without any great complaint about today’s work, a feeling crosses the chest at odd moments: my time, the ceiling on my earnings, the shape of the life ahead of me — all of it sits inside a frame someone else has drawn. To this feeling, the present age offers one strikingly clear answer. Get out of the organisation.

How to start a business, what steps to take to succeed on your own — that information is already abundant. What this article takes up is the premise lying just before it. If you stop being employed, do you actually come loose from subordination? The means are discussed at enormous length; only this premise gets skipped before it is asked.

Here is the conclusion first. “Independent equals free” is a story that celebrates only half of the word freedom. Release from the employment contract is obtained; the condition of holding no right to decide what gets made and what it sells for is preserved exactly as it was. That is why the more independent you become, the more your masters multiply rather than diminish. From here I dissect that structure in order.

What Independence Promised, and the Condition It Actually Required

The word independence draws people because it is not a vague longing but a bundle of specific promises. Give back the time. Give back the share. Give back the place. Give back the decisions. The more concrete the unfreedom of employment, the more the freedom drawn as its reverse looks within reach.

There is something worth watching carefully here. Every one of these promises is spoken of as though it would be fulfilled automatically by the single act of getting out of the state called employment. In the skeleton of the story, the branching point of release is placed at one spot: leaving the company.

Yet turn the promises over one by one and each turns out to hold only on the premise that there is nobody making demands of you. You can decide your own hours only when nobody is claiming your hours. You can decide when to rest only when nobody is inconvenienced by your resting.

The condition the promises actually required, then, was not leaving the company but the absence of anyone demanding. These are entirely different things. And the place the newly independent person actually stands in is precisely the place where demanders are present — clients, trading partners, the systems that broker the work, the institutions that collect the tax.

The Word “Freedom” Has Two Layers

Why does it turn out this way? The clue lies inside the word freedom itself.

Picture someone bound to no master at all. Yet this person holds no means of obtaining a living — no land, no tools, no capital, nothing to sell but their own labour power. In terms of status this person is free. To go on living, however, they have no option but to have that labour power bought by someone, and to keep fitting themselves to the demands of whoever buys. Is this person really free?

There is a classical concept that names this two-layered structure precisely: the “double freedom,” presented by Marx in Capital and later organised into a system of economics by Uno Kōzō as the core of capitalist logic [Marx, 1867; Uno, 1964].

• The first freedom — freedom from bonds of status. In principle you may choose for yourself who employs you.
• The second freedom — freedom in the sense of holding no means of production. Means of production are the land, tools, equipment and capital needed to generate a living. You are unbound by them; turned over, you hold none of them.

Combine the two and a particular state appears: you hold the freedom to choose whom you are employed by, but not the freedom to live without being employed. Being free and being compelled to sell your labour power become two faces of one and the same condition.

Independence is the act of pressing that first freedom one step further. The second condition, however, it never touches at all. Most independent people still hold nothing but their own labour power. So to live they must go on selling it. Independence carries the first freedom through to the end while preserving non-ownership of the means of production entirely intact.

Subordination Does Not Disappear; It Disperses

What happens when you leave only the employment contract while the second condition stays preserved? Subordination does not vanish. It disperses.

As an employee you faced, in essence, one counterpart. Concluding contracts, collecting payment, remitting tax — the company handled nearly all of it. Independence removes that wall. And when the wall goes, the countless counterparts that were hidden behind it stand in front of you, every last one of them.

Here the economist Ronald Coase’s insight begins to bite [Coase, 1937]. A firm is a device for taking transaction costs — the cost of finding a counterpart, negotiating terms, concluding a contract, and monitoring whether promises are kept — inside an organisation and holding them down. Independence is stepping outside that device. The transaction costs the device was processing do not evaporate; they are transferred wholesale onto the shoulders of one person.

So being chased by sales calls, quotes, contracts, collections and tax filings is not a sign of poor organisation on your part. It is an unavoidable structural consequence. And this dispersal is mistaken for freedom, because the experience of getting away from a single counterpart carries an unmistakable sensation of release. Yet the total weight has not changed; only the number of places bearing it has gone up.

The Story of “Being Your Own Boss,” and the Escape from Freedom

Dispersed subordination next moves inside the independent person.

“Being your own boss” does not describe a state in which the boss is gone. It describes a state in which you take on that role yourself. The boss who gives orders disappears, but the function of giving orders has merely been relocated inward. And the inner boss has no employment rules, no ceiling on working hours, no other party to consider. So the demands ratchet up without limit, and become far harsher than any outside boss.

Then a further paradox follows. The freedom to decide everything is also a weight. To decide is to take on responsibility. You hand down decisions daily without knowing the right answer, and when the result is bad there is nobody to blame. When that weight becomes unbearable, people willingly offer up the sovereignty over decisions they have only just acquired — handing it to a successful person’s playbook, to an image of what an entrepreneur ought to be, to an expensive place of learning that stands as a new authority.

Independence sought in the name of freedom becomes the entrance to an escape from freedom. Here lies the most ironic paradox in the whole undertaking.

Whose Interest Does This Story Serve?

When a story survives tenaciously despite conflicting with the facts, someone needs that story. Stories do not spread only because they are true. Often they spread because they are convenient for someone.

There was a time when a company needing someone’s labour had essentially one method: employment. Employ a person and you take on responsibilities — social insurance contributions, security of the position, management of hours, duty of care for safety. Into this comes the independent individual as a supply of labour. Place an order and you obtain the labour while carrying none of the responsibilities that come with employing.

The costs the company sheds have not disappeared. They have been transferred onto the shoulders of an individual. And the story “independent equals free” retells that same position in altogether different words. You are not being made to carry someone else’s responsibility; you are a free independent operator choosing your work by your own judgement.

Let me be clear here. This is not an accusation naming anyone as the villain behind the curtain. Most of those telling the story have not noticed the distinction between the two freedoms; they sincerely believe release from bonds of status is freedom, and they recommend it in good faith. Even with nobody holding ill intent, when a story is convenient for particular people, those people end up on the side that spreads it without meaning to. Interest reproduces stories without malice.

So Is the Point That You Should Go Back to Being an Employee?

Having read this far, some may conclude it is wiser not to go independent and to stay put. That is not this article’s conclusion.

Someone who reasons I cannot eat if I leave, so however unreasonable it gets I have no option but to stay in this organisation has entrusted their living, whole, to that one counterpart. Whether what you entrust is entrusted to one party or to several, the posture is the same in this respect: the root of your living rests on decisions made by the other side.

Going back to a company merely rebundles several masters into one; it likewise leaves untouched the structure of selling labour power to another’s demand. The very axis of “employee (unfree) or independent (free)” is nothing more than the boundary of a small plot drawn inside the same territory. The real question is not which way to cross that boundary, but whether there is a road out of the territory.

Ownership Does Not Mean Owning a Factory

There is another objection. Ownership is a matter for capitalists; surely it is out of reach for ordinary people.

Ownership as used here does not mean holding vast equipment or capital. Whatever the scale, it means holding some proportion of the decisions about production — what gets made, and what it sells for — on your own side.

The way to tell them apart lies in the difference between flow and stock. Credibility and reputation are flow value: pour into them continually or they thin out. Stop and they narrow, and eventually run dry. Ownership, by contrast, means holding on your own side a stock that keeps generating value even when you stop moving your hands: a work or a right that generates value repeatedly once made; a mechanism that runs with few people; a structure that keeps a certain distance from demand.

And one more thing matters — the order. Do you fit yourself to the other side’s demand and offer yourself up afterwards? Or do you establish your value first and find the people who want it afterwards? A counterpart exists in either case; which of the two is the origin of the decision is what divides subordination from freedom. Placing decisions on your own side does not mean removing counterparts; it means moving where the decision starts.

Five Criteria for Changing Direction

I gather the above into criteria for judgement. These are not steps guaranteeing success but a measure for locating where you now stand and which way to move.

1. Move the question from employment status to ownership. Stop asking “employed or independent?” and ask “do I hold the decisions about production on my own side?” You do not need to abandon where you are. You change only the direction of the question, from where you are.
2. Do not mistake dispersal for freedom. Dispersal scatters risk but does not sever dependence itself. It is useful as an immediate defence, but it is a waypoint, not a destination.
3. Do not mistake “being your own boss” for freedom. Look at structure rather than sensation. Is there a mechanism that lets you rest? Is there ground that does not collapse when your hands stop? Sensation deceives; structure does not.
4. Do not entrust the weight of freedom to an authority. Using another person’s practice as material for your own judgement is learning. Handing over the judgement itself, whole, is submission. The dividing line is whether sovereignty remains in your own hands.
5. Measure autonomy by coherence, not by form. Are your actions coherent with your own deeper goals [Deci & Ryan, 1985]? Switch to this measure and you can also step down from the exhaustion of envying other people’s arrangements.

Why Ownership Frees a Person More Than Dispersal Does

Finally, let me argue the core of the constructive side.

Suppose a dispersed person holds five sources of income. Lose one and four remain. The risk is scattered. Yet they must go on answering the demands of all five. They are held five ways. Someone who has built ownership, by contrast, may have fewer sources, but part of them comes from a structure that generates value without their hands moving. For that part, there is nobody whose demand must be continually answered. The presence or absence of this “portion nobody holds” is what decisively separates the two.

Time also works differently. Dispersal only scatters, now, the risk you are carrying now; its effect stays in the present. Ownership thickens future freedom the more it accumulates.

One honest qualification, though. Ownership is not a spell that reduces dependence to zero. The structure you build also rests on a foundation that carries it. Dependence certainly remains for those who own. That is exactly why the direction to move is not “switching to a different form” but “reducing dependence little by little, and thickening the floor you can stand on.” Ownership is a direction, not a switch.

Conclusion: From Job Title to Structure

The reason masters multiply the more you go independent is that independence disperses the counterparts to whom labour power is sold, while preserving non-ownership of the means of production. Try to increase your living while remaining non-owning and the only route is to increase the number of buyers — and the masters to be answered increase by exactly that number.

Let me make this explicit. This article does not deny independence. It does not deny autonomy, ownership, or leverage. It positions them as destinations. What is cut is not these but one error: that changing your employment status will, on its own, hand you freedom.

The wish to take your own life back into your own hands is sound. It is only that pursuing that wish through a change of employment status lands you in the paradox of independence. Pursue the same wish through the structure of ownership and the masters diminish, and autonomy comes closer. The job title “independent” multiplies masters; the structure called ownership removes them.

Those already independent need not abandon that footing. Stand there and turn your gaze towards ownership. Those still employed need not hurry either. What matters is not which form you are in now, but whether you can take a step from there towards ownership.

Articles in This Cluster: Reading Each Argument in Depth

This article set out, as a whole picture, that “independent equals free” is a story celebrating only one half of the double freedom. Each argument is dissected more deeply in its own piece, arranged in the order of this article’s reasoning — the pain, the half freedom, the dispersal, self-exploitation, and who the story benefits.

What the pain really is — masters multiply rather than diminish

• Why going freelance multiplies the masters you serve — you did not become free; subordination merely dispersed

Half a freedom — the form changes, the structure does not

• Registering as self-employed does not begin ownership — paperwork changes only the form
• Becoming a contractor does not change what you sell — the shared structure of labour power as a commodity
• Earning under your own business name is not ownership — a name is flow; means of production are stock

Mistaking dispersal — more parties to depend on does not mean less dependence

• How the freedom to pick projects creates a new boss — a new form of control with no room to negotiate
• Escaping subcontracting does not end your dependence — dispersal scatters risk but does not sever dependence

Subordination from within — the harshest boss becomes yourself

• Having too much to do is not a problem of scheduling — demands that lose their limits ratchet up without end
• What are you handing over when you seek a role model? — people flee the weight of freedom towards authority

Who the story benefits

• Who benefits from the story of quitting to be free? — the order of a telling that stokes anxiety and then sells hope

This argument — calling a form freedom and clearing the structure out of view — can be analysed with the same structure from other domains. Why an employee’s side hustle does not change how they sell time dissects the addition of another way of earning; what the phrase passive income conceals dissects the fantasy of exit from labour and the location of decision rights; and why career advancement never quiets your anxiety about the future dissects the industry that feeds anxiety. These are sister clusters, each a different angle: what this article treats is the non-ownership that remains after employment status has been discarded. To move from the individual arguments to the overall design, start from the structural autonomy master pillar.

The direction this article named as the exit — placing decisions about production on your own side — is handled concretely from the side of economic structure in the articles under how the economic structure works. In particular, how labour power comes to be treated as a commodity, what really decides your pay, from flow-type labour to stock-type, and the four leverages that require no permission are the continuation that unties, from the side of implementation, the ownership this article speaks of.

The book-length treatment of this argument is available as Independent, but Not Free on Amazon Kindle.

References

Academic papers and theory

• Marx, K. Das Kapital, Band I (1867) Verlag von Otto Meissner — the “double freedom” was presented by Marx and later organised into a system by Uno Kōzō
• Uno, K. Principles of Political Economy (1964) Iwanami Shoten
• Coase, R. H. “The Nature of the Firm” Economica, 4(16) (1937)
• Standing, G. The Precariat: The New Dangerous Class (2011) Bloomsbury Academic
• Deci, E. L., & Ryan, R. M. Intrinsic Motivation and Self-Determination in Human Behavior (1985) Plenum Press