u/NicodemusV

Coercion, a simple but important concept that serves as another difference between the philosophy of capitalists and socialists.

A typical socialist argument regarding coercion under capitalism goes something like this:

“Capitalism doesn’t actually give you freedom of choice. It’s work or starve.”

Or like this:

“Capitalism is coercive because one guy takes all the stuff you need to live, and sells it back to you.”

Or something similar like that.

Regardless, the critique is ultimately that capitalism is coercive, and from this a whole host of conclusions are drawn, along with the claimed “remedies” to the coercion.

So, how does socialism solve and eliminate coercion?

What is the measure of hard work?

When socialists argue against the salaries, compensation, and privileges of their supervisors or bosses, against CEOs and other corporate executives, they’ll mockingly joke and argue some variation of the following:

“So Jeff Bezos/Elon Musk/Bill Gates works harder than everyone else in the company?”

“You mean my boss works 1000x harder than me and that’s why he’s paid 1000x more than me?”

It is a popular socialist meme.

And often these socialists will proceed to exhibit a type of labor-prejudice, discounting the labor of others, especially against those who work in positions of power over them, calling it “parasitic”or “immaterial” or in the words of Marx, “unproductive labor,” etc. according to whatever theory of value and political-economy they subscribe to.

At the same time, socialists will decry the capitalist ethos of hard work leading to success, denying that one may advance their goals through individual effort and instead chalking a capitalists’ success up to some form of systemic privilege, nepotism, or some other abstraction of social relations.

This socialist criticism does not limit itself to such big names as Musk or Bezos either.

It applies to all business owners, as any one who owns productive capital property on which they earn profit not off the sweat of their own brow, may be called a capitalist.

So if Bezos, Gates, Musk and other CEOs and other capitalists and other corporate officers and business owners do not and did not actually work hard to achieve their success, then what did they actually do?

What measures hard work?

What qualifies as “hard work?”