How power works under capitalism: if I have food and you are starving, then I can make you do things.
I’ve read something today on r/CriticalTheory that has been quite an epiphany for me. Someone explained power like this: let’s say that we two are alone on a stranded island, and I’m the only one who has food while you’re starving. In that moment, I have power over you: I can make you do certain things in exchange for giving you food, while you have a much harder time making me do things for you.
This is the simplest and yet clearest explanation of how power works under capitalism that I’ve ever read. If the employees are dying of hunger while the employer ‘has food’ (or money, which you can use to buy food) then the employer has much more leverage to indirectly force the employees to do certain things rather than vice-versa.
Similarly enough, if an employee abandons their employer (leaves the company), the employer does not have much to lose but if the employer abandons the employee (fires them) the employee is usually screwed outside of solid social safety nets. (The only exception to this case is when the employees unionize and go on a strike, only in that case is the power relation between the employees and the employer more balanced, which is why it is so important to have laws and regulations supporting unionization.)
What I wrote above is also an argument in favor of economic equality. As I explained above, to own money/capital/resources means to own power, and the more wealth and capital are concentrated in the hands of a small group of people, the more power is concentrated in the hands of a small group of people. Any hierarchical power structure in which a small elite of people make the decisions for a large majority of people is tyrannical and dictatorial and leads to corruption. This is why ‘free’ market capitalism is incompatible with democracy and leads to oligarchy and why so-called right-wing ‘libertarianism’ is only fascism’s other side of the coin: two power structures where the strong and powerful rule over the weak and helpless. A system in which billionaires are able to exist while others die of hunger is a system in which a small minority of people indirectly, through their social position, force a large majority of people to behave the way they want.
Noam Chomsky was right to state that Marxist-Leninist state-socialist projects (the USSR, Mao’s China, etc.) and unregulated market capitalism are two sides of the same coin. They are usually portrayed as two opposite extremes (far left vs far right) when in reality they are much more similar than they seem, since the real opposition that matters is not between “state vs. markets” but between democratically vs. autocratically controlled economies. Both authoritarian state socialism as well as capitalism represent top-down hierarchical power structures where a handful of people make decisions for a large majority of people (and so is your usual workplace). A real alternative would be a democratic economy: a market socialist/libertarian socialist system in which power is in the hands of the many instead of the hands of the few, a system in which neither the state nor the capitalists own the means of production, but where the workers directly own the MoP and the businesses in which they work. A system where we have workplace democracy, a decentralized power structure where decision making is done not in a top-down, but in a bottom-up way, where the leaders have to be accountable to their subordinates (be they political leaders or managers in a workplace) and where the weak and helpless do not have to bow down to the strong and powerful.
