Choice and capitalism

[Mr. Piccolo]

Is meaningful choice an illusion under capitalism? You hear a lot about choice in the mainstream media. The basic premise is that most people in society have meaningful choice when it comes to their work-life. You can choose the jobs you want, the subjects you want to study in university, or to work for a wage or to become an entrepreneur or self-employed, or to even work at all.

The issue of choice is often bound up in the "personality responsibility" ethic and used as a defense for capitalism. Those who end up in poverty or in some other negative situation must have made bad choices.

So I want to ask comrades, to what extent do workers have meaningful choice under capitalism?

[Cliff Paul]

https://kapitalism101.wordpress.com/2009/08/15/manufacturing-consent/


We have already seen how the basic structure of the market, free exchange between formally equal individuals, creates the appearance of freedom and equality. [It was from the emergence of markets that our modern notions of freedom and equality come from. In the marketplace all that matters is price. It does matter who you are buying from, whether they be Kings or peasants, black or white.] This world of market freedom and equality masks a world of coercion and inequality in the sphere of property and production. After all, why does a worker need to enter the market place to purchase their means of subsistence? Because they do not have the ability to produce it themselves. Why does a worker enter the market to sell her working life to the capitalist class? Because she does not own any means of producing commodities herself. Thus the very fact that a worker enters the market to buy commodities and sell wage-labor implies that there is an asymmetry in the ownership of production. But we don’t see this in the marketplace. All we see is formally equal people exchanging commodities. Nobody is forcing anyone to buy or sell anything. Thus market exchange itself obscures the coercive asymmetry behind the market.

[tuwix]

Is meaningful choice an illusion under capitalism? You hear a lot about choice in the mainstream media. The basic premise is that most people in society have meaningful choice when it comes to their work-life. You can choose the jobs you want, the subjects you want to study in university, or to work for a wage or to become an entrepreneur or self-employed, or to even work at all.

The issue of choice is often bound up in the "personality responsibility" ethic and used as a defense for capitalism. Those who end up in poverty or in some other negative situation must have made bad choices.

So I want to ask comrades, to what extent do workers have meaningful choice under capitalism?

To very small extent. In capitalism, the more money you have, the choice is greater. The most of workers at the bottom of income pyramid, so their extent of choice is at the bottom too. Only moneyless communism is able to equalize such chances. Then and only then all will have the same extent of choice.

[Loony Le Fist]

The amount of choice and freedom you have in a capitalist society is a function of how much wealth you have. Money is simply a mask over the underlying social relationships. We are then sold the line that hard work is what got people where they are. It is the social relations that got where they are. Often times common expressions belie these common fragments of propaganda, e.g. "It's not what you know, but who you know."

[The Intransigent Faction]

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The first minute of this video sums it up better than I would. The choices you are presented depend on your socioeconomic class, and they depend on to what degree a greater range of choices will threaten (or serve) ruling class interests.

As for whether the poor choose to be poor: in short, no, they do not. Certainly they don't make any meaningful choice to be poor.