"Anyone can make it with hard work"

[Mr. Piccolo]

I was recently speaking to a friend of mine who said that he believes that poor people have no excuse for their condition. He used his grandfather as an example. His grandfather's parents were poor immigrants from Europe. His great-grandfather died in an accident so his grandfather was raised in a single-parent household by his mother who worked in a factory for little money. Despite this his grandfather went on to become a physician.

According to my friend his grandfather's story proves that no amount of poverty or hardship should be used as an explanation for individual poverty.

This argument strikes me as weak but I cannot quite put my finger on what formal philosophical error my friend is making. My layperson's response is that it is unrealistic to expect everyone to be able to become a successful professional or businessperson no matter how much hard work they put in. But my friend will have none of it.

So, I am wondering if there is a more formal philosophical response to these types of arguments. The "anyone can make it with hard work" argument is commonly used as a defense of capitalism.

[Comrade Jacob]

Then why do so many hard workers die in poverty? And why do so many of the rich do nothing but exploit labour and/or inherit their wealth?

[Guardia Rossa]

"Anyone can make it with hard work"....
Is it worth it though?


I'd prefer to have a 1-2k salary than to waste my life climbing an invisible ladder, only to fall through when I discover that It doesn't exists. There is only Heaven and Earth, no in-between...

EDIT: Adding up to that, you need to have ten generations of your children living and working robotically ("workaholics") in order to become a Haute-Bourgeois.

[Rudolf]

But hard work isn't enough. You could work your arse off for 50 years doing manual labour but that's not going to make you rich it's just going to make you die younger. There has to be something else and usually apologists recognise this and insist on saving and being frugal. Yet this is easily demolished in the fact that mere savings bring in nothing so long as the money saved isn't used to exploit the poor.

As Kropotkin put it in conquest of bread


"This is the secret of wealth; find the starving and destitute, pay them half a crown, and make them produce five shillings worth in the day, amass a fortune by these means, and then increase it by some lucky hit, made with the help of the State.... That is what people call "being economical and having frugal, temperate habits." At bottom it is nothing more nor less than grinding the face of the poor."

[Counterculturalist]

Capitalism's existence is predicated on a majority of people being unable to "make it". If (even hypothetically) anybody could "make it" capitalism would fall apart.

[Mr. Piccolo]

I think my friend was putting more emphasis on the education/skills aspect of "making it" and not just on working hard at a job. In his mind, everyone should be able to develop their skills to "make it."

The argument I made is that: A) Not everyone has the ability to sufficiently develop their skills to earn sizable incomes under capitalism and; B) Even if they did these skills would become commonplace and drive down the price of skilled labor since it would no longer be scarce.

I guess my friend is saying that education acts as a way to sort the lazy from the hard working and that is why outcomes under capitalism are just. It is this argument that I am struggling with.

[Shinyos]

It is not under the interests of capital to have the majority to "make it". If it was, that would be the complete antithesis of capitalism, or, private accumulation of profit. Your friend is working on the assumption of a just-world hypothesis, that people who are in substandard conditions deserve it due to the fact that they do not better themselves in some way, shape or form. This is essentially blaming the victim.

[Rudolf]

I think my friend was putting more emphasis on the education/skills aspect of "making it" and not just on working hard at a job. In his mind, everyone should be able to develop their skills to "make it."

The argument I made is that: A) Not everyone has the ability to sufficiently develop their skills to earn sizable incomes under capitalism and; B) Even if they did these skills would become commonplace and drive down the price of skilled labor since it would no longer be scarce.

I guess my friend is saying that education acts as a way to sort the lazy from the hard working and that is why outcomes under capitalism are just. It is this argument that I am struggling with.

Not everyone has the means to develop said skills let alone ability. You could have the potential to be a brilliant physicist but if you're born to someone working for starvation wages in a factory youre probably not going to be able to develop the mathematical or scientific skills you'll need you're probably going to go work a shit low paying job like your parents as soon as you're old enough so that in the case of some calamity like an injury at work you#'re not all rendered homeless and starving.


Oh plus the amount of people i know working low paid jobs with degrees is ridiculous. Education is no guarantee for a decent living. I'm way more educated than my dad yet when he was my age he had a higher standard of living than i do and a far more stable source of income.

As an aside, i always find it weird how people emphasise shit like ability. Even if someone is stupid why shouldn't they be entitled to the same standards of living? It's fucking barbaric to say someone should be poorer because they're not as clever.

[Comrade #138672]

Your friend is delusional.

[olahsenor]

The attrition rate in American, British and Canadian workplaces is 89%. Which means that 80-90% of the workforce are wrongfully terminated and replaced with another 80%, then wrongfully terminated, then another hiring spree.. ..This goes on and one until only 2 people remain. The CEO and his trusted manager. One mistake, your fired. If you whine about the heater, you're fired.. I've been there..

[Antiochus]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/House_of_the_Vettii

The reason I post it is because it was owned by Freedmen. Yes, former slaves. So I suppose any slave can make it with hard work and perseverance.

[Futility Personified]

What I always consider when people say this is this:

I was working in a warehouse a while back, and there was this old fella, proper west country guy, hard working, "yarp" saying and generally quite pleasant.

He was in his early 60s.

I'd chatted to him trying to find out why he was there (he was agency, so he was roving between work places) because why the fuck would you want to be working when you are his age, especially doing manual labour?

He just wanted a little extra money so he could afford to get some chickens. Chickens! It is a folksy, rootsy example, but it shows that you can work all your damn life, live in a pretty simple way, and still go wanting. We live in a society where to be a teetotal old guy who doesn't really like cars or technology, doesn't go out drinking, and you still need to bust your arse just to get some cluckers.

As for place in the pecking order ( ;) ) I was making the case to my boss the other day that sometimes management is quite severely strained in the demands they have placed upon them, and that the stresses from this are unfairly passed down further. It's inefficient and unpleasant. The abolition of those roles and the fair division of their duties is one of the first steps of workplace democracy.

[Ele'ill]

I think it's basic arithmetic, you can't outwork the difference between your wages and what's required as basic needs, let alone what's needed to have an actual life, and this is while working 40 hrs+ / 2 jobs.

[Quail]

Most of the poorest people in the world are the hardest workers... much of the hard work poor women (in particular) do is unpaid.

People don't get rich by working hard. They get rich by having the right connections, being in the right place at the right time, and exploiting others. There are some "skills" (i.e. friends and family in high places) which can't be learned, and besides some people simply wouldn't want to make a good life for themselves on the back of other people's poverty. Capitalism is promoted as a meritocracy, but at the same time it's deliberately set up so that rags to riches stories are decidedly the exception rather than the rule.

[Vee]

Tell that to every person that worked in a factory for crazy long hours in very deplorable conditions and died impoverished. The average worker works infinitely harder than the average capitalist and often has nothing to show for it.

[Sewer Socialist]

Well, that phrase doesn't really state that all hard work results in "making it", but that if anyone wants to, they could start a successful business. I don't think that's quite true, and wealth is absolutely a huge factor in whether a business succeeds, but people with working class origins can and do start businesses (assuming that's what "making it" is), which is close enough to the point they're trying to make.

The real issue is that even if anyone could make it, it is not true that everyone can. These successful entrepreneurs will still need the labor of others to be successful in this sense; the success of this business relies on the hard work of those who haven't "made it".

It is still fundamentally a contradiction that wealth is collectively produced, but privately owned, and communists side with those who come up lacking from this contradiction. Further, the forces of the state actively work to dispossess, criminalize, and otherwise marginalize a substantial population of people to ensure that there are large amounts of people who "haven't made it," and are desperate to serve those who have.

[BIXX]

Who cares, even if everyone could work hard and become rich I don't give a shit I don't even want that to be a reality

[ComradeAllende]

Idk about philosophical objections (other than some snide comment on class struggle lol), but I think your friend is making a mountain out of a molehill. His grandfather was white so he didn't have to deal with the effects of slavery and Jim Crow. Plus it's just an anecdote; anecdotes aren't really useful in making broad assertions about a large segment of the population. Plus the poverty of immigrants was one of transition; much of it was based on the conditions of their emigration and so their children could (in theory) benefit from becoming Americanized; plus wages were notably higher for industrial workers in the US than in Europe, so that could have factored in allowing immigrants to save money for future investment. Immigrant poverty is a lot different from native poverty, which is often due to things like depressed economic conditions in their home-region, mental illness, lingering racial discrimination, etc. And many immigrants still remain in poverty; at least 20% of the immigrants who came here from 1870-1920 returned to their home countries, and I think that the real number is more like a third, so your friend's grandfather was pretty lucky compared to those poor bastards.

[Strannik]

Communism is not about whether or not an individual can "make it". Communism is about what "making it" means. In bourgeois society, invariably, "making it" is possible only when you invest the results of your hard labour and become a proprietor - thus making it harder for others to "make it" as well. The question is not about individual mobility between classes - it's why does society need to be divided into classes in the first place.

[Sibotic]

Seems suspicious that they'd say that to a communist. Obviously 'anyone can make it with hard work' doesn't make sense in discussing with such a communist, as obviously in order to do that they'd presumably have to want to become a capitalist, or 'make it,' which communists did not want to do or hold to be in any sense a privileged state worth working towards. So that isn't 'anyone,' then, it's idiots unthinkingly under the sway of capitalist ideology, which is why of course if you scratch the rich and capitalists were never really known for intellectual achievements or achievements generally. They were stupid, because they were merely the depersonalised (!) functionaries of a decrepit system.

Secondly, it's really a self-defeating argument for them, or one that they'd not really bring up. Other than not really having any point - whether or not it's true doesn't matter, obviously it isn't, and in any case it hardly means anything; if you brought up that seemingly nobody sees the need to pursue capitalist ends they'd still have pretended that their system was stable - stating that people who try (not 'believe'? Well.) or work towards it can achieve - something, raises quite explicitly the question of the nature of this 'work,' namely of labour and the social relations concerning it, which is absolutely something that they do not want to do because then you were discussing class, alienation, exploitation, etc. They introduce a term which they do not want to define. They wouldn't want to define it, either, because it implies that their argument's only validity was its circularity: to 'work' in this context is conditioned by the system they are confined within, and hence all that they're trying to say is 'the capitalist mode of production was alright because the capitalist mode of production was alright for no reason but let's pretend because feelings,' or in brief in discussing 'work,' they're already positivistically taking on a capitalist category, so that once you get past the fact that they're trying to justify wage slavery there's not really much to the 'argument.' It stands to reason that if there is a system being discussed, then all they can be saying is that people achieve 'success' by being functionaries of this system, which strictly speaking is relative to the demands of the system, especially for capital and willing slaves, and in addition as is noted vis-a-vis the rate of profit but in relation to surplus-value generally, it also makes sense that to actually do this and serve would be to accept lower wages and such and in brief poverty - if a worker - in order to increase surplus-value, and if a capitalist - not to work. Once you take into account that 'work' here isn't a neutral term, which for a Marxist it can't be, then obviously that game was rigged from the start, and in favour of capital - while obviously time and reality were not in favour of either.

They should pick their arguments better.


His great-grandfather died in an accident
At least they made this event seem slightly comical. Success ain't all it's cracked up to be sometimes.


According to my friend his grandfather's story proves that no amount of poverty or hardship should be used as an explanation for individual poverty. Obviously individual poverty isn't collective poverty, which is a systematic trend. Obviously some people can work in unimportant niches of labour that got more pay, but systematically they aren't even relevant. That one person can get out of poverty is an accident, so to speak, and as we've specified it often means that they're bad people so that's not really in favour in any real ethical sense, but on a wider scale poverty was about the movements of capital, the overall state of production, crisis, and so on, rather than having realistically anything to do with such things. Capitalism needed the proletariat - by which I mean the significant proletariat, not random niche jobs, who are therefore a systematic rather than 'individual' necessity, and after all these people who are 'successful' despite such are generally so due to their function towards capital, so in that sense it hardly seems they can complain about the poor for that reason. In any case it seems problematic that people who don't 'work hard' aren't in poverty, if that's what it takes to get out of it, and perhaps they would be more interested in legislature to reduce most of the population to poverty to favour the budding Stakhanovs, albeit with more emphasis on social order.

Obviously any story where a person is more 'successful' than they seemed to be previously can be written off as 'hard work,' and usually is, so in that sense it's a fairly trivial distinction.


This argument strikes me as weak but I cannot quite put my finger on what formal philosophical error my friend is making.It's not a 'philosophical' argument per se, so that might be it. Existing, perhaps, to start from Hegel?


Tell that to every person that worked in a factory for crazy long hours in very deplorable conditions and died impoverished. The average worker works infinitely harder than the average capitalist and often has nothing to show for it.Given that we're discussing 'capital,' this does seem relevant, yes. Perhaps people's 'friends' shouldn't be so quick to effectively friendzone capital by discussing irrelevant fragments of the social system in lieu of the parts of it that were actually significant to it. How little must they think of capital to emphasise 'hard work,' which was exploited to form capital. It's like workerism all over again, although the split is just basic inconsistency.

[Luís Henrique]

I was recently speaking to a friend of mine who said that he believes that poor people have no excuse for their condition. He used his grandfather as an example. His grandfather's parents were poor immigrants from Europe. His great-grandfather died in an accident so his grandfather was raised in a single-parent household by his mother who worked in a factory for little money. Despite this his grandfather went on to become a physician.

According to my friend his grandfather's story proves that no amount of poverty or hardship should be used as an explanation for individual poverty.

This argument strikes me as weak but I cannot quite put my finger on what formal philosophical error my friend is making. My layperson's response is that it is unrealistic to expect everyone to be able to become a successful professional or businessperson no matter how much hard work they put in. But my friend will have none of it.

So, I am wondering if there is a more formal philosophical response to these types of arguments. The "anyone can make it with hard work" argument is commonly used as a defense of capitalism.

I like the shipwreck analogy.

If the ship wrecks, say, two miles from the coast, the best swimmers aboard will manage to get to the shore. Those who don't know how to swim, or who are lousy swimmers, or are too weak to swim such a distance, will die.

What your friend argues sounds like saying that if one person was able to swim to the shore, then all people aboard could have done so. Why didn't they learn how to swim, why haven't they perfected they swimming abilities some more, why have they boarded ship if they were elderly or just children?

But, as we perfectly know, people are different; some indeed are able to work harder, or to learn more, etc.

The question is, why should one starve or live in misery, just because they aren't brilliant students or Stakhanov reborn?

Luís Henrique