Work Reform

That's how it should be. That demonstrates why the working class must maintain control of the means of production. Contrary to popular belief, that's not actually communism, rather it is the difference between feudalism and freedom.

When the feudal lords own the thing(s) you use to make your living, you're not really free and disempowerment and disenfranchisement becomes endemic and cumulative. Plantation slaves and tenant farmers had an awful lot in common, they were not free, did not have any form of mobility, physical, social or otherwise. The lord owned the land and pretty close to everything in it. They controlled the job, controlled the housing, controlled the costs, controlled the compensation and ultimately controlled the tenants lives. There is some difference in the degree of control, but mostly only in degree.

Tenant employees are not much different today, except that it's all been dressed up to look more free. Most of it's an illusion though, and that shows when you start actually trying to exercise any freedom. If you don't own any of the things that are earning your paychecks, you'll be a slave to the people who do. That's not something capitalism requires or even expects. A free labor market is part of the free market that capitalism requires to function effectively. Entrepreneurship is one of the pillars of capitalism and growth but it cannot exist if people or even small organizations cannot afford to own anything productive enough to be competitive or successful.

Like it or hate it, capitalism itself is not quite the problem. What we're doing now is not functioning effectively because it's not actually capitalism anymore, it's feudalism. Whatever you want to call it, late-stage-capitalism, neo-liberalism, techno-feudalism, neo-feudalism, what is happening today is not what capitalism used to mean, and it's not just because we just didn't "properly understand" capitalism until now, and it's not because this was actually an inevitable outcome.

Capitalism is just a tool, it's one tool in a toolbox that we can use, it was never supposed to be the only tool, but even if it was the only tool, what we're using it for now is not what it was supposed to be used for. What we understand about capitalism's intended function is not matching what we see happening in the world because it's been changed, it's been corrupted. Important pieces of the framework that we used to call capitalism have been lost. On purpose. It has been stripped down from a tool to a weapon.

Capitalism is not the problem, we can get rid of it if we want, but it won't solve the problem. The lords claiming ownership of everything are the problem, and even if we did throw it all away to switch to communism or something else, they would still be there, they would put themselves in the same places of power, and they would cause exactly the same problem, just like they did in communist Russia, maybe even some of the names and faces of the lords changed, but the problem certainly didn't! Corruption and greed and exploitation and rent-seeking don't care what economic system you're using, they will find ways to corrupt, hoard, exploit and seek rent from the less fortunate, because that's what the humans desiring those things want. And they will use any system at all to get it. The system is only at fault in that it was not protected from this kind of abuse. Any system will have to be or it will end up the same way.