One of my favorite podcasters, Lex Fridman, interviewed Marxist academic Richard Wolff. The discussion was long and thought-provoking. I recommend listening to the whole thing. For example, I learned the difference between Marxism and Communism. (Marxism is a critique of Capitalism, while Communism is a specific form of government.) One thing Wolff points out is that Marxism does not have to be effected via the state - it’s just an accident of history that the most famous implementations of Marxist ideas were done via control of the state (and ended badly).
Some of Wolff’s points are just factually wrong. For example, he believes cars would be unnecessary if the U.S. just spent $30 billion on mass transit. His seriousness and confidence might have convinced me if I didn’t know that it’s basically impossible to build new mass-transit in the US (and when it does happen, it costs more than $500 million per kilometer of railway).
But some of Wolff’s points are wrong in a philosophical sense, rather than factually. For example, he says that the median childcare worker’s wage is lower than the median car attendant’s wage. He believes this is due to sexism, and that society values watching cars more than watching children. This is wrong. It just boils down to supply and demand. There are more people willing to work in childcare than watching parked cars (higher supply of labor, equals lower prices for that labor).
Another argument Wolff makes is that capitalism causes inequality, which is tearing our country apart and will take us somewhere bad if it isn’t nipped (he says: inequality breeds resentment, which led to Hitler). Right now, CEOs make more than 300 times employees’ salaries, which is exploitative of workers and takes advantage of what they produce. In theory, Wolff believes, companies should be run like democracies, where everyone makes collective decisions and the employees all benefit equally from increased profits. What I think Wolff misses is that this system would not fix inequality. Even if inequality within corporations would disappear, the employees at Google would still be a lot richer than employees at Pizza Hut. So the Pizza Hut employees might still be resentful of the richer Google employees.
Furthermore, the reason the founder/CEO gets paid more than the workers is because the CEO is irreplaceable. There is no Tesla without Elon Musk. There is a Tesla if any of the other employees leave. This is why Bernie Sanders became a millionaire (after years of railing against “millionaires and billionaires) after writing a book, but the book’s typesetter, publisher, and print-machine operator did not become millionaires. if the typesetter quit, Bernie’s publisher would find a new one. Without Bernie, there is no book. This is supply and demand taken to an extreme - there is only supply of one. To give just one more example, if an actor in Hamilton dies, the show happens anyway. If Lin-Manuel Miranda had died before he wrote and released it, the show would never have happened. His irreplaceable service is so valuable, and that is why Miranda is so fabulously wealthy.
This does not mean that there is no room for new kinds of corporate governance. I’m interested in seeing how new DAOs and other crypto initiatives (e.g. Flow) subvert the typical capitalist corporation. But the idea that Lin-Manuel Miranda is “exploiting” his actors, who are richer and more famous than they’ve ever been, is silly.