Richard D. Wolff

Another parallel campaign could stress the social benefits of giving citizens genuine freedom of choice between work within a traditional, hierarchical capitalist enterprise or within a workers’ self-directed enterprise. That choice doesn’t currently exist. This campaign would advocate extending government programs that assist small businesses and minority-owned businesses to include a major program for workers’ self-directed enterprises. I

In short, private property and markets do not provide us with a clear demarcation between capitalism and, for example, slavery and feudalism as economic systems.

commonly held view is that slaves lacked freedom because they were property and serfs lacked freedom because they were tied to their feudal manors, but workers in capitalism suffer neither of those forms of coercion. Among the problems with this definition is the fact that, under capitalism, wage workers are not free (other than formally, legalistically) because to live even minimally, they must work for others. They must sell their labor power to those who own the means of production in order to survive.