This is a strawman, the socialist argument isn’t about how hard executives work, it’s about relationships to capital.
If you want to setup a meritocratic cooperative, be my guest. If the democratic body that runs the cooperative decides that being a CEO is 300x more difficult than being a senior software engineer with decades of experience, so be it (nobody in the real world believes this).
The issue is that this isn’t how organizations are run. People aren’t compensated based on how much they work, nor is compensation decided democratically. Seed money comes through for example, and those investors put a tiny fraction of the time and effort that workers put in, but their relationship to capital is fundamentally different. They are part of a different class, they don’t rent themselves out to the owners of capital and have the surplus value of their labor extracted and divided up to shareholders.
The critique is at the very existence of these different classes. People shouldn’t have fundamentally different relationships to capital. Abolitionists of the 19th century fully understood this, abolishing wage slavery (renting people) is an incredibly important thing to do, just like abolishing chattel slavery (buying people) was. These are both intolerable infringements upon human rights to autonomy.
This is a strawman, the socialist argument isn’t about how hard executives work, it’s about relationships to capital.
If you want to setup a meritocratic cooperative, be my guest. If the democratic body that runs the cooperative decides that being a CEO is 300x more difficult than being a senior software engineer with decades of experience, so be it (nobody in the real world believes this).
The issue is that this isn’t how organizations are run. People aren’t compensated based on how much they work, nor is compensation decided democratically. Seed money comes through for example, and those investors put a tiny fraction of the time and effort that workers put in, but their relationship to capital is fundamentally different. They are part of a different class, they don’t rent themselves out to the owners of capital and have the surplus value of their labor extracted and divided up to shareholders.
The critique is at the very existence of these different classes. People shouldn’t have fundamentally different relationships to capital. Abolitionists of the 19th century fully understood this, abolishing wage slavery (renting people) is an incredibly important thing to do, just like abolishing chattel slavery (buying people) was. These are both intolerable infringements upon human rights to autonomy.