Equal opportunity and meritocratic fallacies

Capitalism does not commonly result in meritocratic organisations. Capitalism does not create economies that have equal opportunity.

Critique

Capitalism does not commonly result in meritocratic organisations. Capitalism does not create economies that have equal opportunity.

The fallacy of equal opportunity

Under capitalism there is an equal opportunity for people to start new organisations. There is often not an equal opportunity for individuals within an organisation. Workers within an organisation are not entitled to a fair reward based on the value of their contributions. Workers rely on the goodwill of capitalist owners to receive fair compensation. Owners are incentivised to maximise their own profit by minimising the amount they spend on workers. If a worker is unhappy with how an organisation is being operated they will often have little to no influence in making changes to that organisation. The notion of equal opportunity in capitalism is that any worker that disagrees with how an organisation is operated can choose to create their own organisation if they want to. This approach is often highly counterproductive as workers may just want to change a small number of things about how the organisation is operated but they have a limited voice and ability to collectively agree with other workers what changes should be adopted. Changes that could be highly beneficial to the workplace. A number of organisations could have natural monopolies such as electric, water or gas providers or entrenched digital networks with large amounts of adoption such as online marketplaces or social networks. It is not practical to keep recreating these organisations due to the high cost and network effects they have. It is also a highly wasteful approach for workers to use a large amount of resources to start a new organisation instead of being more pragmatic and adopting a fairer approach to govern and improve the existing organisations. Workers are often subjected to the rules and policies of capitalist owners due to the impracticalities of duplicating existing and well established organisations.

The fallacy of meritocracy

The most hardworking and performant worker in an organisation is not entitled to receive the proportional and fair reward for their contributions. Instead it is up to capitalist owners to decide how compensation is handled. This is not meritocratic for workers as regardless of how hard they work they are reliant on the capitalist owners to receive fair compensation for their labour. The owner is only incentivised to reward the contributor enough to keep them but not too much that it reduces their profit margins that they benefit from. Organisations are also not meritocratic for the owners as they are often receiving the gains and upside from other peoples labour instead of being due to the merits of their own contributions. A truly meritocratic organisation would be one where contributions are proportionally rewarded based on their actual value and merit. Capitalist owners are not incentivised to create a truly meritocratic organisation.