What capitalists do is—as Marglin noted—insert themselves into the production process as gatekeepers.

Their unequal access to power and resources has absolutely nothing to do with skill. Do you think Donald Trump or Elon Musk have useful *skills*? Of course not! What they have is power, derived from institutions of violence, which they use to gatekeep nodes in the web of exchanges between laborers.

That is, once again: inequality of power and resources is the product of *choices* people make, not something that emerges organically, mechanically, or inevitably from the human condition.

Any argument that we are doomed to hierarchy by differences among people, or that we require coercive institutions like the state to constrain an inevitable inequality that emerges from our differences, is based on a false understanding of how human society works.

We are not doomed by circumstances. We could choose differently. We could choose something better.

/end