Economy cannot be reduced merely to the means of production, as in Marx, nor to technologies and institutions. It is always also grounded in ethics — in stable ideas about what is permissible, just, obligatory, and worthy conduct. It was no accident that the USSR proclaimed the need for a “new man.” Economy is, above all, an organization of shared existence and the distribution of goods. No economic system can function without stable rules of behavior within society. Another example of how dependent economy is on ethics is the difficulty of transferring people from one ethical and social regime into the economic system of Western countries. Cultures in which loyalty to the community, religious group, or family clan plays a central role are more difficult to integrate into the impersonal ethics of corporate or state administration.
Classical capitalism rested on Protestant ethics. Max Weber demonstrated this convincingly in his classic work The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. Protestant theology assumes the absolute will of God over man, which means that God already knows whether a person will be saved or not. Accordingly, signs of future salvation may already be found in one’s present life. Protestantism encourages thrift, modesty, discipline, and hard work. Combined with the ideas of the free market, the successful entrepreneur becomes not merely someone who has achieved material success, but also someone marked by God during earthly life, carrying an almost sacred meaning of justice.
Ayn Rand’s objectivism, especially in Atlas Shrugged, slightly shifted this ethical form, somewhat desacralizing it but adding pathos. For Rand, the entrepreneur is not someone marked by God and predestined for salvation, but a hero of progress: an exceptional individual whose talent, will, and creative capacity move the world forward, and who therefore gains a moral right to power, property, and reward.
The ethics of classical capitalism is the foundation and a key part of the entire system. The world order, even the universe itself, seems to reward the entrepreneur for his virtues: hard work, the ability to assume risk, talent, responsibility, and respect for impersonal rules and contracts.
Post-capitalism outwardly resembles classical capitalism, yet differs from it at its core precisely because it has a different ethics. Ethics in postmodernity is flexible and fluid. It is based neither on religious ethics nor on the ideas of modernity, but primarily on the current needs of business, using the classical values of capitalism as a set of symbols and semiotically, locally assembling relevant meanings from them.
In the capitalism of late modernity, roles still remained relatively distinct. The entrepreneur was expected to show initiative, a willingness to take risks, organizational talent, and the ability to create something new; possible power and money were understood as a fair reward for risk and responsibility. The wage worker occupied a different, but still socially recognized, position. He was not required to be an entrepreneur of his own life. He had the right to labor, a profession, a wage, a stable place within the production system, and the basic reproduction of life.
This was one of the important justifications of industrial modernity: the inclusion of a person into a complex production system was supposed to give him more than direct self-reproduction through simple forms of labor, trade, craft, or subsistence economy. The point is not that pre-capitalist life was necessarily harder or worse. The point is that a person of average abilities still had more direct access to the means of subsistence. Capitalism justified the loss of this immediate autonomy by promising the ordinary person a higher level of predictability, comfort, protection, and social reproduction.
In postmodernity, however, the roles begin to merge. The wage worker is now expected to possess entrepreneurial skills: negotiation, self-presentation, innovativeness, a willingness to assume risk, and hyper-motivation. At the same time, the double morality and separation of roles remain intact: the worker is expected to be devoted to the company and passionate about the work, while for the company he remains an impersonal human resource, primarily a source of profit and an element that must satisfy the demand for rapid interchangeability.
In other words, what was once the attribute of the entrepreneur now becomes the minimum requirement imposed on the ordinary worker. Modernist capitalism promised the average person a life above mere self-reproduction. Postmodernist capitalism increasingly demands entrepreneurial qualities from the average person simply in order to preserve access to a basic standard of living.
The startup industry functions in a similar way. Symbolically, the classical scheme remains in place: the entrepreneur brings innovation to the market and, in the event of success, receives a deserved reward. But the meaning of what is happening is inverted. It is increasingly profitable for corporations not to produce the entire cycle of risk internally. Millions of teams, startups, and independent developers test ideas, products, niches, and business models on their own. The corporation joins later — when the risk has already been partially removed and a promising model has become visible. It buys not an abstract idea, but a result already filtered by the market. Founders have little choice, since sales channels, infrastructure, advertising networks, cloud services, and access platforms are increasingly concentrated in the hands of major players.
Here one may also note that mass culture adapts in a timely manner to the needs of the market. For example, in the late 1980s the image of the “street girl” or “street boy” was popular and embodied in music and cinema. The rapid shift in IT is revealing: in the early 1990s the popular figure was the punk or hacker; in the 2000s, the successful yuppie bank employee; in the 2010s, the urban resident or hipster — because at different stages of market development, the market required different kinds of labor resources.
In other words, mass culture does not merely reflect the labor market; it produces desirable types of subjectivity: the disciplined worker, the creative freelancer, the successful office professional, the flexible startup founder, the “special” urban specialist for whom work becomes part of identity.
Current demands of the labor market also change the demands placed on ethics and values. If industrial culture could still separate labor from leisure, work from private life, profession from identity, postmodernist culture increasingly connects them. The worker must not simply perform a function, but become a particular type of subject: creative, flexible, passionate, special, constantly plugged into work, and ready to turn his own personality into part of the production process.
There is no need to look for a conspiracy here. Producers of media content simply read the current cultural layer. The cultural system sustains itself, and even at the lower social strata people support the values of their own stratum for the sake of self-actualization and self-identification. Falling out of a social model is often harder than remaining fixed at its bottom.
Direct coercion in the modern labor system does not disappear; it changes form. The worker is no longer governed only by a boss or by the classical production hierarchy, but by a protocol: KPI, ratings, the algorithmic distribution of orders, the platform, the brand, the license, the corporate procedure. Power becomes not personal, but systemic. It acts through rules of access, evaluation, visibility, and interchangeability.
In traditional capitalism, the wage worker occupied a relatively stable place within a hierarchy: he had a position, a role, a wage, a boss, an enterprise, and at least minimally defined social obligations on the part of the employer. In the postmodernist model, this place is blurred. The worker must increasingly behave like an entrepreneur: he must be mobile, communicative, flexible, ready for risk, able to sell himself, constantly learning, constantly investing in his own “competitiveness.” But he does not receive the main benefit of entrepreneurship: the possibility of appropriating substantial profit from the risk he has taken.
Here a characteristic simulacrum of entrepreneurship emerges. The worker bears risks like an entrepreneur, but remains constrained like a wage worker. He pays for his own training, adaptation, promotion, equipment, downtime, reputational losses, and periods of decline. Yet his income is capped from above by the logic of survival: he rarely reaches the level at which he himself can escape dependence and use the wage labor of others. If the entrepreneur in classical capitalism assumes risk for the possibility of profit, the modern worker assumes risk in order to preserve access to the system.
This is where a new form of power appears. Business increasingly sells not so much a workplace as access to a protocol: to a brand, a platform, a marketplace, a franchise, an order-distribution algorithm, a rating system, or corporate infrastructure. The risks remain below — with the courier, freelancer, seller, franchisee, content creator, app developer, or remote worker. The upper level of the system extracts profit from the very organization of competition. It does not necessarily participate in each concrete risk, but it controls the rules of the game, the visibility of participants, and the possibility of exclusion from the system.
This is especially clear in digital and platform environments. In a real market, an entrepreneur fails as a result of competition: he loses if his product, price, or organization proves ineffective. But in a platform environment, a different type of dependence emerges. The platform owner possesses an almost sovereign right of access: he can change the algorithm, block an account, suppress search visibility, cancel monetization, shut down an app, delete a store, or erase accumulated reputation. Invested effort can thus be nullified not by the market, but by the decision of the owner of the environment.
That is why the contemporary model of labor appears entrepreneurial only on the surface. It imitates freedom of competition, initiative, and self-management, but preserves an asymmetry of power. The subject is offered the role of an entrepreneur without property, an investor without control, a market participant without the right to define the rules of the market. This is the postmodernist form of capitalist power: it does not merely exploit labor, but organizes an environment in which the worker voluntarily assumes the risks necessary for the profit of the system.
This is why postmodernist capitalism does not simply continue the exploitation of labor in its old form. It changes the very ethical frame of labor. The ordinary person no longer merely sells labor power. He must constantly prove his own suitability for the system, invest in himself, manage his own reputation, assume risks, and struggle for access to infrastructure he does not own. The modernist system promised the individual: enter production, and you will receive more than you could obtain through immediate self-reproduction. The postmodernist system increasingly says something different: enter the race, so as not to lose the very possibility of survival within the system.