Like almost all of the 1.5 million instructors at colleges and universities in the United States, I’ve been teaching online for weeks. I don’t much like it. I love leading classroom discussions and hate grading. Online teaching means none of the former and a whole lot of the latter.

Even so, it’s not so bad. Despite working in increasingly corporatized universities, where most instructors are adjuncts or work under contingent full-time contracts with no meaningful job security, people who teach for a living at the post-secondary level are among the most autonomous non-managerial employees in America. I have wide latitude to set my own schedule and decide many of the details about how I carry out my job on a day-to-day basis. If anything, that freedom is enhanced by staying at home.

The vast majority of US workers are a lot less lucky. As socialists have always pointed out, workplaces are sites of tyranny. Since most people have trouble finding the starter capital to build a business of their own, and the majority of small businesses quickly go under, the average person has no realistic choice but to go to work for someone else. As Karl Marx said, workers are “doubly free” — free to sell their labor to an employer, and free to starve if they decline to do so.