this post was submitted on 12 Jun 2026
38 points (89.6% liked)
Chapotraphouse
14384 readers
565 users here now
Banned? DM Wmill to appeal.
No anti-nautilism posts. See: Eco-fascism Primer
Slop posts go in c/slop. Don't post low-hanging fruit here.
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
It just isn't a winning strategy. That's why the capitalist class pits the large, non-capitalist "middle class" against lower classes. It is good for the capitalists if they have a bunch of people taking their side against their own best interests.
In reality, all wage workers and even lower tier petty bourgeoisie like some small-time landlord making 10k/yr off a couple houses while working a real job have much more in common re: their interests than the middle class has with the capitalist class (1%).
Like your uncle who sends emails and makes 250k. If he is still a wage worker (and not a capitalist), albeit a rich one, his class interests should be more in line with other wage workers. And wage workers don't really have the power to exploit others in a capitalistic sense. But, chances are, he sees himself as being much richer than he is and probably considers himself to be in the same league with the same class interests as the 1% when that is not the case.
Not to mention, these "rich" wage workers are often just as precarious as much poorer wage workers. Their income is huge, but they often mismanage their money so severely that they are still 1 paycheck away from losing everything, as stupid as that sounds. Obviously that is not always the case, and it is basically their fault, and their lives are still infinitely comfortable than the very poor, but it is much more common than you might expect - largely because their labor is still exploited, they suffer from the same miseducation and propaganda everyone else is subjected to, etc.
And the 1% is responsible for most of the legislation that allows them to legally extract more wealth from those below them and exploit the populace via essentially indirectly extracting tax revenue via the government they bought, and the massive media force shaping public opinion in ways that favor them (bezos buying wapo as an example).
And it's just a numbers game. The top 1% own 43% of the wealth, and there are 100x fewer of them than of us. It just makes more sense to build class consciousness among even rich wage workers than it does to give them more reason to side with the capitalists.
A worker who makes $250k is making 3 times the average (not median!) earnings in America, and closer to 20 times the average worldwide.
This really illustrates what OP is saying. You simply can't have this without a certain level of income inequality.
Sure, it's not really conclusive whether or not targeting the wealthiest 5% is a useful starting strategy. But they will eventually be an opponent to deal with.
No they aren't lmao. Nobody is making 250k sending emails in a just society.
Well, I agree. But we don't live in a just society. We live in a shitty and unequitable capitalist hellscape.
But also, I do not think it is the monetary value that is the problem. I think it is the inequity and the labor exploitation/relationship to the MoP that is the problem.
They're labor aristocrats. Their relationship to the means of production is that keeping things the way they are gives them a better quality of life than a just society would. I don't think it's necessarily worth people's time trying to organize labor aristocrats just for the heck of it.
There are already unions for various labor aristocratic jobs. They aren't revolutionary or progressive. They aren't advancing socialism or whatever.
Here's SPEEA, a "professional aerospace union": https://speea.org/
Does it seem like it could be part of a revolutionary movement?
And most people don't really care whether they're technically part of the 1% or whatever. People know how their bread gets buttered and want to keep their quality of life.
I assure you nobody actually cares about some technical relationship to the means of production. I don't care about this. I care about my quality of life. It is almost entirely the monetary value that people care about.
No this is bullshit. If you live in a first world nation and make over 100k you already have assets in the speculative market that makes you more allied with capital than labor.
And plenty of people who make less than that are also invested - which they need to be if they ever want a chance of retiring or weathering bad financial times in the volatile capitalist system they are trapped in. Are they not also allied with capital then?
It's about the relationship to the means of production. That's what Marx said, that's what theory supports, and I think that's right.
I don't think that the government making it so the only way you can survive to old age is to have money in speculative financial assets (by constantly threatening to destroy social security, lowering interest rates to nothing so businesses can borrow for essentially free and making your bonds worthless, etc) means that everyone with a 401k or IRA a capitalist.
Marx didn't live when huge numbers of workers in the imperial core were invested in the market either actively with their excess savings or passively in their pension. You cannot "appeal to Marx" for something that did not exist within his time. What did exist within his time were discussions between him and Engels about the frustrating lack of revolutionary activity within certain strata of the English working class, which clearly does have parallels to today's situation. Identifying that strata (I.e. the labour aristocracy) is an important task for contemporary Marxists.
That's fair. But it also wasn't possible in Marx's time for someone to own an extremely small part of a capitalist enterprise. Like no one could own 0.000000001% of a factory. So the possible relationships to the MoP have expanded.
But still, I'd argue that especially when the alternative is not having money to survive old age, this sort of extremely small "ownership" with no decisionmaking or exploitive power is not what Marx meant by Capitalist (because he couldn't have meant that since it didn't exist)
And valid point about the modern labor aristocracy. You're correct of course.
TBH I am surprised by how often I see people posting on hexbear.net talking about "investing" etc as a neutral thing to do. Advice is shared about what kind of financial asset to buy into. It's strange to me that it would be normalized. But it is reflective of reality.
What Percentage of Americans Own Stock? Answer is about 60% overall, here is some details:
Even more people are implicated if you consider indirect ownership, like having a pension plan.
It is true that this confuses matters of class interests somewhat, which is part of the point. It is pitting the interests of the "invested" individual on the enhanced exploitation of other workers. that's the story of living in the core.
I don't think that owning 1 single share in 1 corporation makes you basically a robber baron. For one thing, most people who hold investments like this never exercise any decision making power at all; they aren't going to shareholder meetings or anything. A lot of people don't even have direct knowledge or participation in the details of what investments are made, they put their money somewhere and professionals take care of it. But those professionals are expected to extract some amount of fiscal benefit, and there is no way to do that without someone else losing. "If you see one man with a dollar he didn't work for, that means another man worked for a dollar he didn't get." But it does give the "shareholders" a sense of ownership over Capital, and turn their attentions and sense of well being from the collective, even though it is false (overall).