But honestly, I feel a more base, emotionally driving hatred towards the more immediate capitalists in my life. I hate my landlord, I hate my district manager, I hate my uncle who makes 250k a year sending emails. These are more the people I want to rip out of their homes kicking and screaming to the guillotines.

Pretty much every successful communist revolution didn't direct their fury towards just the richest of the richest, they recognized there were people down the hierarchy who were still exploiters who deserved the wrath of the proletariat. Calling for the liquidation of American Kulaks would do more for socialism in America than trying to get people to strike against Bezos.

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[–] ConcreteHalloween@hexbear.net 6 points 1 day ago (2 children)

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.

[–] ALoafOfBread@lemmy.ml 17 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (1 children)

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.

[–] zedcell@lemmygrad.ml 6 points 1 day ago (1 children)

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.

[–] ALoafOfBread@lemmy.ml 5 points 22 hours ago* (last edited 22 hours ago)

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.

[–] hellinkilla@hexbear.net 12 points 1 day ago

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:

The percentage owning stock is highest among adults in households earning $100,000 or more (87%), college graduates (84%) and married adults (77%). By contrast, the rate is 49% among unmarried adults, 42% among those with a high school education or less, and 28% among those in households earning less than $50,000.

Stock ownership also varies significantly by race/ethnicity, with 70% of White adults owning stock, compared with 53% of Black adults and 38% of Hispanic adults.

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).