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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[–] 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 21 hours ago* (last edited 21 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.