Pretty much every successful communist revolution didn't direct their fury towards just the richest of the richest
one of the five stars on the Chinese flag is for the petty boug, what type of ahistorical nonsense is this
this post was submitted on 12 Jun 2026
37 points (89.4% liked)
Chapotraphouse
14384 readers
479 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
The point of having a structural analysis is that the problems which manifest in your life are not really the fault of the individual people who surround you. Their bodily destruction will not help anything. Their actions can be organized around, struggled against. But they aren't the stars of the show. Your district manager is highly replaceable. If you were the district manager, you'd be on some other schmuck's list.
Politics isn't a question of "who should I hate?" it is a question of "what should we do?".
In the post revolutionary world, annoying uncles will persist. There's always gonna be people who rub you the wrong way. What we want is that shitty behavior is not rewarded with increased power.
Have you been involved in any local/IRL organizing? Generally these are in fact focused on local targets. I doubt your tenant union will be picking Elon Musk as their first opponent. I infer your frustrations about "the left" might be too much focus on Online Discourse. As Online is geographically dispersed, it is only possible to discuss globally known celebrities in any detail.
There is very little left organizing focused on revenge killings at any level, municipal or international.
There is very little left organizing focused on revenge killings at any level, municipal or international.
Socialists should focus neither on moral arguments nor about where the line between rich and not-rich is supposed to be. One is unproductive, the other only useful for reformist policy.
If we can understand the landlord-tenant relationship, we can recognize that violence doesn't end the relationship. Only ending the system of property ends the relationship. Once there is no more landlord and no more tenant, what necessity is there for violence?
How do you end the system of property without violence? Do you think the landlord will just give up their property? Is there any historical precedent for that?
Violence is necessary to gain and then maintain control of a proletarian state until the system of property is undone. Landlords that fight back will be subjected to violence, more often than not in retaliation by the directly affected members of the proletariat. The Soviets and the communist party of the USSR would often have to intervene in outbursts of revolutionary violence from the masses, ensuring it didn't go too far and directing it where it had the most impact. The terror following the Russian revolution was directly in response to the violence meted out against communists by the Tsarist forces, hanging landlords and the bourgeoisie responsible in the streets to make examples of them for killing communists.
almost no landlords are prepared or willing to engage in direct violence to evict occupants. they rely on no cost state violence to enforce their right to exclude.
if armed police are no longer getting paid by the broader community to watch over and protect movers throwing peoples' belongings onto the curb or escort them to the street, landlordism is over.
until that mechanism is gone, there will always be another landlord waiting behind the dead one.
I think this is a rosy view of what revolution looks like. Armed police won't simply all disarm on the eve of their pay drying up. There are committed fascists amongst their ranks that will fight back pay or no pay at the prospect of a proletarian revolution. To think we have no ideologically committed foes that might operate in opposition to their immediate material interests is to fall to mechanistic materialism.
The Chinese civil war was 30-40 years long with ebbs and flows in the strength of the communist aligned movement and the nationalist movement. Nothing just stopped because the red army took control of a given province.
i think this is a uncharitable interpretation of what i said. armed police don't need to disarm. the police force doesn't need to be demobilized. they would be formally declared no-longer-responsible for protecting landlordism, potentially with something as simple as a ban on evictions, but possibly a more explicit right to shelter-in-place.
that was effectively what happened under the proletarian revolution in china: those employed in public safety were no longer charged with securing and protecting the rights of landlords through evictions or court collections of rents. additionally, they would they no longer be charged protect landlords from the broader public if they tried to evict people themselves, using hired goons.
under capitalism, renters always outnumber landlords and they will never be able to afford enough goons to out number their tenants. the landlord's position is precarious, numerically. it is propped up by the extension of public safety to include their so-called "rights". once that "positive right" become illegitimate in the eyes of a community, landlordism would be crushed.
anything short of a broad, communal reorienting of tenant rights is just individualistic/stochastic adventurism and revenge killing that goes nowhere, because there will always be someone waiting behind the dead landlord.
i think this is a uncharitable interpretation of what i said. armed police don’t need to disarm. the police force doesn’t need to be demobilized. they would be formally declared no-longer-responsible for protecting landlordism, potentially with something as simple as a ban on evictions, but possibly a more explicit right to shelter-in-place.
I think that depends on which police you're talking about.
US police, which are armed with surplus military hardware and are reliable reactionaries, absolutely do need to be disarmed.
It’s easier to point out the injustice of a guy owning a fucking rocket ship while people starve than it is to point out the guy who has an average sized boat or something. Most people like their rich uncles.
In East Germany a critical view of psychology was developed that took material dialectics and historical materialism and centered them on the subjective reality of individuals. What arose from this critical rethinking of psychotherapy were three core concepts: “action possibility” (Handlungsmöglichkeit), “agency” (Handlungsfähigkeit, sometimes translated as “action potence”), and “subjective situation” (subjektive Befindlichkeit).
Now, I'm going to simply quote from this short peice from the Annual Review of Critical Psychology, entitled KRITISCHE PSYCHOLOGY AS A MORAL SCIENCE
I cannot summarize all the pertinent aspects of German Critical Psychology in the short space allotted here, but three concepts can be mentioned that illustrate its recognition of Gesellschaftlichkeit. These are “action possibility” (Handlungsmöglichkeit), “agency” (Handlungsfähigkeit, sometimes translated as “action potence”), and “subjective situation” (subjektive Befindlichkeit). All three are based on the recognition that human individuals do not confront the world directly, but as a structure of meanings which creates for us what may be called an “epistemic distance” between ourselves and objects. Objects do not act directly upon us, but rather present us with possibilities for action that can only be decided by the individual reflecting on a complex amalgam of cognitive, historical, and societal factors. In Holzkamp’s word:
The essential determinant of consciousness in its specifically human form is the emerging epistemic relation of the individual to world and self, materially based on the overall societal mediatedness of individual existential security, in which people are able to relate consciously to meaning structures as action possibilities, thus becoming free of the demands of immediate personal survival and able to understand the overarching connection between the existential and developmental problems of the individual and the overall societal process by which the means and conditions of providing for human life are created in a generalized way. (1983, p. 237)
Among the implications of this is that individuals come to relate to themselves as first-persons in societal relations with others, and subjectivity becomes seen as equivalent to intersubjectivity. This is important from the moral theoretical point of view, as it creates the morally necessary choice of relating to others as – to use Macmurray’s terms (1961) – instruments (means) or as persons (ends).
“Agency” (Handlungsfähigkeit) refers to the historically and societally determined degree of control that individuals have over their own conditions and possibilities for satisfying their needs. Clearly, there are circumstances under which such agency can be severely limited. This may or may not be obvious to the individuals affected. Those whom Marx called “wage slaves” in a capitalist economy have agency that is restricted, but they may accept such restriction as normal, thus remaining effectively unaware of their enslavement. Ideally, a society should be organized such that every individual has the possibility of realizing the potentials for satisfaction that are offered by the state of the society’s historical development. We all need to play a meaningful part in the control of the societal process (Holzkamp, 1983, p. 243), which brings us to the concept of “subjective situation” (subjektive Befindlichkeit). This is the individual’s personal awareness and assessment of his or her own possibilities and restrictions. As long as the wage slave is unaware of the restrictions that create wage-slavery, little is likely to be done about removing those restrictions. An important role of theory is to create that awareness.
I trust that I have said enough to show that we have here a psychological theory that is equipped with the kinds of concepts that readily mesh with moral theory and its concerns. The world in which we live is currently ruled by fear, destruction, and greed, that is, by anything but concern for the development and exercise of human possibilities and the development of individual awareness and agency. To realize the latter, radical change is needed. As Chris Hedges (2015) writes, such change (or “revolt” as he puts it) is a moral imperative. No psychological theory will bring this about, but one with the right concepts can be part of the necessary apparatus of change. German Critical Psychology meets that requirement; it is prepared for the “revolutionary moment.”
I say all that to mean, that on the scale of action potency, taking charge against the landlords In your local area is very likely to have a much higher degree of potency then trying to do something about Elon.
For the deeply alienated this framework feels very powerful. Taking stock of the degrees in which you have agency, finding where you have less agancy, coping with stress due to this lack of agancy through understanding why you have a lack of agancy, working towards changing those conditions to create more agancy for yourself and others.
At some point you will need to engage with others to struggle for that agency. We have little agency as individuals to control musk. But we have lots of agency as individuals in our jobs, schools, towns, and cities. When we hit our limits we can seek others who share our struggles so that we can lessen the load that lack of agency brings with it.
I hate my landlord, I hate my district manager, I hate my uncle who makes 250k a year sending emails
So, like, the top 2%?
If you live in the imperial core it's more like 10%
Not right now it wouldn't. The best we can do right now is slowly begin the association. Utilize the energy at the billionaires and drive it towards the millionaires.
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.
his class interests should be more in line with other wage workers
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 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.
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:
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).
Farm to Taber and Farming While Beige has some good YouTube content that gets good numbers focusing on American small farmer Kulaks, fake farmer influencer types, and practical problems with American agriculture among other things. Check them out. They get plenty of views, and they cover things like farm subsidies to wealthy farmers, influencers messing people up with diet anxiety, farmers dispensing advice when they clearly inherited their farm from when that shit was stolen from the Natives, and other such cracker nonsense.
I still wouldn't want to take my eye off the ball of the 1%, they fund the politicians and form the policy that literally keeps shit the same in the US. There's no way to ignore that.
I agree with you but I think it happens at the tail end of organising. Not the front end.
The front end of building revolution is building the vanguard, building the educated people of the working class and the skillsets of those who will organise the working class.
The tail end of revolutionary organising is the working class unleashing their anger on any enemies they can get their hands on, and this culminates in attacking those close by.
At the front end the focus is on the big things because it's the big picture. But once the vanguard is built up I agree with you, a turn away from that big picture and onto the various things that make the working class furious in their day to day lives is more likely to motivate them out and into a fight.