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iso1631

Part of divide and conquer from the owning class

There's three types of people

1) You rely on a paycheck to live

2) Your passive income is enough to live

3) You are so wealthy you can influence the world

Someone working for a 40k a year payslip, or even a 200k a year payslip, is likely in group 1. Someone with 5 million net worth is comfortably in group 2 - even at 3% in a savings account gives them an income way above people earning from labor. Both of those groups are so divorced from those whose wealth increases 5 million a year, or 5 million a month that they're basically the same.

At some point it ceases to be about money and being able to afford the things you want, and becomes power to control others.

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The person making $40k/yr and the person making $200k/yr likely have irreconcilable differences of opinion and are equally divorced from each other as they are some billionaire.

Regardless of ideology their material interests are much closer to each-other than they are to genuine rentiers.

No they are not. The $40k guy wants the material plenty the $200k guy has. The $200k guy wants to scheme up some way to not have his position threatened by the $40k guy while simultaneously trying to become a "genuine rentier" the combined incentives of which results in a hell of a lot of punching down (usually with the government or some other obfuscating intermediary in the middle).

> The $40k guy wants the material plenty the $200k guy has.

This is level -1 of class consciousness and that's exactly how the top 0.x% keeps us down.

Class consciousness is an interesting term. Not too long ago, people were trying to figure out what it would mean in practice to build a society based on that. It turned out that the answer was in class interests. In particular, whether it would be in someone's interests to support communist revolution and the subsequent abolition of private property.

The eventual conclusion was that the interests of the upper middle class did not align with those of the working class. Anyone with substantial non-labor income, such as a small business owner with permanent employees or a professional with enough wealth to have a rental property or other investments of similar value, would not want to have their wealth taken away. That made them class enemies of the working class.

It can be instructive to read what happened to kulaks (wealthy independent peasants) in the early USSR.

Maybe I'm too naive but I can imagine a whole bunch of scenarios between the current capitalismmaxxing and "ThE GuLAgS".

You don't have to be marxists or revolutionist to notice that you're getting the short end and that a smaller and smaller part of the population is profiting more and more. Wealth inequalities weren't anywhere as bad between the 1930s and 1990s for example, it was still capitalism, still largely the same societal organization, etc.

We're asking that we perhaps should consider doing something about the 0.1%... and people like you are misrepresenting it as "they want to literally kill anyone owning anything". Nobody gives a shit about the local baker, farmer or ice cream shop.

There is a middle ground, but class consciousness does not lie that way. Once you start thinking in terms of class interests, the natural conclusions are unpleasant.

That would be group 2, not group 1

"Your passive income is enough to live"

The propaganda of the communist revolution was just a mirage.

The communists confiscated everything of value from the majority of the population and in theory all that became "common property of all the people".

In reality, every valuable property was controlled by a small class of privileged people, who even if they were not the owners on paper, in reality they used and benefited from those properties exactly like or even more than "capitalist" millionaires and billionaires. All the communist revolutions just replaced a few privileged people with other few privileged people and the majority of the people typically became even poorer after the revolution, though frequently some minorities received some advantages after the revolutions, because those in power needed faithful people in some lower jobs, to be able to control the majority.

The only difference between the "capitalist" oligarchs and the "communist" oligarchs is that for the former the amount of money recorded in their bank accounts is important for their power, while for the latter money is of little importance but what is important is their network of allies with which they are connected by family relationships, complete obedience when subordinates, bribes or barter of various favors.

The first decade after the Russian Revolution was characterized by a power struggle and search for direction in the communist party. First there was "war communism" with forced socialization and central control. Towards the end of the civil war, there was a switch to a form of market socialism, for both ideological and pragmatic reasons. Many people even got wealthy during that time. Then Lenin died and Stalin started consolidating his power. The first five-year plan marked the beginning of the kind of communism we now know.

During the civil war, communists saw kulaks as enemies, as their loyalties were at best unclear. And because they were convenient scapegoats. Most Russians were peasants, and kulaks were the neighbors who were better off than you. When things were bad, you could blame kulaks for your misery, because they had more than you.

Later kulaks were tolerated as a necessary evil in market socialism. Then Stalin started his "dekulakization" campaign. Millions of kulaks were deported (mostly to Siberia and Kazakhstan), which was a major contributing factor to the famine in the early 1930s. And when Stalin's purges started, most of the victims were from former kulak families.

Right but compared to a billionaire the difference between the two workers is a rounding error, a distinction with an insignificant difference. You're claiming the pecking order of hens matters anything to the fox outside the henhouse.

A million seconds is a couple of weeks, a billion seconds three decades. Comparing a worker at any salary to that singular concentration of socioeconomic power just doesn't make any sense to me, the key distinction of the rentier is that he can avoid the domination non-rentiers must suffer almost by definition when rentiers exist - they are subject to the arbitrary whim of someone who cannot be voted out of power through democratic efforts. In my view liberty is the freedom from domination, and any private individual with the power to dominate in their own right is inherently hazardous to a democratic society. It is in the interests of both workers that the billionaire is prevented from gaining a position of political influence.

That's a great example of magnitude I hadn't heard before.

Do you really think so? A few years ago I was making ~40k euro a year, now making ~80k a year and my life and opinions are essentially identical, other than the fact I save slightly more and treat myself to a few more things. I would assume 180k euro (200k usd) would net me a slightly higher quality of life and an earlier retirement but otherwise not much else. Amongst my friend group incomes vary from around 12k (dole) to about 150k and apart from some people having less money for leisure (resolved usually by having a night in as opposed to a night out) it doesn't really lead to any tension.

Is this some cultural aspect I'm missing here? Eg lower social cohesion between income levels in the US?

Or maybe it's just a life stage thing. I'm still in my 20s, and none of my friends or myself have children. As time passes and savings mount and people start having families maybe the problems emerge...

Do both rely on a salary and being employed to have access to their material needs? If so, they're both from the same class, and being pitted against each other despite that is a mean for controlling both.

"When education isn't liberating, the dream of the oppressed is to become the oppressor." as it was eloquently posited by Paulo Freire.

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