"When education isn't liberating, the dream of the oppressed is to become the oppressor." as it was eloquently posited by Paulo Freire.
This is level -1 of class consciousness and that's exactly how the top 0.x% keeps us down.
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.
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.
"Your passive income is enough to live"
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.
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.
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.
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...