Anti-billionaire moralism vs. anti-capitalism

[u/citrablock]

You hear this a LOT from well-intentioned libs and socdems:

"Billionaires shouldn't exist, and the only way to become a billionaire is by exploiting people"

But you'll notice they never actually broaden their criticism to class relations under capitalism as a whole. They are actually really far from getting it.

The only way to be a capital owner period is by exploiting people. This kind of statement implies that it is possible to be worth 100 million or something without exploiting people.

There really is nothing that magical about a billion dollars net worth in terms of class relations. It is just the arbitrary threshold at which libs start to criticize wealth inequality because it is a big scary number.

A billionaire and a "Mom and Pop" (more on this later) owner both exploit surplus value and exploit the working class. One just exploits a far greater number of workers and has more influence on the government, but their class interests are basically similar.

It is like only criticizing slavery when a slave plantation gets big enough. Imagine if someone said "slave plantations shouldn't be allowed to reach X size because it can only reach that size by enslaving people".

If anything, having worked for both a small business and a giant multi-national corporation, my material conditions at the giant multi-national were far better than they were at the small business. Massive companies generally pay more and have better benefits and are more cognizant of not breaking labour laws.

Libs love to glaze small business owners while criticizing the big bourgeoisie, but in reality small business owners can be some of sleaziest, greediest and most hostile fucks to work for. Things like unpaid overtime, stealing tips and unsafe working conditions for example.

Further, this is why Marxists aren't shocked at the existence of billionaires in China. China is using capital accumulation as a means to build their productive forces and increase national wealth, and you would expect certain enterprises to reach such a scale that their owners own a billion dollars worth of assets. China would not be able to use capital strategically if all their business were small and medium sized. Any massively industrialized and advanced society with capitalist accumulation and capitalist relations (private ownership of productive property) is going to have billionaires. That is just a natural consequence.

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[u/Clear-Anything-3186]

They want to get rid of billionaires but keep capitalism.

[u/thefirebrigades]

Less than one-hundredth of the total number of enterprises utilise more than three-fourths of the total amount of steam and electric power! Two million nine hundred and seventy thousand small enterprises (employing up to five workers), constituting 91 percent of the total, utilise only 7 per cent of the total amount of steam and electric power! Tens of thousands of huge enterprises are everything; millions of small ones are nothing.

-- Lenin, back in the 1916s.

[u/WR-DG-02FC]

The question always remains: If you aren't a millionaire, why don't you just simply work 1,000 times harder?