this post was submitted on 14 Jul 2024
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It is not about being rich or super rich. It is about climbing the hierarchy being an exploitative act in itself. If you dream of creating your own business you will - you have to, basically by default - do this by exploiting other people on the way up. Your success and you becoming "mildly rich" is always built on the backs of others.
Edit: just to be clear, I am fully aware that in the greater scheme of things, a person earning 30k or even 300k is not the enemy of someone earning 25k. Obviously we need to get rid of pervertedly excessive wealth. Having 300k-30k-25k hating on each other distracts from the bigger problem.
But at the end of the day, and I say this with as little moral judgement as possible, as soon as one person controls another one's salary and undercuts it for their own profit, we are in a system in which success is achieved via exploitation. And this is the case in 99.9% of work environments.
Not everyone will become and entrepreneur. Some people will always work for others. People need to put down Das Kapital and read a history book
If you read Das Kapital you'd understand why you just said nonsense that wasn't really relevant to it
You can read both Capital and history books. You should do both.
There were times when individuals did not work for someone higher than them on a pecking order, though that model is physically not possible in an industrial society, I think.
That being said, hierarchies can be made voluntary rather than enforced by threat of violence, and I'd argue that requiring all servitude to be uncoerced would lead to a better future.
The words "hierarchy, coercion, and voluntary" are vague. What an Anarchist considers hierarchy, coercion, and voluntary may not be what a Marxist sees those as.
Ultimately, it is important to recognize that democratizing production and the state is a vast improvement on present Capitalism, and can better serve the interests of the workers.
Hierarchy, being a chain of command in which an individual above, privvy to more information, gives you instructions to follow. This includes military organizations, but is just as applicable to a doctor-patient relationship.
Coercion, meaning the threat of retaliation, through physical force, revoking of freedoms or privileges, or denial of resources.
Voluntary, meaning of one's own means, with no coercion or realization of coercion, with the clear option to opt out being present whenever possible.
This does not leave things in question, I believe. Currently, we all operate within hierarchies at work with explicit threats of destitution being held over our heads, through the denial of currency. Meanwhile, there is no coercion from your physician despite it still being hierarchical in nature, because the hierarchy is entirely based on trust and is voluntary.