I suspect that it is due to a trend that started in the 90s of people becoming grotesquely wealthy seemingly overnight through inventing tech. With much of that tech enabling people to share how grotesquely wealthy they are and make money feeding the masses desire to become grotesquely wealthy.
Like why are so many CEOs household names now? Growing up, the only reason I knew who Jack Welch’s name was because my dad worked for GE.
The issue isn’t that the rich are out of touch with reality. It’s that they collectively form a society unto themselves that potentially excludes the masses from obtaining wealth and services. Private schools. Gated communities. Concierge health care. Etc.
Of course, even if education were free, there will always be some subset of the population who is not smart enough or talented enough to complete advanced degrees and land six figure corporate jobs. So there is always the question of what standard of living should they have and who should provide it?
Generally speaking, people who feel as though they can’t get ahead under the current system nor or their futures are secure will tend to turn against that system. If you’re working for Amazon, having to piss in a bottle because you don’t have time to take a break, maybe you resent Bezos a little when he buys a yacht and you’re making $20 an hour. Wages aren’t even keeping up with inflation. The federal minimum wage was $2.10 in 1975 which was the equivalent of $12.43. The price of housing and education have outpaced inflation and a lot of people feel as though they’ll never own a home.
I’ve also noticed a lot of people are lumpers. When Occupy Wall Street was a thing, my friends who were part of it would always associate something they didn’t like with the 1%. We had a goose problem here in the Little Rock area, and one of the possible solutions was to allow hunthing to cull their numbers, and my friends objected because it was a “1% solution.” My friends on the far, far left tend to associate anything bad, racism, sexisms, homophobia, and pollution most notably with capitalism. As if those wouldn’t exist in any other economic system.
That sounds like magical thinking: if A is bad, and B is bad, then A and B must be connected. Or even: if C, who is bad, has properties A and B, then A and B are connected. On the left, capitalism itself is bad.
For what it’s worth, I wasn’t meaning general populist anti-rich, anti-oligarchic sentiment. That has been there forever.
I mean the specific messaging that capitalism is the root of our problems, billionaires are necessarily evil and not just suboptimal for our economy, and that “corporations” and CEOs are a huge problem. Its predecessor seems to have been Occupy Wall Street, which sort of came up out of nowhere itself.
What, to you, is the difference between that and general anti rich, anti oligarch sentiment? People get upset when capitalism (or any ism) creates extreme inequality and oligarchs, unless the state is powerful enough to suppress dissent.
It feels to me that today’s messaging is a difference in magnitude, corresponding to the increase of felt hardships, rather than a difference of kind.
As for Russia, undoubtedly they would try to seize any opportunity they can to sow dissent and unrest, whether that’s capitalism or Trump. But that usually requires legitimate preexisting discontent for them to amplify and enflame.
I would be very surprised if anti capitalist messaging is NOT at least partially Russian. I would also be very surprised if if it was majority Russian.
Also, disregarding foreign interference for just a moment, let’s look inward for a sec.
The US implementation of capitalism is quite unique, for better or worse. We are a developed economy without national healthcare, proportional representation, parental leave, sick leave, etc. We barely have any unions or coops. We have low taxes for the rich and for corporate entities. We are poorly educated when it comes to civics and history. We are more religious. We have a lot of guns. We have wide, porous borders and a lot of immigration of various skill levels. We also have freer speech than just about anywhere else, so people can complain loud and often.
All of those come together to create a society that is really quite favorable for business — capitalists — but not so good for the wage slave class. If you’re middle class or up, you can create quite a good life for yourself here as long you can play along and not mind the growing dystopias around you. But if you’re not, or once were but are no longer, well… you look around and see the uber-rich living without a care in the world, flaunting the law and raping kids with no repercussions whatsoever, with neither big party caring about anyone except the ultra-rich and their cronies… and you, struggling to make ends meet while things keep getting worse, and there’s nobody in government or business who cares about you in the least… why would you think anything but negatively of the billionaires as a class?
There’s so, so much money to go around, it’s all just concentrated in a tiny fraction of the population, and no matter how hard you work, you’ll never really be able to escape the crushing poverty. Civic duty is dead, “America” as a unified whole is dead, the American Dream is a myth… all while the rich keep getting orders of magnitude richer. Who else would you rather scapegoat? Nobody is “winning” in America except the rich. I don’t think we need Russia to tell us that isn’t an ideal way to have a stable, prosperous society…
It’s just a more extreme version of the anti-rich and anti-oligarch sentiment that you acknowledge has been there forever. The reason it’s become more extreme and more widespread is because for the past 10 years or so the oligarchs have been given free rein to do whatever they want by our elected representatives. Yes, obviously a lot of stuff went on before that, but it was under the table, hush hush deals that no one with any sense of decency would talk about in polite company. Back then, if someone was caught doing something wrong, they would hide evidence, claim they didn’t do it, defend themselves in court with slimy lawyers, etc. Now they just say “Yes, I did it, but so what. What are you going to do about it? You can’t do anything because I have all the power and you have none of it, hahaha.” Since around 2015 / 2016, it’s become perfectly legitimate to do all that stuff above board, with the out in the open approval of the watchdogs. That’s what is new, and that’s why the reaction is more extreme.
For example, do you remember Iran Contra? I was only a kid at the time, but I remember seeing televised hearings where Oliver North, John Poindexter, etc. were hauled in front of Congress and made to answer for their misdeeds. These days we get something like the Trump deal with Russia for diesel while throwing Ukraine under the bus (with Elon Musk throttling Starlink), and now the reaction from the authorities is “no big deal / business as usual / it’s their right to do so because they know better / etc.”. That’s the difference, and that’s why regular people are reacting differently.
Right. The reason the OP has noticed the anti-oligarch message being especially prominent over the past 10 or so years is because 10 or so years ago is when the oligarchs started pissing of the diving board.
ETA. At least that’s when the American oligarchs started doing so. I’m sure the timing is different in other countries.
I would start with Adam Smith’s observation that “The power which that possession [of great wealth]immediately and directly conveys to him, is the power of purchasing; a certain command over all the labour…in the market.” The command of “labour” is the command of people, and so the inequality of wealth created by the “free market,” or “capitalism,” is also an inequality of power. The wealth of the capitalist is not created by the capitalist, only appropriated by the capitalist from the work of many others, and so is undeserved. The belief in the meritocracy of capitalism is about as valid and the divine right of kings.
As the economist Bradford DeLong put it in The Atlantic, "There’s someone in Bangladesh who would almost surely be a better economics professor than I am and is now behind a water buffalo,” he told me. “The market economy gives me and my preferences 200 times the voice and weight of his. If that isn’t the biggest market failure of all, I don’t know what your definition of market failure could possibly be.”
And there’s some guy in Bangladesh running a billion dollar tech company. What’s the point?
I have no doubt that there are things our society can do to make things fairer and more equitable. By the same token I don’t imagine DeLong is going to quit his economics job to push a water buffalo.
People don’t follow facts. They follow narratives and apply anecdotal facts to support whatever narrative resonates with them.
Evil billionaire CEOs running evil corporations is a narrative that resonates with a lot of people. particularly if you are struggling to make ends meet. Plus some billionaires (and there are only like a total of 1000 in the US) like Musk, Zuckerberg, Trump and Bezos come across as such assholes and have such high profiles that they make perfect villains.
The reality that the SDMB reality is not universal. That Musk is an a-hole with fascist leanings who drove X.com (Twitter) into the ground is a true statement.
That Musk also created a trillion dollar business empire that includes electric cars, rockets, satellites, robots, tunnel machines, as well as X.com while employing 150,000 people is also true.
I agree that those things are true. The question is this. Is Musk, or someone like him, needed to make those things happen? Those of us who purchase goods or services from one of his business ventures are purchasing things of value created by those 150,000 employees, not by Musk himself. As such, why is Musk more important than those employees? If he isn’t, why do we treat him, and all other oligarchs, as if they are? The conclusion I come to is that Musk himself isn’t all that more important than those employees. Certainly not in the same way that a highly skilled technician with a rare skill (a neurosurgeon at a major academic center, an elite athlete playing for a major league team, etc.) is compared to the goods or services of value they create. Yet we as a society treat the capitalist as if they were contributing in the same way.
And if we had been asked, how many of those things Musk is alleged to have created would we have supported? If we had a chance to decide, hmm, we could have robots and rockets and satellites, OR we could have great medical and educational resources for everyone, what might we have decided? That one person can direct billions of dollars and control hundreds of thousands of people, in Bangladesh or anywhere, points to the real purpose of the “free market,” or capitalism: to funnel money upwards to the few. And that means that very many people live lives that are worse, often much worse, than they would be if resources and wealth were shared more equally. That, I submit for your consideration, is a bad thing.
Even if Musk created all that stuff (very debatable), it doesn’t mean he should have the wealth and power to impact national security based on his own whims. It shouldn’t be legal to be that powerful, and it doesn’t have to be.