By your logic, the gap between the median American and Elon Musk is far larger than the gap between Stephen Duncan, the richest slaver in the South,, and one of his slaves, since he was only worth 3.5 million.
I think there’s a stronger argument that is things don’t change, the oligarchs might be in trouble.
People like Musk and Trump are not holding their positions because of any individual abilities they possess. They hold their positions because they are part of a large system.
If people decide that dollars are no longer a worthwhile asset then owning a billion dollars is meaningless. If people decide that democracy no longer produces legitimate results, then holding an political office no longer matters. If people decide that the rule of law is no longer in effect, then society will be ruled by whoever uses the most force.
So people like Musk and Trump need to live in a society where the majority of people believe in things like dollars and democracy and laws. Yet perversely, people like Musk and Trump are constantly undermining those beliefs.
Even in our society, Elon Musk gains more power from owning (and influencing the conversation on) Twitter than from having billions of dollars. Obviously he needed an enormous sum of money to buy Twitter, but the point is that simply having enormous sums of money isn’t enough; Jeff Bezos is also rich, but he couldn’t buy Twitter from Elon unless Elon is willing to give it up - and that would remain true if Jeffrey was a gazillionaire rather than a billionaire.
And even with billions of dollars, even with multiple times the amount of money Elon bought Twitter for, you can’t necessarily create a platform that matches Twitter. Just ask Mark Zuckerberg.
I feel this is missing the bigger point. The issue isn’t whether Elon Musk or Jeff Bezos or Mark Zuckerberg is the individual holding a vastly disproportionate amount of power. The issue is whether it’s a good for society for any individual to hold that vastly disproportionate amount of power.
They do so confident in the belief that the amount of undermining they do is insufficient to actually matter. And meanwhile the gold they extract is sooo worth it.
The proverb of the goose and golden eggs applies. Yet nobody knows just how inexhaustible the goose is until it teeters once then keels over dead.
They are acutely aware of the finitude of their own lives, while cognizant that new suckers are born every minute, each to grow into a young adult with a stake in the status quo. Albeit along with some measure of discontent.
The golden goose proverb would be a lot more real-world applicable if the story also had the goose lay an egg every couple of months that produced a fresh young gosling that also produced golden eggs even as the parent goose’s laying days are çoming to an end.
The wave of popular approval given to Luigi Mangione is a sign that the goose might be sicker than they realize.
Maybe. That sounds a lot like a nihilist form of slacktivism to me. Talk is cheap on tiktok or instagram or wherever.
I have this idea (I didn’t make it up, but I’ve long forgotten where I heard it) that people don’t really appreciate the role of the top 10%. These are the senior managers and directors, low-level/small company executives who are given substantial wealth by the 1% (again, really, probably the 0.5%) and are essentially the task masters that keep everyone else in line. Everyone knows at least a few of these people, they’re the ones who can directly hire and fire you, they’re reasonably approachable. They’re probably a significant portion of the SDMB. This isn’t to say it’s an explicit conspiracy to subjugate, more of an implicit one.
I find this idea compelling.
America is one of the least socioeconomically mobile of the industrialized nations. And comparing it to feudalism is just another example of how America’s defenders try to justify how awful it is by comparing to to the worst hellhole that can be found.
I’ve often said that the measure of political (de-)merit for lefties is how much less than perfect we are, while the measure of political merit for righties is how much better than North Korea we are.
The same argument can be made in the economic realm.
Huh? Not that it’s really crucial to this argument, but Facebook has five times as many users as X, not even counting the Facebook-adjacent sites like WhatsApp and Instagram. Seems like a better conclusion would have been “Just ask Donald Trump”.
Didn’t we just do this a few days ago?
Well, yes. But we started because I wanted to better understand what was meant by “Late Stage Capitalism” and whether it could really be said that we are there. That was answered early on, and so now we’re just beating dead horses. But I don’t mind.
Yeah, exactly:
Except that the people raising the comparison are often America’s detractors, because they are so ignorant of actual oppression that they actually think they have it worse than feudal peasants.
Facebook has more users (and probably makes more money) than Twitter. But Twitter drives political discourse to a much greater degree.
Zuckerberg is now trying to lift restrictions on political speech on Facebook in the hopes of getting in on that action, but it remains to be seen whether you can catch lightning in a bottle on purpose like that.
And I didn’t mention Trump because he doesn’t have the kind of money Elon dropped on Twitter.
I concede that point. However, I never said I was comparing America to other existing industrialized nations.
We can argue on how bad feudalism was. But, it wasn’t some isolated hellhole. It was the norm for at least (I would argue more) one continent for several centuries at least.
Luke 12:48 “from those whom much is given, much is expected.”
Although, now we can only expect the worst.
Japan and China were also pretty feudal, India was feudal, the Mongols were nomadic but in many ways their system resembled Feudalism (especially once they expanded)…
I have a lot of peers who use the phrase ‘late stage capitalism’ as a sloppy way of saying ‘I’m not necessarily trying to criticize capitalism as a whole, but what we’ve got now isn’t sustainable and is turning the world into a cyberpunk hellscape.’
I have no idea what the term means in a Marxist context. Like most Americans (including, probably, a lot of those who call themselves socialist or communist), I’ve never studied Marxism. Amongst the people I know, the qualifier ‘late-stage’ both conveys the idea that we’re permanently destroying things, as a cancer does, and that it may not be inherent in capitalism as a whole. So it’s meant as a criticism within capitalism, while being agnostic on whether capitalism itself is the problem, or whether it’s just a particularly nasty strain.
I hope that helps give some insight on the usage.