> There are a lot more people who don't own capital than there are people who do
This attitude explains, at least in part, why they live in a place with the shoddy rule of law and a deficiency of capital. (The track record of revolutions which violently re-allocate property is terrible, mostly for the people who originally lacked capital, moreso in the last century.)
It always amazes me how ignorant most of the so called "capitalists" (who generally control little to no actual capital) are. Thanks for showing me at least someone paid attention in economics (or maybe history) class.
Precisely this message. The issue is that there is a strong incentive for capitalists to behave in a certain way due to their material conditions, capital being truly international requires those with international capital interests. The capitalists (or non-capitalists for that matter) do not see Russian, American, Japanese etc., they see a representative of a certain commodity or class of commodities. This is commodity fetishism, in which money acquires a supernatural magical quality within the circuit of capital.
The capital that most Americans "own" is managed by a very small class of capital managers at elite financial institutions. The point is, who controls the levers of power, and whose interest are they operating them in? The distinction you're making isn't much more than pedantry.
It should be considered remarkable that Marx's observations need only minor adaptations after one hundred fifty fucking years.
If you don't bother to mention how they attained the capital, you could be describing feudalism as well!
Realize the most important aspect of capitalism is the ability to accumulate capital, to a fundamentally infinite end because any limits will be overturned by the controllers of the capital.
Capital is not underappreciated - it is hidden by owners. Because their power and wealth comes from control of a scarce, hidden resource. If everyone had access to capital, nobody would be “on top”, and that’s unacceptable to the owning classes.
I think it's something else. After all, people with large amounts of capital having attention and power is not new; the world's dominant economic and political system has been grounded in an ideology of capital for at least half a century, and in the Anglo world far longer.
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