Political Memes

That "abstraction" is the alienation. I don't want to have like, a symmantical argument or anything. Like you say, surplus value appears to them in stocks, which is just a form of capital; but it also appears on profit and loss reports. They don't actually starve the poor, but the existence of the starving and destitute is a great motivation for working people to consent to their own exploitation. they don't actually build or drop the bombs -- but they invest in the companies that do, and profit when they drop, like you said about venture capital for example. Big corporate landlords look at their income and try and figure out how to increase profits year on year, but they never have to see how it affects peoples lives when they raise rents. Consumers don't see where or how the things they buy are made, it just appears in a retail space. Workers don't make an entire commodity like a craftsman might, they interact with a machine (owned by the capitalist) that mass produces some little spring or whatever that is integrated into the final commodity, and the capitalist has purchased the workers time to operate it, thus the workers are alienated from the product of their own labor.

So maybe you don't want to use the word alienation and you'd rather call it abstraction. Alienation is the word Marx used to describe it, abstraction is something different, so that's what I call it. But I think its the same concept.