this post was submitted on 02 Jan 2025
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For instance I know some lawyers and insurance CEOs who built the company themselves and run an ethical business model but because of innovation have made a ton of money. One lawyer has made a name for himself only defending those who have been hurt my big corporations and their life is ruined. The other made an insurance model that helps these hurt people invest their court winnings into annuities to guarantee they’re financially taken care of for life. These are not billionaires but both companies have won for their clients/work with hundreds of millions if not billions.

How can one clearly define someone like Musk or Bezos as bourgeois whereas these hard working individuals who came from nothing and build a huge business actually from nothing and help people?

Hoping for a non-black and white answer. My local MLM group declares everyone evil who isn’t their exact ideology. It doesn’t make sense to apply this thinking when someone whose become rich through helping people isn’t the same as someone whose has taken advantage of people for generations.

Edit: getting downvoted to hell when I am asking a question sure isn't welcoming.

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[–] [email protected] 14 points 4 days ago (1 children)

You don't, the accumulation of wealth is a zero-sum game. There's no way to "win" that doesn't involve others losing.

Plus, nobody gets rich by honest labor. Your ethical friends are almost as far from actual riches as the rest of us. Even I "Work with hundreds of millions if not billions" and my paycheck barely covers the bills every month.

What you're asking for is a demarcation between the bourgeois and the petite-bourgeois, but the difference is only one of scale. Small business owners enrich themselves with the profits their employees produce, while Bezos and Musk have a thousand times more employees to exploit.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 4 days ago (1 children)

The two people I describe do most of the work. The lawyer is the one who defends all of the cases and the insurance one creates all the formulas. They’re not extracting anything. Both are helping the poor, the only loser is the corpos.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 4 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago) (1 children)

Hence why your friends aren't "rich". They might be a lot better off than the average person who works for a living, but it sounds like they don't exploit enough people to quit working and live off other people's labor in perpetuity.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 4 days ago
[–] [email protected] 10 points 4 days ago (2 children)

It sounds like the people you've used as an example certainly try to do good.

I think an issue here is that "ethical" and "unethical" as value judgements operate on many different levels and just because someone does something considered one or the other, it doesn't necessarily mean they are wholly bad or good.

Providing services aimed at helping poor and marginalized people? I'd argue that's ethical.

Accumulating wealth? I'd argue that's unethical, whether it's by doing something helpful or harmful: as another commenter pointed out, it's a zero-sum game and keeping more for yourself means there is less for others.

I don't think the people you described are bad people; they're doing something philanthropic within an unethical system.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 4 days ago (1 children)

I think an issue here is that “ethical” and “unethical” as value judgements operate on many different levels and just because someone does something considered one or the other, it doesn’t necessarily mean they are wholly bad or good.

This is a fair point I considered. That's why I wondered how to define because it can't be on an individual basis.

Could you expand upon how getting paid a high salary is unethical? Does giving a lot to charity make it better?

[–] [email protected] 8 points 4 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago) (1 children)

A high salary isn't unethical on it's own, just like how a small salary isn't necessarily ethical when it is acquired by unethical means. However, high yet ethical salaries are vanishingly rare because the structure of our economy provides very few opportunities for an individual to create that much value, while the opportunities for extracting that much value from masses of working people abound.

Capital imposes an iron law of economics: Profit = Income - Expenses. Labor costs are an expense, therefore profits can only be achieved when the workers aren't fully compensated for the value they've created for the company. This generally breaks down two ways, the actual workers who create value and are massively underpaid for it, and the generously-salaried managers who extract that value to finance the shareholders' dividends.

Every dollar paid to someone who owns a share of a business is a dollar stolen from someone who works there.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 4 days ago (1 children)

So based on what you just said, profit would/should essentially not exist. It should be expenses going towards all workers fairly and the rest put back into the company and means?

[–] [email protected] 8 points 4 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago) (1 children)

Ideally, yeah.

There's no way to make profits that doesn't exploit the very people who make them possible, and therefore no moral way for shareholders to exist as an economic class. Ownership and it's demand for perpetual dividends on finite investments can't ever be anything other than a machine for extracting value from workers.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 4 days ago (1 children)

Thanks! That makes a lot of sense. So if one wanted to expand and make more one would thus have to divide that amongst more workers. Any expanse, salary, and expense would all be decided and taken upon together.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 4 days ago (1 children)

Indeed!

It's not perfect, but worker-ownership is as close as we get to ethical forms of business organization.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 4 days ago (1 children)

Thanks for taking the time to explain :)

[–] [email protected] 2 points 4 days ago (1 children)

Of course! Online discourse is my favorite way to procrastinate at work. XD

[–] [email protected] 2 points 4 days ago

Same! I’m doing it as I watch my infant eat remotes lol

[–] [email protected] 2 points 4 days ago

Thanks for that well written response. That is very helpful!

[–] [email protected] 5 points 3 days ago

Tldr: basically there are owners and workers. (this is of course leaving out all of the people who can't or don't work or work outside of wage labor but that is not what we are focusing on right now). In an ideal world there would not be people who "profit" off of the labor of others.

That is not to say people cannot work together make each other's lives better and enrich each other, but it wouldn't be in a owner/worker relationship, it would be in a co-worker/community relationship. If your friends own a business and make the lion's share of the profit while employees who enable them to do their work only get a small share of the value created by their labor, they may be trying to help but they are still exploiting their employees for profit. A truly equitable company would need to have all workers treated equitably and no profit be generated for shareholders. This is 100% possible but it's definitely not the standard model people are taught.

I believe what people mean when they say there is no such thing as a good billionaire is, it is impossible to create that much personal wealth without exploiting others and, furthermore, amassing that large an amount of extracted wealth is inherently harmful to the exploited workers on such a level as to be undeniably evil. You cannot gain that much wealth without explicitly and intentionally stealing from those who created it. Even people who work hard, who could be argued are the only reason that wealth is generated, (thinking of Taylor Swift here) if they were truly good people they would see the profits that are being made by the Enterprise that they spearhead and know that it would be impossible without the people who work with them and support them to create that wealth and that it should be distributed as equally as possible between all involved. If they are keeping such a large portion that they become a billionaire, they are inherently evil, regardless of if that wealth could have been created without them.

I suppose there could be some argument for a theoretical company that was so profitable that all employees involved in creating the value reached billionaire status, but I have a hard time imagining any business that could create that amount of wealth without their business being exploitative in some way, even if all parties involved in that business directly are paid equally. An example of this might be a investment brokerage. People who invest in the stock market and get rich doing so are not employers directly but they are indirectly, through the stock market, siphoning the value of exploited workers from corporate profits.

This topic is of course a ethical and idealistic one. Expecting everyday people who have invested in the stock market through their 401k to not use the wealth that they receive from those investments to live comfortable lives In their retirement would be ridiculous in our current system. In an ideal world that wouldn't be necessary, people would be guaranteed food, housing, and healthcare for the entirety of their old age and retirement without requiring the explicit exploitation of wage labor, but there must be a division in our consciousness between what an ideal person in an ideal world would do and what an an evil person in our current world does and that it is the gray in between those two extremes that makes up the vast majority of the current population.

One last point to consider is that developing class consciousness is something that needs to be taught and learned and understood and that the current societal expectations and norms that we have instilled in us from a very young age need to be broken down internally before people are able to recognize how much harm the current system does. I guarantee that the people who profit the most off of their employees believe wholeheartedly that they are doing good by creating jobs for people who otherwise would have had nothing without the company that has been provided by their ownership. Getting people who benefit the most from our current system to see how harmful their "good fortune" is to others will be a daunting and thankless task and will take decades.

[–] jwiggler 7 points 4 days ago (1 children)

I think you should start out reading some anarchist theory, like The Conquest of Bread by Kropotkin, rather than try to use it to label people evil or good.

It's not a tool to judge people's goodness or badness, even if it can be used as a guide to judge the relations between two people.

Your friends accumulation of wealth probably doesn't jive with anarchist principles for a wide variety of reasons, even if they don't exploit labor. That doesn't mean they're evil people. And just because someone exploits labor, doesn't mean they are necessarily evil.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 4 days ago

Thanks for the recommendations and taking my question seriously :)

[–] merde 5 points 4 days ago (2 children)

How can one clearly define someone like Musk or Bezos as bourgeois whereas these hard working individuals who came from nothing and build a huge business actually from nothing and help people?

musk and bezos are not "bourgeois"! Oligarchs maybe?

When bourgeoisie ruled the world, they would only in their wildest dreams could make believe that one day so much capital would concentrate in the hands of one or two greedy assholes. Musk is a historical abomination that needs a class of his own. (he would probably take this as a compliment!

[–] [email protected] 5 points 4 days ago (1 children)

musk and bezos are not “bourgeois”! Oligarchs maybe?

They are bourgeois and they are oligarchs. They own of the means of production and extract profits from the labor of others, without needing to labor themselves, which is what it means to be haute bourgeois.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Class_consciousness

Marxists categorize classes based on their relation to the means of production, especially on whether or not members of the class own capital.

[–] merde -4 points 4 days ago (1 children)

see the "Criticism" in the page you linked

there's no "haute bourgeois". The class you're refering to, the bourgeois, if it still exists, is milked by these monstrosities as much as the proletariat or the precariat.

Marxism is not enough. The world that gave way to his interpretation is no longer here.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 4 days ago

See them yourself. Garbage criticisms from libertarian cranks von Mises and Rothbard 🙄

[–] [email protected] 2 points 4 days ago

great point!

[–] [email protected] 0 points 3 days ago (1 children)

Not so useful to separate them, better not enable the evil ones in the first place.

Laws should reward only the ethical value making, not the money hoarding:

  • ~100% inheritance tax. No unearned rich anymore. Funds universal basic income.
  • Intellectual property (patent, copyright) owners can't forbid others from producing, and state decides the cut the owner gets according to simple formula. Patent trolling and sitting on inventions made impossible.
  • Ban artificial scarcity: All trade secrets must be published as patents. Every computer must have everything digital ever made. State decides the producer's reward based on consumption times value produced while consumed. When addiction produces negative value, harm tax funds harm reduction and the producer is fined.
[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 days ago (1 children)

2-3 make sense but why would someone not be allowed to set their children up for success? By 100% you mean it’s all taken?

[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 days ago

You are allowed help your children in every way, except your death tax money belongs to the generous welfare state. No unearned income except UBI. The state must invest in all risky ventures that were funded by accumulated private money before the 100% inheritance tax. This way more money is allocated to projects valuable to society, less to personal projects in families that happen to be rich.