I hate Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos.
But honestly, I feel a more base, emotionally driving hatred towards the more immediate capitalists in my life. I hate my landlord, I hate my district manager, I hate my uncle who makes 250k a year sending emails. These are more the people I want to rip out of their homes kicking and screaming to the guillotines.
Pretty much every successful communist revolution didn’t direct their fury towards just the richest of the richest, they recognized there were people down the hierarchy who were still exploiters who deserved the wrath of the proletariat. Calling for the liquidation of American Kulaks would do more for socialism in America than trying to get people to strike against Bezos.
That’s fair. But it also wasn’t possible in Marx’s time for someone to own an extremely small part of a capitalist enterprise. Like no one could own 0.000000001% of a factory. So the possible relationships to the MoP have expanded.
But still, I’d argue that especially when the alternative is not having money to survive old age, this sort of extremely small “ownership” with no decisionmaking or exploitive power is not what Marx meant by Capitalist (because he couldn’t have meant that since it didn’t exist)
And valid point about the modern labor aristocracy. You’re correct of course.
Companies traded on the stock market have been a thing since the 16th century. Stock markets themselves are several centuries older than that.