flamethrowing-hurdy-gurdy:

brainstatic:

occupythedisco:

brainstatic:

I sympathize with the fantasies of killing rich people and redistributing all their money, but you guys should probably know that’s not how wealth works. Like, they don’t have a Scrooge McDuck swimming pool of gold coins, their assets are abstract. You don’t get ownership of someone’s stock portfolio and mutual funds by killing them, there’s no actual money to seize. I just want to spare you all the trouble of going through a revolution only to find out that wealth is specifically designed to exist as things which can’t transfer to the person who kills you. They thought this through.

It’s almost as if the goal should be to seize the means by which economic value is produced such that the rich no longer can have access to the surplus value that is created from the labor they exploit. 

This gets to the second part of what I’m trying to say, this isn’t 19th century Prussia, rich people aren’t rich because they own factories, their businesses are services. For example, and insurance company doesn’t produce anything, they take wages on future events and promise, by legally binding contract, to pay out money under the agreed upon circumstances. Seizing Geico headquarters wouldn’t gain you anything, especially if there was no state to enforce the contracts their business is built upon. So that’s billions of dollars that vanish the minute the business is removed from the capitalist superstructure, you won’t find anything to return to the people, unless you want to just keep running an insurance company. 

Or take Amazon as another example. They don’t really produce anything of their own, they provide a service. That service is shipping goods from a wholesaler to a customer through a single website. But if you were to “seize” Amazon headquarters, you wouldn’t be taking over any means of production, because there are none. At best you’d be taking over a series of business agreements with vendors and ownership of warehouses and various other shipping operations, but again, these exist because of international contracts that require nation-states to enforce. And Amazon is only a part of Jeff Bezos’ wealth, he also owns an investment firm. Once more, this is not production, it’s a group of financial transactions paid into businesses that are either their own abstractions or simply services. If you want real change in the modern world, you’re not going to find it by reciting long-dead philosophers who couldn’t even begin to dream of what a 21st century economy would look like.

Generally also seizing anything just gets you a new group of people ready to exploit everyone else as soon as the revolutionary spirit dies down. Best end result is you get different factions arguing about how to distribute the resources, and someone ends up buying someone else out eventually, or taking advantage of their bad luck. There’s always gonna be someone in charge, or there’s gonna be internal conflicts, or both.