I have a theory: Oligarchs are only looking to own the working class as property for themselves.
Part 2: It's the working class's poverty that gives oligarchs the power of life and death over us. It's not owning a $1tril in assets.
I think it's worth divorcing the idea that oligarchs need or even want money as an end goal. I think they only want pure power over people and our lives.
So we always talk about “My boss/workplace is so stupid. They're blowing money away doing stupid things! They can make more money by supporting workers and doing XYZ so easily. What a joke!” And it is pretty funny. They ignore research and clear evidence that would make them far better profits. Just to be dicks.
The only real concern for the oligarchs is not whether they have money or enough money or too much money – it's only if we don't have enough. As long as they steal from us, that's all that matters. The number of zeroes in their bank accounts is irrelevant. They're clearly willing to spend money so we lose money, because our money keeps us alive, but a hundred billion dollars isn't going to be different from two hundred billion. We complain about corporations losing money on stupid business moves – high employee turnaround, lowering worker productivity, etc. – but I don't see them making business moves at all. I think they're making smart decisions when it comes to owning and controlling people.
They're playing a different game than we're thinking. It's about abuse to gain the power of life and death.
This is what I see – we work, we get money, and our end goal is to support ourselves and be happy. Be relatively free. We need money for that goal (yay capitalism).
The oligarch's end goal is to own us as property. Anything goes.
We're two different creatures. Completely different motivations.
I think workers get frustrated because we assume oligarchs have the same values as us. They don't.
Pay attention to this.
If you look at it as – someone in the first group wants to be happy and find personal meaning; that person does not want to destroy the planet. That goes against our hopes for an enjoyable, meaningful life, and is totally insane.
People in the second group, the oligarchs destroying the planet can be a huge opportunity to owning people's bodies and lives. And deaths, ofc.
I think we have to reframe our ideas of the ruling class because we're gonna get burned if we don't understand them and predict what they're aiming to do.
That's really the concern I wanted to bring up. We're playing our moves, and our moves make sense to us, but their moves usually don't make sense to us. To me it looks like they're playing a completely different game, and their moves are actually really brilliant for their end goal.
We have to rethink how the ruling class actually functions and we have to start now.
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I'd love to have a discussion about this. I'm not 100% sure I'm right, but I think I'm aiming on the right track, and wonder if other people see something like this or not. Add to, challenge, adjust or refute. I'd love to hear it from youse guys.
(I posted most of this as a comment elsewhere, but I like how this came out, basically better than the original post.)