sure bezos is individually more disgusting than the sympathetic local restaurant owner who asks you how your mom is when he greets you in person, but he doesn't exist simply as an individual: he exists collectively, inside a CLASS
and when the time comes for a truly socialist transition that guy and his class friends are gonna be just as reactionary as any billionaire
not only that, but whatever they lack in financial power individually, they certainly compensate in sheer numbers
so why is it that i often see criticism directed at china being followed by It even has billionaires! as if they would have any less trouble if that property was instead in the hands of a few thousand petty bourgeois
i can't help but feel like this is a vestige of a liberal interpretation of how society works sneaking into the thought of a socialist transition
just imagine what would've happened if instead of kidnapping jack ma the CPC had to kidnap, say, 10,000 store owners how the fuck is that not just outright worse
they're even harder to control as they're constantly flying under the radar - in fact, this is expressed even in china's foreign policy as smaller businesses are by far more guilty of exploitative practices in underdeveloped countries than the larger businesses like huawei
what am i missing here?
At least in the west, the distinction between small and large capitalist isn't very useful because the small ones are usually just subcontractors to large ones. I don't know whether it's like this in China too.
to use a somewhat bad example for the lack of a better one, when the need for collectivization came, stalin faced equal wrath from all owners of land, regardless of how large their property was