First of all, financial times, please find people who can get to the point in the first 16 paragraphs. Relevant bit:
After Bezos, Amazon’s largest stockholders are BlackRock, State Street, and Vanguard. These asset managers are also the largest stockholders in Tesla, after Musk. They are also the largest stockholders in Prologis. And they are likely to be among the largest stockholders in most other companies you might think of. (The equity of AerCap is provided by a slightly different group of asset managers.)
BlackRock and its competitors are not beneficial owners, of course; they run index funds that invest in everything and also offer active management through pooled funds and on behalf of large institutional investors, such as endowments and pension funds. Some of these institutions are large direct investors in equities; organisations such as Norges Bank Investment Management, which manages the more than trillion-dollar sovereign wealth fund of Norway, and Calpers, which funds the pensions of California’s public employees.
One of modern capitalism's greatest achievements has been convincing workers they really own a stake in their own shackles. If you want to survive in your old age, you need a pension fund, which invests in equity. If you want what scraps you saved not to lose their value, you give your money to someone else to put in an index fund.
"At that point what difference is there between you and Musk or Bezos?" asks some illiterate moron. Well, it's simple really, even an imbecile writing for FT can get it. As far as a normal person who doesn't drink children's blood is concerned, investing in private equity provides lower returns that just playing the stock market after the extract all the hidden fees they want. In some usian states, it's apparently illegal to disclose the details of an equity's financials. Furthermore, people who happen to be giving their money to the parasites running this charade through pension funds and whatnot have less say in their running than the homeless guy sitting outside their offices.
The notion ”I own a small part of the firm that owns a small part of the firm that owns this plant and rents it to the airline therefore I'm a capitalist" is so removed from reality that even liberals shouldn't be falling for this shit. From the same article:
400
The number of times greater that Jeff Bezos’ $200bn wealth is than Andrew Carnegie’s. Over the same period, US national income has risen only by a factor of 50That's a whole lot of rubbish to say "the rich have gotten richer"
401k’s and such do function to mentally invest you in capitalism. My 45+ year old coworkers are obsessed with the stock market as their retirement accounts swing wildly by 80k from time to time and get mad at whatever they perceive as the cause. Occasionally it’s Musk or Bezos but equally as often it’s unions or any tiny bit of government spending that might actually do a sliver of good. It’s sad to watch.
lackRock and its competitors are not beneficial owners, of course; they run index funds that invest in everything and also offer active management through pooled funds and on behalf of large institutional investors, such as endowments and pension funds. Some of these institutions are large direct investors in equities; organisations such as Norges Bank Investment Management, which manages the more than trillion-dollar sovereign wealth fund of Norway, and Calpers, which funds the pensions of California’s public employees.
They have meetings that probably aren't dissimilar to that one scene in Spectre https://youtu.be/o8wvQkZkxyQ
I found a YouTube link in your comment. Here are links to the same video on alternative frontends that protect your privacy:
say it with me everyone,
"your status as a 'capitalist' relates directly to your access to the means of production. If you are a worker, even white collar, you are not a capitalist"
Yet as finance and business became more complex, the link from wealth to ownership of the means of production to managerial authority eroded.
Lol. Lmao even
“Marx was wrong because the modern worker has seven bosses on three different levels of the corporate hierarchy.”
Libs will then say in the same breath: "corpos have more efficient bureacracy than the state
"
No object permanence with these people, if something is obscured then it must have dissolved
We have refined finance to such a point that commodities now just materialise out of the ether through some kind of capitalist magic.
That's not how this works. That's not how any of this works.
Even if you have a we are all freelancers now mindset, can you honestly say that I own the means to production for what I do on my computer when a third party owns a lot of the data physically on the device and I need to pay a whole bunch of rentiers for the stuff I need for my job?
I'm not reading that but I can already guess the "capital" is your laptop and your phone because this was written by a trustfund baby who thinks everyone is a "digital nomad".
"capitalism is when you have a iphone" i don't know where this liberal bullshit came from but whoever wrote that article needs to shut the fuck up. they literally do not know what capitalism is, or what it means to be a capitalist. these people's relation to any sort of productive means is obviously that of a worker. they are not capitalists lmfao. "being exploited for your labor but instead of directly having a boss an app is telling you what to do, makes you a capitalist". ok that sentiment makes whoever holds it a genius who knows a lot about what they're talking about then i guess.
i don't know where this liberal bullshit came from
It's a common conservative talking point. That's where it comes from
wdym, consumers have just expressed a strong preference for renting at rates comically higher than mortgages
Heh, looks like I'm a billionaire capitalist now. Bye bye you stinky proles, I'm off to Mars with my new friend Mr. Musk.
Called it. I've been around some pork circles and this is what they're coalescing around as their next pitch.
EVERYONE should be their own individual small business owner, being a businessman is the new clergy so no one will have anything to complain about when everyone's a pork. In a sense, they do want communism but only on their own terms. If the capitalist class is the only class, then it's a classless society.
how long before this proceeds to trying to pitch gig work as "passive income" via some incredibly convoluted logic
That's always been their pitch, I'm pretty sure it's even discussed in the manifesto when Marx talks about petty bourgeois socialism.
It’s not new, this is what the American project has always been about - everyone a yeoman farmer
Dang, guess I owned the means of production all along without noticing
The real means of production were the friends we made along the way.
