I was arguing with a friend about whether a capital class could be tolerated as long as necessities like shelter, healthcare, education, etc are freely available.
One one hand, marx says that class war is inevitable, and the capital class would try to increase their share of profits by pushing into the government.
On the other hand, assuming that there exists a system where the average citizen could reliably access human necessities, can the existence of a parasite capital class be tolerated, as long as they stay away from the above mentioned necessities?
I'd love to hear your thoughts on this.
They can exist in gulag until they've learned their lesson and are ready to play nice with all the other workers
If capital was weakened to the point that housing, healthcare etc. were fully decommodified and socialized, then there is no reason not to eliminate it completely. Allowing a capitalist class to exist at all poses a threat to the system you mention: the amount of profit to be made from housing and healthcare is too great for capitalists to sit by and let it go untapped. An applicable situation can be seen in countries with universal healthcare today, where there are often repeated attempts to privatise and whittle away at such systems.
This exact argument is what took me from "just take care of everyone and then I don't care what the fuck else you do" to "yeah, capitalism needs to go." Capitalism is a corrosive agent -- as long as it exists it will seek to roll back whatever progress has been made.
Why would we settle for a system where the average citizen could reliably access human necessities when we could build a system where every citizen could access those necessities, and also enjoy the fruits of their labor?
And eventually they will cut your throat and things will go back to feudalism because of their crave for power. Juat take a look at the welfare states from the 50' and the current world.
The power imbalance is still an injustice, even if everything went fine, which it wouldn't
they literally can't help themselves. they have to go after everything - must, in fact - because at some point, there's so little profit to be extracted that they're really doing it from each other. the existence of the capitalist class is predicated on their continued capacity to extract profit, i.e. infinite growth. Marx called this the tendency of the rate of profit to fall. when the choices are to steal from other billionaires and to steal from societal welfare programs, which do you think they're going to go with? this is why we point to the imperialism of social democratic societies - that's where their capital has redirected their extraction.
but eventually, as is happening right now, you run out of other people's money. and when that happens, they don't hesitate to rob each other, rupturing the class during periods of intense political unrest.
capital is antithetical to a society that takes care of its population and that doesn't resort to imperialism.
A parasite is a parasite for a reason. What we need is a symbiotic existence which is not possible with the current capitalist class and may not be possible with any capitalist class.
Every single one of them needs to be executed or they will eventually seize power and ensure that basic needs are no longer met as soon as they can.
The only way we can have equality and equity is if we expropriate their wealth either through taxation or force (strikes, revolution, etc).
Otherwise there will always be exploitation of labor and grifters waiting in the wings to take power.
