I’m thinking about social justice and cancel culture lately, where society forces someone to lose their job, social status, erc. for shitty things they have said or done that aren’t technically illegal but are unpopular. One thing I’ve noticed is that social justice never focuses on billionaires.
Bill Gates could end world poverty with a fraction of his wealth, yet we throw praise on him for spending money on research to block out the sun and oral vaccines that actually increase infection rates when entering the water system.
Billionaires are morally reprehensible people and we spend our time instead focused on cancelling celebrities and people for saying stupid shit. Are we just being manipulated again to focus on the wrong thing?
Not really, no. Cancelling is almost exclusively for petit bourge or proles. It’s not really a revolutionary tool, it’s radlib masturbation.
Normally the haute bourgeoisie will only eat one of its own, if that member puts a lot of them at risk ( like epstein ), or steals from many of them ( bernie madoff ). Individual squabbles among them are generally not enough to cause any problems, and of course they can get away with murder if its anyone lower down the chain than them.
As far as cancel culture goes, I agree with @tskaalgard@lemmy.ml that its something the haute bourgeoisie aren’t susceptible to, and canceling does nothing to challenge the system. Its more akin to ritual sacrifice than anything else. That said some people of middling popularity do say some heinous shit so its nice to see them get cancelled in a way that we never have to hear from them again.
Oh yes, some people indeed deserve it, but the zeal and readiness people have to engage in these cannibalistic rituals isn’t good praxis and will ultimately accomplish nothing. At the end of the day, we will need everyone, including some people we don’t like, to fix the problem of capitalism.
fixing capitalism involves removing people from power by force, capists will act on their class interests. and they control media, manufacturing, social norms, brain programming, so. but yeah major care should be taken to insure the targets of anti-capitalist force “deserve it”
Martin Shkreli?
He wasn’t a billionaire though, I believe he peaked at $70 million networth. Multimillionaires still get cancelled frequently, since many celebrities are. Travis mentioned petit bourgeoisie, that’s probably what Martin is. I’m talking about the disgusting people who have more money than they could possibly spend. Bezos, Gates, Slim, Poreshenko, Ma, etc.
Jack Ma kinda got cancelled in China
Haha yes true fair point. China doesn’t care about billionaires as much as the States.
