Whether it's Bezos or Musk, newspaper publishers or arms manufacturers: rich individuals and corporations do not have to justify the machinations with which they have built up their fortunes. On the contrary, they are respected and celebrated as role models. They embody a hypocritical neoliberal ideology that claims that work performance determines where people stand in society. But wealth can only exist through poverty. The small portion of the world's population that lives solely off its possessions builds up those possessions at the expense of the working population. We generate the surplus value that they appropriate—we generate it in their factories, their homes, their supermarkets, their agencies. The wealthy, the rich, the bigwigs, do not act out of malice; they simply represent their class interests. The logical consequence of this is ever-increasing wealth alongside ever-increasing poverty and a completely hollowed-out democracy.

Only in a classless society, in which property is democratized, can a good life be guaranteed for all.

“The rich man and the poor man stood there and looked at each other. Then the poor man said pale: If I were not poor, you would not be rich.”—Bertolt Brecht ¹