One of the most insidious tricks of modern capitalism is the superficial ease by which one participates in it. Any dipshit can download Robinhood on their phone, drop a few hundred bucks in via a bank transfer, and begin speculating on the secondary market.

This creates an illusion of accessibility and participation. If you want to glean the tiniest sliver of Microsoft profits, buy a share of their common stock and collect a 0.84% dividend. Congratulations! You’re a capitalist, just like Bill Gates!

This, combined with the fantasy of rags-to-riches investing and the less-fantastic-but-still-oversold promise of steady indefinite compounded returns, creates a natural cohort of “winners” to offset the far more numerous but significantly less visible cohort of “losers” in the Battle Royale competition to join the petite bourgeois.

It also entirely neglects the nature of sovereignty and the primitive accrual of real estate, behind which every real fortune in any country stands. Capitalism as an ideology exists independent (often explicitly in opposition to) the idea of legal state institutions. And numerous - often very successful - participants in the petite bourgeois game believe themselves entirely independent (often explicitly in opposition to) state bureaucracy. They can persist in this delusion their entire lives and potentially pass the belief on future generations, simply by living inside the belly of the empire and serving as (often unwitting) symbiote to the state’s greater purpose.

This furthers the illusion of Capitalism as a fully participatory meritocracy. You have living subjects who openly decry state bureaucracy as anathema and make token efforts to undermine or negate efforts of said bureaucracy. They can accrue enormous amounts of wealth, participate as ostensibly rivalrous subjects within the empire, and appear as major media figures echoing the propaganda of stateless capitalism far and wide without being hindered.

How do you argue with what is right in front of people’s eyes? That this person emerged from Wage Slavery (a state construct caused by the scourge of taxation, I tell you!) and joined the ranks of the celebrity petite bourgeois class through savvy speculative investment and compound accrual? That capitalism is empowering and not degrading?

Its not a trivial challenge.