#capitalist appropriation

[jennyandvastraflint]

Would love to hear more about your thoughts on the commercialisation of fandom!!

Ooooh, boy you've opened a can of worms. I took a Fan Studies course at uni for a module bc I could choose it, and I did a lot of research into this specific topic... I hope it's okay that I'm just putting in some of my slides and then summarising underneath each!

Now, fandom in, for instance, fan fiction spaces, works on the basis of a Gift Economy in which gifts rather than money are exchanged. However, these gifts aren't just meant for one person, but for many, and even when you for instance do an artwork or a fanfic for someone, other people can still ALSO read it. These gifts can (but don't have to) be responded to with another gift, be it a comment on a fic, or a fic in return. Now, I could go into much more detail here, but I recommend checking out for instance this text by Trisha Turk on the TWC for some more in-depth stuff about this. (I'll list all the sources I used in the presentation in the end btw!) The gist of it is that fandom is a very complex system in which the reciprocation of gifts - and therefore labour - is distributed across the community.

(more under the cut)

HOWEVER capitalism, as always, comes along and tries to ruin things for profit.

Fandoms continue to form because of the unrestricted movement and no one dictating what is well, "really" canon and what isn't. I'm sure you've witnessed some fans in more recent years refusing to ship things that "won't become canon anyway", positioning the canonicity of a ship or a scenario higher than... well, their own critical reflection and interpretation OF the media and their own creative endeavours. At the end of the day, canon for me personally is something to draw on, negotiate with, or reject if it's stupid, while more recent fandoms I've seen sometimes go about their engagement with fandom as a sort of... worshipping of canon almost, and where being noticed by the creators is sort of the ultimate goal.

Now, this is of course connected to corporations realising that hey, actually people engaging with our media and creating something about it bring in numbers, and with them being able to make a profit off of views on social media, they seek to drive certain forms of engagement with the content. However, they are of course seeking to police HOW you engage with things, and don't you dare stray from their vision too much. This, of course, harms especially marginalised communities who propose alternative readings of media, who subvert the show itself and who transform it into something else, adding themselves into the work and into a world where, by design, they were invisible. It's also an attempt to undermine fan activism and grassroots organising by fans (if you wanna hear more about fan activism shoot me another ask and I will ramble <3 edit: link to post about fan activism) by keeping them in line with a sterilised version of fandom. In this sterilised and controlled version, the forms most often encouraged are things like video edits (but don't be too out there, that's bad too) that can be consumed like content by fandom... They like video edits, sterilised fanart, and things that are easily consumed and bring numbers, but "don't you dare write that nasty Spirk fanfiction where they have sex in the captain's chair! Ewww, yuck yuck!"

Rather than having a fandom driven by community, you have one driven by consumption, and that has become increasingly clear in the past few years, with readers on fan fiction asking "When next chapter?", pressuring artists, writers, etc. for more 'content' for them to consume without a) participating in the Gift Economy fandom is built upon and b) realising that these fan works are gifts to the community in the first place, and not content... These are, by the way, often the same fans who will cheer on AI because now they can finally read a story they wanted someone to continue :D Instead of using their own fucking brain, they're asking a bot trained on scraping works to produce them some bad, surface level jumble of words just so they can consume, consume, endlessly consume without ever having to think.

A few years ago (well in like, the late 2000s), a site called FanLib wanted to profit off of the resale of fanfiction, but were quickly shut down. Their mistake was that they mistook the community of fandom for a commodity to exploit for their own commercial interests. I'm not sure you've seen it, but Wattpad has sent authors emails asking them to update their fics frequently because it would appease the algorithm (see Tumblr Post about this here), which leads me to my next little point!

Algorithms! If you have ever done fan edits and posted them on sites like TikTok, Instagram, etc., you'll have noticed that... unless you post regularly and frequently (like. one edit a day at least), the algorithm will NOT push your video at all and it will be buried. Algorithms are based on how well a post performs not in terms of actual community that is built, but of course on numbers. Wattpad also functions on an algorithmic principle, which is why you have some........ individuals coming to AO3 and complaining about the supposed algorithm, spamming their work and reposting it, yadda yadda. Basically, these fans are so used to being spoonfed by an algorithm by now, they are confused when they are actually left on their own and are supposed to learn some basic fandom rules. It's honestly frightening to see fandom not only be reduced to this surface level interaction and to number-based algorithmic systems, but also to the trend-hopping TikTokification of fandom.

A study done by Booth and Dare-Edwards published in 2021 that focused on school age children basically came to the following conclusions... Children still connect "fan" with the same stereotypes of obsessive and unruly individuals that were plaguing us thirty years ago. A whole bunch of children think fandom is a thing of the past and that it peaked in the early 2000s - and while fandom of course is different now and has changed with the spread of the internet, fandom very much still is A Thing. Further, children connected fandom and being a fan mostly with buying merchandise and collecting, and also with plain consuming content, echoing "neo-liberal associations of ‘emotion’ with ‘buying power’, but at the same time, seemed to pathologize those who practice fandom (as they see it) ‘too much’" (Booth and Dare-Edwards 230). The text concludes that while there has been an explosion of media and you are becoming more multi-facetted in what you are a fan of, lilypad hopping and essentially abandoning fandoms after a brief period of surface level engagement and consuming content is increasingly becoming more common. From my own experience, this is for instance the case with shows like Willow (2022), Good Omens(ish), etc. Pretty much anything more recent doesn't have as stable a fanbase and if you enter the fandom a month too late it's already fizzing out. It's really fucked up, honestly.

Right, after that long tangent about this, I want to bring up ancillary models, which is an attempt by capitalist companies to market the previously unwanted Gift Economy of fandom as something new and desirable, but something they are in control of.

Ancillary Content Models try to lure fans in with "free" Behind-the-Scenes content. The guise they have stolen from fandom of acting like a Gift Economy of saying "here, this is for all our dedicated fans <3 Consume :D" is used to downplay the commercial infrastructure these Content Models (honestly it's already in the name). The "gifted" content is more concerned with getting loads of people to individually consume as much of it as possible to create an alternative revenue on for instance social media through views, clicks, likes, etc. They're essentially trying to commercialise our viewing time and keep us engaged with that additional content as much as possible. Rather than having a community that comes together to share their ideas and stories around a metaphorical campfire, Ancillary Content Models want each person alone to sit and stare at the stuff they put out as much as possible, always placidly clicking "like" and demanding more. They also want to cultivate an "official" fan community (aka the ones most dedicated to consuming additional content) that they can monitor and control, and they don't encourage anything that's too... out there, too subversive, too queer, etc. Coined "re-gifting economy" by Suzanne Scott, capitalism with these Ancillary Content Models has warped the Gift Economy fandom functions on into a model that equates consumption with community, and which wants to profit off of fans' engagement and their free labour of making viral TikTok edits that adhere to the sterilised version of what a fan "should be". The example I used in my presentation for this is from The Dragon Prince, which, while I do love the show, has been pushing such Ancillary Content Models. They also have a Discord (which is regulated and monitored) as their "official fan community" place, and not only are the rules pretty strict, but it also just... doesn't feel like a community but just like a bunch of people wanting more content gathered in one place :/

Now, to conclude this, capitalism sucks and is trying to ruin fandom communities in order to replace them with something they can make some more money of, and rather than having a critical fanbase that questions things, they want one that endlessly consumes the "free" content they churn out. Stay active in fandom, remember we're a Gift Economy, learn the fandom rules, and keep hating capitalism <3

Fan Work: Labor, Worth and participation in Fandom's gift economy by Trisha Turk

Now, the sources I have used for this...

Repackaging fan culture: The regifting economy of ancillary content models by Suzanne Scott

Stanfill, Mel. “The Fan Fiction Gold Rush, Generational Turnover, and the Battle for Fandom’s Soul.” The Routledge Companion to Media Fandom, edited by Melissa A. Click and Suzanne Scott, New York, 2017, pp. 77-79.

"No one's a fan of anything anymore, this isn't 2002.": Surveying 7–17-year-olds on being a fan and contemplating the future of fandom. by Paul Booth and Helena Louise Dare-Edwards

[zenosanalytic]

rbing this again cuz I've watched it now and it's super-great! I had thought I'd been following this story pretty closely but there are elements of it Sophie covers here I hadn't heard of yet. Also, she goes into how behavior like Holmes's is less personal than systemic; how it is RIFE in capitalist subcultures like startup, and how the myths, "incentives", and "discipline" of capital pressures people into it even within supposed philanthropic spaces. A really informative, funny, and tragic video essay.

New Sophie From Mars video!

Pressure, Prodigy and Profit: a look at Theranos and Elizabeth Holmes is a critical analysis of the biomedtech startup that garnered 9 billion dollars in venture capital backing despite never once having a working product. I also talk about my own work history in tech startups, and take a wider view of startup culture as a uniquely capitalist sickness.

https://youtu.be/CKUxFa_FEeU

[heterophobicdyke]

i don't mind chappell roan's music but her "gay culture aesthetic" is very... what straight ppl think gay culture is. and it's specifically gay male culture. but labrys', diy, not smiling and cats don't sell so i guess all she had was drag queen makeup

[spoonful116]

Let's learn about the Quaker Oats brand:

The Quaker Oats company is not a Quaker (Religious Society of Friends) company nor founded by them; a thread:

With the current renaming and changing the logo of the Aunt Jemima  line, owned by the Quaker Oats company, I'm going to take the time to address one of the most common associations with Quakers.

Quakers were considered good to do business with as they are honest and value integrity. The company adopted the name, "Quaker", in order to attract more business. The founders weren't Quakers themselves.

The logo for the company, now easily recognized, was drawn as a man in what was called "typical Quaker garb" - but resembles the dress of the Puritans in the 1800s. Many Quakers in the 1800s wore "plain dress" and would dress more simply.

In the mid 1900s, the company carried out experiments on mentally disabled children (without the parents informed consent) with a couple of universities. The experiments were supposed to study how minerals in cereals were metabolized.

The children were unknowingly fed food with radioactive calcium and iron! The parents of the children later sued and the lawsuit was settled in 1997.

In 2010, a class action lawsuit was filed against the company for dishonest advertisements. The company marketed their products as healthy, but had food that contained trans fats. They didn't ban/remove trans fats until 2014.

There's a lot more to the story, but this is just a sample of how the company is not Quaker and doesn't follow Quaker values. While Quakers participated in the Underground Railroad, the Quaker Oats co. is only now rebranding a racist brand.

[coolguycy]

(Questionnaire on a job application)

Do you guys think I’m getting the job

[kraniumet]

"cultural analysis" youtubers read something that isn't a medium/vouge/vox op-ed as research challange

[citrine-elephant]

via 'mobile art notes' :

leon "sea turtle" kennedy. strangled by that funky cellophane shit used in warehouses

[nando161mando]

As an alum, is this really appropriate?

[fictionz]

Just me and these guys.

[southernsolarpunk]

I’ll have to wait to watch this when I can give it my full attention, but kurzgesagt is funded partially by Bill Gates, who heavily promotes green growth and invests in carbon capture technologies. Bill has also said that “we can’t expect people to change their lifestyles for climate change” and essentially wants to continue our consumerist culture with a green facade.

Of course I haven’t watched this yet, so it could be a great video! But it’s important to keep in mind the biases kurzgesagt has when it comes to climate change, and especially since solarpunk has begun to be appropriated by green capitalists since becoming more popular.

Aside from the physical limits of the universe there is nothing stopping us from creating a literal paradise for ourselves. If we dare to tell ourselves a different story about who we are and who we could be. - from Is Our World Broken? by Kurzgesagt

[apas-95]

Any analysis of fascism that posits the USA in 1776 as a fascist state is one where 'fascism' is just an edgier way to say 'capitalism' - what capitalism isn't fascist, in this view; and what's the purpose of the term in that case?

Fascism is a specific formulation of capitalism which emerges when the capitalist system is in extreme crisis (specifically a crisis of entrenched fixed capital devastating the rate of profit). It is characterised by the extension of imperial methods to the population of imperial core itself - an autocannibalism when all other sources of profit have dried up - and the mobilisation of the petty-bourgeoisie. It explicitly borrows the methods of settler-colonialism to apply not only to its colonies, but also to itself. Fascism is not simply 'when genocide happens' - capitalism under liberal-democracy carries out genocide just as well.

In this regard it is essentially appropriate to say that fascism has been superfluous in the USA - a fascist movement has historically never been able to seriously gain ground in the USA because the needs of fascism are already met by straightforward settler-colonialism. There has been no deep crisis to spur on fascism, and no need to divide the populace and expropriate some portion of it, because the USA already has an exploitative and expropriative relationship with its internal colonies. This arrangement is not fascist, it is straightforwardly colonial.

There can only be a real fascist movement and fascist state in the USA if two conditions are met: 1) the settler state can no longer wring enough profit out of the exploitation of the indigenous and black peoples; and, 2) serious economic failure and crisis threatens the existence of capitalism, by inspiring popular revolt and communist organisation.

[reachartwork]

PLEASE JUST LET ME EXPLAIN REDUX

AI {STILL} ISN'T AN AUTOMATIC COLLAGE MACHINE

I'm not judging anyone for thinking so. The reality is difficult to explain and requires a cursory understanding of complex mathematical concepts - but there's still no plagiarism involved. Find the original thread on twitter here; https://x.com/reachartwork/status/1809333885056217532

A longpost!

This is a reimagining of the legendary "Please Just Let Me Explain Pt 1" - much like Marvel, I can do nothing but regurgitate my own ideas.

You can read that thread, which covers slightly different ground and is much wordier, here; https://x.com/reachartwork/status/1564878372185989120

This longpost will; Give you an approximately ELI13 level understanding of how it works Provide mostly appropriate side reading for people who want to learn Look like a corporate presentation

This longpost won't; Debate the ethics of image scraping Valorize NFTs or Cryptocurrency, which are the devil Suck your dick

WHERE DID THIS ALL COME FROM?

The very short, very pithy version of *modern multimodal AI* (that means AI that can turn text into images - multimodal means basically "it can operate on more than one -type- of information") is that we ran an image captioner in reverse.

The process of creating a "model" (the term for the AI's ""brain"", the mathematical representation where the information lives, it's not sentient though!) is necessarily destructive - information about original pictures is not preserved through the training process.

The following is a more in-depth explanation of how exactly the training process works. The entire thing operates off of turning all the images put in it into mush! There's nothing left for it to "memorize". Even if you started with the exact same noise pattern you'd get different results.

SO IF IT'S NOT MEMORIZING, WHAT IS IT DOING?

Great question! It's constructing something called "latent space", which is an internal representation of every concept you can think of and many you can't, and how they all connect to each other both conceptually and visually.

CAN'T IT ONLY MAKE THINGS IT'S SEEN?

Actually, only being able to make things it's seen is sign of a really bad AI! The desired end-goal is a model capable of producing "novel information" (novel meaning "new").

Let's talk about monkey butts and cigarettes again.

BUT I SAW IT DUPLICATE THE MONA LISA!

This is called overfitting, and like I said in the last slide, this is a sign of a bad, poorly trained AI, or one with *too little* data. You especially don't want overfitting in a production model!

To quote myself - "basically there are so so so many versions of the mona lisa/starry night/girl with the pearl earring in the dataset that they didn't deduplicate (intentionally or not) that it goes "too far" in that direction when you try to "drive there" in the latent vector and gets stranded."

Anyway, like I said, this is not a technical overview but a primer for people who are concerned about the AI "cutting and pasting bits of other people's artworks". All the information about how it trains is public knowledge, and it definitely Doesn't Do That.

There are probably some minor inaccuracies and oversimplifications in this thread for the purpose of explaining to people with no background in math, coding, or machine learning. But, generally, I've tried to keep it digestible. I'm now going to eat lunch.

Post Script: This is not a discussion about capitalists using AI to steal your job. You won't find me disagreeing that doing so is evil and to be avoided. I think corporate HQs worldwide should spontaneously be filled with dangerous animals.

Cheers!

[fat-fuck-hairy-belly]

Sociology should be a mandatory course for all STEM students. The amount of people that think we just need "technology” to solve all our problems is frankly scary. Take basically any problem we face today and the root cause is always societal. You could create some magical new technology that creates 100% free and clean electricity with no cost to operate it or to distribute it, and the capitalists will still find a way to monopolize and monetize it. You could make a miracle machine that builds houses out of thin air at no cost and we'd still have a housing crisis. You can completely automate the production of absolutely everything and people will still have to spend 90% of their life working for pennies to survive. Every time we've developed some new technology that's meant to make our lives better the capitalists just used it to further consolidate their power. Advancement in technology without appropriate societal changes don't make things better. You can go back to 100AD and give Romans all the modern weapons and medicine and fertilizer and shit, and the Roman empire will still fall, because they'll just continue killing each other in constant civil wars and resulting famines and plagues, except now they'll do it with F16s.

[max1461]

I think that the average internet Marxist is actually not much of a materialist at all, in fact in their behavior and rhetoric they seem very concerned with moral purity, the redemptive power of suffering, and the ability of narrative to shape the actual world. As myriad as the senses of the word "materialist" have come to be, none of this would seem to comport well with any of them. This all feels very Christian.

In some cases I really do think there is a latent Christianity in it, but I think the stronger source of this trend is simply the leftist emphasis on sloganeering. Somewhere along the line, maybe with the Bolshevik policy of democratic centralism or maybe somewhere else, the importance of the slogan, the party line, the supreme power of the speech act seems to have been elevated for many leftists above all other concerns. From this follows the kind of disingenuous, obviously fallacious argument you so often see from the online ML left. The point is to say the magic words that have been carefully agreed upon, the magic incantation that will defeat all opposition.

Whether it's "I don't want to vote for a candidate who supports any amount of genocide" or "The Is-not-rael Zionist entity is on the edge of collapse!" or whatever else, a rational person can recognize the impotence of these words. They don't do anything. They're just words. But the feeling seems to be that once the perfect incantation is crafted—the incantation that makes your opponent sound maximally like a Nazi without engaging with their position in good faith, or the incantation which brushes aside all thoughts of defeat, or whatever else—once the perfect incantation is crafted, all that is left to do is say it and say it and say it, and make sure everyone else is saying it too.

This is not a materialist way of approaching politics. This is a mystical way of approaching politics.

I think it's also worth saying that this tendency in Marxism seems old, it certainly predates the internet. Lots of Marxists today are vocal critics of identity politics, of what they see as the liberal, insubstantive, and idealist Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion framework. I share this criticism to a significant degree, but I'm not very eager to let Marxists off the hook here. The modern DEI framework evolved directly out of a liberal/capitalist appropriation of earlier academic ideas about social justice from such sources as Queer Studies, Black Studies, academic Feminism and so on. I say this as a neutral, factual description of its history which I believe to be essentially accurate. In turn, disciplines like Queer Studies, Black Studies, and academic Feminism each owe a great intellectual dept to academic Marxism, and likewise to the social movements of the 1960s (here in the Anglosphere), which themselves were strongly influenced by Marxism.

Obviously as the place of these fields in the academy was cemented, they lost much (most) of their radical character in practice. To a significant degree however, I think their rhetorical or performative radicalism was retained, and was further fostered by the cloistered environment of academia. In this environment the already-extant Marxist tendency to sloganeering seems in my impression to have metastasized greatly. And so I think the political right is not actually wrong, or not wholly wrong, when they attribute the speech-act-centrism of modern American (and therefore, online) politics, its obsession with saying things right above doing things right and its constantly shifting maze of appropriate forms of expression, at least in part to Marxism.

Now I should say that I don't think the right is correct about much else in this critique, and I also don't think this is wholly attributable to Marxism. But I think there's plainly an intellectual dept there.

More than anything else, this is my genuine frustration with both Marxism as it exists today and with its intellectual legacy as a whole. I fundamentally do not believe in the great transformative power of speech acts, I do not believe in the importance of holding the correct line, I do not believe that the specifics of what you say or how you say it matter nearly as much as what you do. I do not think there is much to be gained from playing the kind of language games that Marxists often like to play, and I do not think that playing language games and calling it "materialist analysis" is a very compelling means of argument.

[j4gm]

SPOILERS!!! REFERENCES AND EASTER EGGS IN F&C ep. 10: CHEERS

The finale!

Pawn Swan! This was another character who first appeared in Steve Wolfhard's post-finale loredump about the 1000+ world. I never expected to actually see him in the show.

Nuts how this is like the third time we've seen Simon's ass. I love how Shermy is just chilling and playing video games while GOLB lets this random old man take a turn at the wheel.

This establishing shot of Fionnaworld shows that it's very small. By the time it is restored at the end of the episode, this ominous white border is gone and there are more buildings, implying that it became a complete world.

I can't believe Gary was thirsting after Scarab in this situation.

There is a shop called Evergree Flowers; likely a reference to the episode Evergreen.

This shop window advertises that you can learn to kick bugs. Appropriately enough, Cake kicks Scarab through this shop window while in her Godzilla form.

The Betty statue has become GOLBetty.

It should be clear by this point that Casper and Nova are a parallel to Simon and Betty, with all of their decisions being made by Casper with little consideration for Nova due to their unbalanced power dynamic. This is why Simon realises that he should have been more considerate of Betty's dreams, rather than single-mindedly chasing the Enchiridion and the crown.

The credits confirm that genderswapped Ash is named Ashley. I wonder what happened to her after she fell into the void. Probably nothing good.

Poor Marshall never gets to finish his songs. Truly he is the genderswapped Marceline.

The name "GOLBetty" is now canon; Simon uses it in this scene.

I'm not sure what's happening to GOLBetty here. A loose thread to pick up if this story ever gets a continuation, perhaps.

Simon steps through several different universes, including all the ones we saw during this miniseries. I'm not sure what this world full of tiny bears is meant to be.

Some kind of industrial capitalist hell universe.

This is the Water Park Prank artstyle, implying that Water Park Prank takes place in a separate but canon universe. So Water Park Prank is now canonically canonical! (what a ridiculous phrase)

Some kind of Jake universe.

A universe featuring Magwood and his volcano lair, from the episode Evergreen.

The snail! It's not dead after all. And it's a great way of symbolising a return to regular Ooo, as is the reappearance of the smiley butterfly.

This was a strange selection of characters. I hope Jay hasn't left his younger siblings on their own if their dad is dead. At least baby Finn won't have to grow up in Vampworld, though part of me liked imagining what that would have been like.

Fionna mentions that his is her top fantasy. The other two of her top three fantasies were Cake being able to talk and a kingdom made of candy.

She gets a hammer, like she had in the dream sequence at the very beginning of the miniseries.

Kheirosiphon goes back to working in a teashop, just like he did on The Drift before he was imprisoned by Scarab. Also Marshall's outfit here is incredibly gay, it's great.

There is an ad here for a daddy issues themed comedy night. Sounds like Marceline's kind of place.

Prismo's face glitches for a second. Ominous.

Simon definitely needs to move out. This is probably an even more important realisation than coming to understand his influence over Betty.

In the credits of this episode, Simon is finally at peace.

And with that, the miniseries is over! Back to the long wait. Will this be it for Adventure Time? Or is there yet more to come...

[mesetacadre]

Does socialist theory have any use for classes based on wealth/income? (rich/poor as opposed to bourgeoisie/proletariat)

Short answer: kinda but not really

Long answer: Classes in marxist theory are exclusively defined by the objective relationship of the subject to the property of the means of production and to the organization of labor, in capitalism it being mostly salary work. From these objective and economic relationships spring the classes of the proletariat, the bourgeoisie, the petit-bourgeoisie, the lumpen-proletariat, artisans...

Income, while highly correlated with one's position in class society, is not the defining trait of the subject, but the consequence's of the individual's conditions and specific relationship to their own work. Income itself is just the remuneration for a part of the labor-power that one exerts, or for the value created by others' labor-power that you exploit by virtue of having private ownership of the means of production. In neither of these cases is income the cause of one's class, but a consequence of it.

What a "class" analysis based on income gets you is the inability to actually strike at the core of what organizes class society. For example, the income-based analysis most radical liberals and social-democrats prefer to use (while still choosing to appropriate marxist terminology like "owning class") does not allow them to properly identify the exploitative nature of small businesses, thus, you'll see them rallying against Big Capital while their beloved family-owned small business commits labor law violations on the daily with 11 hour workdays for minimum wage. The income of the petit-bourgeoise is not that great, it's still higher than an average salary worker, but small enough that recessions or the mere existence of concentrated capital is enough to render the small property owner into a worker, a process known as proletariatization. See this really good explanation of what that dynamic means for the political implications of this economic fact.

An income-based analysis would place the small business owner and their 3 employees on the same side with, supposedly, the same interests, because they don't get a lot of money. I don't need to harp on any more to explain why that is nonsense, I hope.

Furthermore, within the working class, there are contrasts in income. There are workers who have a lavish salary, and there are workers who don't even make enough to support their basic needs. The objective fact of their exploitation is the same: they generate value with their labor-power, and sell it to a capitalist for a fraction of what they generate. Exploitation in the marxist sense is not a moral judgement. This is not about whether it's morally wrong or not to extract value from workers. Exploitation creates alienation and a class antagonism that can only ever be resolved one way, which is through the overthrow of the exploiter class by the exploited, history shows that this antagonism is what has propelled it forwards.

It is another question, and one that concerns us less, whether the salary, the price with which a capitalist buys a fraction of the worker's labor-power, is enough for the worker to lead a relatively accommodated life or not. If this was the question, which it is for, say, social-democrats, then the mere reform of capitalism (which, to be clear, is not possible to enact for all workers and all countries) to ensure a decent livelihood under the system of salary work would be enough.

With a lavish income, some might argue, a worker ceases to share the same interests with the rest of the working class who can't afford the first's lifestyle. But what this is omitting is that, in the cases of some workers with a really high salary, it becomes possible for the worker to join the ranks of the bourgeoisie by acquiring capital. Here, top-rated actors and athletes comes to mind. Actors and athletes are paid a salary in exchange for their labor-power, but the highest rated ones generate so much value that the capitalists pay them a really high salary, and then, most of the time, these highly-paid workers acquire some property and become a part of the bourgeoisie. In the US, for example, a bunch of high-rated workers of the entertainment industry such as Oprah, with more than 2,000 acres, have become large landlords in Hawai'i, taking advantage of the colonization of the island chain.

The break in common interests between highly-paid workers and the rest of their class comes from the change in economic class that their income allows for, not the income itself.

There is one instance when income becomes more relevant, and that is in the case of the labor aristocracy. Because of the international division of labor created by and protected by imperialism, the workers of the imperial core, as much as they are still exploited by capitalists and have revolutionary interests, benefit directly or indirectly from the even greater exploitation placed on the workers of the imperial periphery and global south, allowing for a generalized improvement in the quality of life for the imperial core workers.

Two conclusions can be made from this fact:

First, that the social-democratic welfare state depends on the exploitation of vast swaths of the world, and thus, it is not an applicable system in the majority of the world. Second, that the working class of the imperial core can, by the objective fact of the improvement of their material conditions by the spoils of imperialism, can act in the interests of the imperialist bourgeoisie. Take as an example the SAG-AFTRA union, which decidedly supported the imperialist project of Israel after al-Aqsa Flood. This does mean that a greater effort is needed for most workers in the imperial core, the labor aristocracy, to achieve revolutionary-political consciousness. The spontaneous class consciousness that some people insist is enough to be revolutionary, is born of the daily class antagonisms one experiences, and also of the material conditions underlying one's existence, therefore, as we have seen a lot this past year, spontaneous consciousness can include attitudes that favor the bourgeoisie.

And still, even if the labor aristocracy is broadly defined by a higher income, it is still dependent on the relationship to the organization of labor. Even the most desperate and destitute homeless citizen of the imperial core benefits in a lot of ways from the system of imperialism. For example, they don't need to worry about the political instability most imperialized countries suffer, and to put a cruder example, they are never going to get shot by a 22-year-old USamerican soldier doing target practice.