A place to ask questions of Lemmygrad's best and brightest
No real change would occur, new billionaires would grow.
To eliminate billionaires you have to understand the material conditions that make billionaires possible and change them.
Although getting rid of them certainly helps making the systemic change possible, like the romanovs.
Assassinations are anarchist / ultraleft tactics, we want to remove the possibility of billionaires re-becoming or regenerating into existence.
A stark example of this is during the Cuban revolution. Fidel talks about how, near the end of the civil war, they had many opportunities to assassinate the opposing military leaders, but they refused to do so. Why? Because that changes nothing about the nature of the system, and new generals would just take their place. IE we need to remove their ability to regenerate, rather than their manifestation.
Fidel said that assassinations are easy, revolutions are much more difficult, long-lasting, and worthwhile.
It's also noteworthy that the Chinese revolution took the opposite stance from the bolsheviks when it came to treatment of royalty. They proletarianized them, rather than killing them, since their base of power was eradicated.
Fidel said that assassinations are easy,
He of all people should've known that's not fucking true.
They were easy for him
No you do not end capitalism by killing rich people. You end capitalism by abolishing the economic system itself and building a socialist mode of production with a dictatorship of the proletariat administering to its construction.
And how do we do that?
The only way is basically revolution. In a condition of the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie any other way was proven to be impossible, peaceful methods simply don't work and even hypothetical post scarcity economy emerging would be just controlled by the capitalists too (this is already proven too, by the digital goods market)
As others have said, revolution.
But to add more details that someone coming by might want, there is a reason that people like us think revolution is the only way.
1: The rules in place right now incentivize top-down corporate power, as long as "profit" is the only thing that is "rewarded" in our system (Or, the potential for profit, ie: futures gambling, stocks, etc.), powerful people will always find a way to gain more power, and therefore, will always create an exaggerated economy of wealthy and non-wealthy (Though, there are always the petty class, those that buddy up to the corporate powers and do their bidding, making them wealthy, just not quite as wealthy, or quite as powerful, as their corporate masters).
2: Powerful people have shown time and time again that they will use their power to keep their power. That means influencing public opinion (By buying up media outlets and creating media giants) and influencing politics directly (Paying representatives to change the laws to benefit themselves).
3: Based on 1 and 2, the small iterative changes that bring equality & regulation (Such as welfare, regulating pollution, medicine, quality of food, etc.) have shown to be rolled back time and time again, and therefore are ineffective at reducing wealth disparity, or guaranteeing rights or higher quality of life for everyone.
4: The overall culture of Capitalist nations have embedded into them a sense of "justification". If you are poor, you 'deserve' it, if you are rich, you 'deserve' it. The systemic issues that we observe, and our research into fixing those systemic issues, are ignored and the success of those systems blown off by the capitalists as "not scalable" or some other bullshit. Therefore, evidence and reasoning are not enough, in our experience, to change the minds of regular people who are constantly inundated with false solutions and propaganda.
5: Any countries making real progress on fronts that progressives really believe in (Giving money to the poor, moving away from fossil fuels, reacting to terrorist attacks with education instead of war, etc.) are immediately demonized by the capitalists, and lies and propaganda surround these nations. Yes I'm talking about China (And historically, the USSR). Though China is not necessarily the golden example of socialism (This is just my opinion. This is debatable among well-read Marxists, and I'm not saying anyone is wrong if you think China is correct in it's actions. For example, it was able to survive when the USSR didn't, so they are doing something right for sure), they sure are more progressive than the west is, and now they are seen as the #1 enemy of the west, even though when you look at the west and China's actions from afar, you see that on paper, China is much more progressive and much less aggressive than the West is.
That's all I have time to put down for now. This was just the reason for believing that revolution is the only way to fix, this, but it doesn't even touch what happens after the revolution. There is so much more theory/examples from history that cover that, and I don't think the answer is obvious, especially because things that worked elsewhere or on paper may not work for any other particular nation or culture. Hopefully you found this informative anyway. If anyone thought I missed any piece, please feel free to continue adding things to the list. The many, many aspects of our society are intertwined so I'm sure there is so much more we could say, I just felt this, in my head, was a good distilled version of the minimum evidence I've seen that's convinced me that the west has no intention of bettering the lives of average people, and never will.
Historically, revolution is the only means to the goal of establishing the dictatorship of the proletariat and a scientific socialist society based on the science of Marxism-Leninism.
No, it wouldn't, for the same reason why the reactionary fantasy of simply killing all poor people would not result in a society in which everyone is well off. It is the system itself which reproduces the increasingly unequal distribution of wealth.
That being said, we could still do it as a purely recreational activity...
Nope, the money doesn’t die just because the owner did. The multi-millionaires would open businesses in place of the deceased billionaires and probably rake in even more money under a smaller percentage of people, you’d probably need to do a monthly culling of the Billionaires, which may be fun for a while, but it wouldn’t stop billionaires from existing as long as capitalism continues
That's a weird question. Of course it would be inherited by their successors. I don't know if I understand the question.
Their assets would be inherited and production would continue, simply business as usual. Nothing would change in the big scheme of things for two reasons:
Billionaires are not needed for production. They're literally useless. They are leeches that steal the value workers produce. They are not needed for production to go on.
If the mechanisms of wealth accumulation aren't disrupted, new billionaires will appear.
The problem is not the individual billionaires. The problem is the existence of bourgeoisie as a class and their private ownership of the means of production, through which they capture and accumulate the value that we produce through our work.
Even if their wealth is not inherited you'd still have capitalism. Suppose a crazy government killed all billionaires and redistributed all their assets. Even in that case, if private ownership of the means of production continues, surplus value accumulation will eventually produce new billionaires.
You'll never see serious Marxists advocating for polítical assassinations as a strategy. Because it's pointless. They know that the problem isn't specific individuals and their morals, but the mechanisms. Those mechanisms produce a class of individuals who can accumulate power and wealth by controlling other people's work. The only solution is eliminating this mechanism and turning those people into regular workers.
In the late 19th century oppressed Russian workers managed to assassinate multiple magnates, ministers of state, and even managed to assassinate Czar Alexander II in 1881. You know what this accomplished? Absolutely nothing but increased oppression and vigilance. Because the problem isn't individuals. It's how we collectively organize around production.
I mean, depending on how it was accomplished, it would definitely put the fear of god into the next generation of bourgeois.
But there's still an administrative system at play that goes beyond the folks at the top of the pile. If you took the CEO of Blackrock or Exxon and shoved him out of a window on national TV, you'd still have the tens of thousands of staffers pounding away at their rent-collections and fossil-fuel productions. C-levels would move up the chain and we'd get a new generation of ultra-wealthy leaders. Perhaps they'd be more reticent about working in high-rise offices. But they'd still be fixated on managing their corporate empires.
The corporate entity grinds on long after the wealthiest business aristocrats kick the bucket. What you'd ultimately need to do is nationalize these businesses and wind them down. Otherwise, the machinery of exploitation would be picked up by the next ambitious investor or administrator.
I was going to say killing all the billionaires wouldn't work solve everything.
Now if we had a standing policy that as soon as somebody became a billionaire we killed them that would certainly rattle some cages.
Im from Buenos Aires and I say kill em all
If we kept doing it I bet no one would take the money after awhile.
I don’t think it would destroy capitalism as that’s the general basis for the economy.
But history kinda shows (citation needed) that subsequent generations don’t usually keep the … hoard of gold… intact. they’re rich, yes but are not producing “the next thing” just living off the wealth of the previous generation…
Imo even if all billionaires wanted to end capitalism, they couldn't. It's too deeply rooted both materially and ideologically. So no, killing all billionaires would definitely not end capitalism.