United States Politics Thread 47

[Travis B.]

And frankly, the very idea of a 'middle class' can go to hell. Rather, the actual classes are the proletariat, the bourgeoisie, the petty bourgeoisie, the lumpenproletariat, and the artisans.

I don't think those are the "actual classes" today, as opposed to 1848-- if it was even useful then.

The key thing is that they are about one's relationship with capital, rather than merely how much money one makes, and one's actual interests are determined by the former, not by the latter.

I think the most useful distinction is the one introduced by the Occupy movement: the 1%, the 10%, and the rest of us. It's simple, objective, and pretty predictive.

The 1% (currently the income cutoff is about $750,000/year) are by no means all right-wingers, but they are the capitalists and almost always get what they want... and what they want is increasingly divorced from what's good for the rest of us.

The 10% is a useful category too (the cutoff is about $150,000/year)-- because these are the people needed and courted by the 1%. You can see here that this group leans more Republican than the 1%. And that's not hard to understand: if you make $200K/year you want to make more and are hyper-conscious of things that hold you back (like, oh, workers). A billionaire is already in effect ruling the world, so they can care about other things.

The problem with this view is that people like the more better-off programmers who still rely on selling their labor to the capitalists may fall in the "10%", while many people who own capital and use it to exploit other people but who still have to work alongside those they exploit (the petty bourgeoisie) may fall in the "rest of us". Yet ultimately the latter's interests are more closely aligned with the capitalists than the former's are. It would serve programmers' interests to unionize, for instance, while the petty bourgeoisie, even if they make less money than them, have interests directly against any kind of unionization.

Now, even the 10% isn't enough to run the country-- you need half the voters. And this is where I'm afraid Marx fails us. People don't vote for what would be best for them... a fact that's been evident since the 1800s. Not even union voters, 41% of whom supported Trump in 2024. Nor is this a new thing: 54% of union voters supported Nixon in 1972.

The key thing is that we must wake people up to acting in their own self-interest. This is what class-consciousness is. We are not going to get anywhere until we convince people to do what is actually good for themselves.

Everybody's got a theory on why-- as jcb noted, Orwell was writing about the problem 90 years ago. Again, I don't think it's hard to understand: when people get better off, they are also more invested in the status quo, far less interested in radical change, and apprehensive about people lower on the socioeconomic scale.

The capitalists work very hard to promote false consciousness, and placing an arbitrary boundary that separates one part of the proletariat from another part of the proletariat only helps them do this. Saying that the 10% is on the side of the capitalists is almost a self-fulfilling prophecy. We must act to convince the 99% that fundamentally they have the same interests as each other, which are served by uniting together against the capitalists.

It's hard to get hard numbers on the nation's mood-- most polls are from 3 or 4 months ago. This page is useful: basically the Republican agenda is not popular... Republicans should be worried when 52% of the country agrees with the statement that Trump is a "dangerous dictator."

This is what happens when people blindly vote for one party on the basis of vague "feels" and then realize that what that party actually stands for is actually diametrically opposed to their own interests.

[Nortaneous]

And frankly, the very idea of a 'middle class' can go to hell. Rather, the actual classes are the proletariat, the bourgeoisie, the petty bourgeoisie, the lumpenproletariat, and the artisans. The idea of a 'middle class' only serves to divide the proletariat against itself and align better-off portions of the proletariat with the bourgeoisie and petty bourgeoisie and against other portions of the proletariat.

The poor work and don't own; the rich own and don't work; the middle class do both.

Alice is a technical writer ($85k/yr, 40 hrs/wk) with an asset portfolio including part-ownership of McDonald's and Nike. What class is Alice?
Bob is an Amazon warehouse manager ($80k/yr, 40+ hrs/wk) who lives frugally in order to maximize the amount of money he puts in the Vanguard S&P 500 ETF. What class is Bob?
Charlie is an experienced welder ($36.00/hr) who does the same thing as Bob. What class is Charlie?
Dan is an experienced welder ($37.50/hr) who's not so good with financial instruments and doesn't really know what stock markets are. Most of his net worth is in his house. What class is Dan?

The 1% (currently the income cutoff is about $750,000/year)

Income?

[Travis B.]

Be careful, Torco, or this board will attack you for being disloyal to liberals and "repeating Republican propaganda"!

Never mind that Zompist himself recently posted on his blog about the book "The Road to Wigan Pier" where Orwell makes the exact same complaint nearly 100 years ago!
- https://zompist.wordpress.com/2025/05/2 ... igan-pier/

Your idea of who 'workers' are is at odds with that, from a socialist perspective, all people who sell their labor to survive are workers, not just traditional blue-collar industrial workers. Workers are the 99% or, more likely, 99.9%. Just because people may be paid relatively decently, may be well-educated, and may not fit the stereotypical blue-collar aesthetic does not mean that they are not workers.

Why are you telling me this? I already know this! You should be telling the white-collar workers, who think they're better than the blue-collar workers, and vote like it.

My complaint is not that well-educated workers don't fit the stereotypical blue-collar aesthetic, but that they betrayed blue-collar workers and helped enact policies that devastated the lives of people who were working those blue-collar jobs, and never bothered to replace them with anything of equal value. Instead, they just told them to go to school and "learn to code", regardless of whether there's actually enough jobs in the market for everybody to do that, or whether that was even a viable option for everybody, or how a flood of qualified graduates would degrade the value of a degree. (Or just told them to make do with "gig" work (Uber, Door Dash, etc).)

It is the capitalists and their propagandists who did this, not the average white-collar worker. Of course, the capitalists would like blue-collar people to believe that this was white-collar workers' fault, as that precisely serves to divide the workers and turn them against one another.

When I see AI driving white-collar workers out of their jobs nowdays, I can't help but feel a little bit of schadenfreude. Now *they* know how the blue-collar folk felt when their factory closed and moved overseas a generation ago. At the very least, I hope it humbles them and grows their sympathy for and solidarity with blue-collar workers.

Schadenfreude is not exactly the sort of thing that promotes solidarity.

And frankly, the very idea of a 'middle class' can go to hell. Rather, the actual classes are the proletariat, the bourgeoisie, the petty bourgeoisie, the lumpenproletariat, and the artisans. The idea of a 'middle class' only serves to divide the proletariat against itself and align better-off portions of the proletariat with the bourgeoisie and petty bourgeoisie and against other portions of the proletariat.

Again, why are you telling me this? I realized that "middle class" was a weasel word long ago. The idea of the "middle class" and how it pits the proles against each other is exactly what I'm railing *against*!

Yet you treat blue-collar workers and white-collar workers as if they were separate social classes with disparate interests, and openly attack white-collar workers as being enemies of blue-collar workers, rather than treat them as parts of one and the same social class with fundamentally aligned interests, where the idea that they have different interests is a lie promoted by the capitalists.

[Travis B.]

And frankly, the very idea of a 'middle class' can go to hell. Rather, the actual classes are the proletariat, the bourgeoisie, the petty bourgeoisie, the lumpenproletariat, and the artisans. The idea of a 'middle class' only serves to divide the proletariat against itself and align better-off portions of the proletariat with the bourgeoisie and petty bourgeoisie and against other portions of the proletariat.

The poor work and don't own; the rich own and don't work; the middle class do both.

Alice is a technical writer ($85k/yr, 40 hrs/wk) with an asset portfolio including part-ownership of McDonald's and Nike. What class is Alice?
Bob is an Amazon warehouse manager ($80k/yr, 40+ hrs/wk) who lives frugally in order to maximize the amount of money he puts in the Vanguard S&P 500 ETF. What class is Bob?
Charlie is an experienced welder ($36.00/hr) who does the same thing as Bob. What class is Charlie?
Dan is an experienced welder ($37.50/hr) who's not so good with financial instruments and doesn't really know what stock markets are. Most of his net worth is in his house. What class is Dan?

Owning some stock or having a 401K does not make one a capitalist. All of these people are workers ─ after all, they for all practical purposes have to sell their labor to the capitalists to survive, and do not make income they can survive off of through ownership of capital. Yes, they might be able to survive for some time if they had a good amount of investments and they sold them to support themselves, but eventually they would run out of money.

[zompist]

The 1% (currently the income cutoff is about $750,000/year)

Income?

I presume you want to talk about wealth instead. But 1) up-to-date data about income is far easier to find, and 2) I doubt it matters much. People with high wealth also have high incomes.

[zompist]

And frankly, the very idea of a 'middle class' can go to hell. Rather, the actual classes are the proletariat, the bourgeoisie, the petty bourgeoisie, the lumpenproletariat, and the artisans.

I don't think those are the "actual classes" today, as opposed to 1848-- if it was even useful then.

The key thing is that they are about one's relationship with capital, rather than merely how much money one makes, and one's actual interests are determined by the former, not by the latter.

Are they? I'd say that's to be established, not assumed.

When I was growing up, arguably the capitalist class had disappeared. Many had lost their wealth in the Depression. Companies were owned by a wide swath of people (i.e. stockholders) whose power was minimized. Pundits were talking about how capitalism was now run by paid professional managers, not by capitalists.

Now, the Reagan revolution put plutocrats back in control, partly due to an explicit policy of paying executive in stock options-- and paying them ten times what they made in the 1960s. Plus things like "stockholder revolts" to ensure that rising stock prices became the sole criterion for success.

The problem with this view is that people like the more better-off programmers who still rely on selling their labor to the capitalists may fall in the "10%", while many people who own capital and use it to exploit other people but who still have to work alongside those they exploit (the petty bourgeoisie) may fall in the "rest of us". Yet ultimately the latter's interests are more closely aligned with the capitalists than the former's are.

Unfortunately I think you're just wrong here. The 10% is the essential class, because the 1% need them and without them would probably be thrown out (or, just as bad for them, waste all their money). If you look at productivity and wage gains since 1980, the 10% has kept up, the 1% has skyrocketed, and the 90% has stagnated. This isn't some kind of coincidence.

It's not that the 10% are politically hopeless-- they lean Republican but not overwhelmingly. But as the rich get richer, they still need lawyers, accountants, doctors, architects, engineers, stockbrokers, newspaper editors, senators, judges, etc. They still want to hobnob with celebrities and send their kids to the best schools. And the 10% is threatened by socialism-- is a specialist doctor still going to make $400K a year? will we need quite that many lawyers? do they still get legacy slots at Harvard? Even when dictatorships fall, there's an appreciable fraction of society which misses them, because they were the ones who benefitted from the system.

The key thing is that we must wake people up to acting in their own self-interest. This is what class-consciousness is. We are not going to get anywhere until we convince people to do what is actually good for themselves.

Sure, but saying what we want isn't a plan. Not that you have to provide one, but I'm talking about how the system works (and how to predict how it works) and you're just wishing it worked differently. I wish it did too.

[malloc]

Meanwhile it looks like Trump has all but declared martial law in Los Angeles with thousands of national guards and marines sent to the city in response to protests against ICE. He has successfully manufactured the crisis he needs to turn the general public in his favor. Let nobody ever tell me I was overreacting again.

[Torco]

I think to overly focus on income is a proletarian kind of mistake: sure, for *us* income is our main relationship with money, right? some of it comes in over time, and we use that to survive. but people who are rich, even smalltime rich, don't really relate to money in this way: for example, they can go without income for years, if needs be (I've seen it) simply cause they have so many assets. they sell one parking lot here, some stock there. similarly, they often do things through the company: so their personal income may be much much smaller than the amount of money they spend on their own needs: people live in houses owned by their companies, or drive around company cars, or cars that are owned by some company that is owned by the company that blablabla. (sure, accountingwise that's income, but smalltime rich people income is very very grey)

so income is a decent metric to figure out which *workers* are the most well off, but above that, yeah, you need to start thinking in net worth, on power, on connections, on relationships of mutual obligation between CEOs that sit on the same boards etcetera, and politicians, and judges, and army officers, and high level consultants. it truly is an aristocracy, functionally, though perhaps more in chile than in other places tbh. and at that level you're not even close to the REAL power. the musks, the carlos slims, the gateses and the bezoses.

[zompist]

I think to overly focus on income is a proletarian kind of mistake: sure, for *us* income is our main relationship with money, right? some of it comes in over time, and we use that to survive. but people who are rich, even smalltime rich, don't really relate to money in this way: for example, they can go without income for years, if needs be (I've seen it) simply cause they have so many assets. they sell one parking lot here, some stock there. similarly, they often do things through the company: so their personal income may be much much smaller than the amount of money they spend on their own needs: people live in houses owned by their companies, or drive around company cars, or cars that are owned by some company that is owned by the company that blablabla. (sure, accountingwise that's income, but smalltime rich people income is very very grey)

There are going to be fascinating sociological differences between wealth and income, but come on, who cares? Do you seriously think the top 0.01% in income and the top 0.01% in wealth are hugely different in interests or behavior? or that they are in fact disjoint sets?

It might be different in Chile, but let's look at the top 10 richest people in the US. Tech founders: 8. Financiers, 2. Among the next 10 you get more diversity: more tech guys, head of food and energy companies, and the Walton kids. Almost all of these are the ones who founded and built their companies-- the Walton kids are 2nd generation.

At that level, the distinction between income and wealth is merely an afternoon's puzzle for the accountant. When you own the company you distribute the profits as personal income or personal equity as you like. And as I said earlier, "as you like" is now an order of magnitude more than it was in the '60s.

BTW, those top 10 people, if my math is correct, collectively own 1% of the US's wealth.

Again, it's not that there is no interesting difference. In 19th century Europe, the rentier class was very important. But it's probably arguable that if that's the situation of your country, it's in decline as a capitalist state (but in denial about that decline).

[Raphael]

The poor work and don't own; the rich own and don't work; the middle class do both.

Alice is a technical writer ($85k/yr, 40 hrs/wk) with an asset portfolio including part-ownership of McDonald's and Nike. What class is Alice?
Bob is an Amazon warehouse manager ($80k/yr, 40+ hrs/wk) who lives frugally in order to maximize the amount of money he puts in the Vanguard S&P 500 ETF. What class is Bob?
Charlie is an experienced welder ($36.00/hr) who does the same thing as Bob. What class is Charlie?
Dan is an experienced welder ($37.50/hr) who's not so good with financial instruments and doesn't really know what stock markets are. Most of his net worth is in his house. What class is Dan?

Owning some stock or having a 401K does not make one a capitalist. All of these people are workers ─ after all, they for all practical purposes have to sell their labor to the capitalists to survive, and do not make income they can survive off of through ownership of capital. Yes, they might be able to survive for some time if they had a good amount of investments and they sold them to support themselves, but eventually they would run out of money.

I don't usually agree with Nort on political things, but he's got a point here. In all of his cases, their ownership of wealth is likely to make them react differently to certain kinds of events or proposals than someone without that wealth would. The first three are likely to be up in arms if someone proposes nationalization, or running corporations in ways different from the Friedman doctrine. As for Dan, he'll probably be in favor of keeping homelessness high, because building more homes might decrease the value of his home.

[Raphael]

Rather, the actual classes are the proletariat, the bourgeoisie, the petty bourgeoisie, the lumpenproletariat, and the artisans.

Nah, quite obviously, the three main actual classes are the dominant class, the stakeholders, and the proletarians.

[keenir]

Meanwhile it looks like Trump has all but declared martial law in Los Angeles with thousands of national guards and marines sent to the city in response to protests against ICE. He has successfully manufactured the crisis he needs to turn the general public in his favor.

The "general public" of what country?

also, he's not doing this to make people like him - he's doing it because Musk broke up with him.

Let nobody ever tell me I was overreacting again.

Why not? If the shoe fits...

[Nortaneous]

And frankly, the very idea of a 'middle class' can go to hell. Rather, the actual classes are the proletariat, the bourgeoisie, the petty bourgeoisie, the lumpenproletariat, and the artisans. The idea of a 'middle class' only serves to divide the proletariat against itself and align better-off portions of the proletariat with the bourgeoisie and petty bourgeoisie and against other portions of the proletariat.

The poor work and don't own; the rich own and don't work; the middle class do both.

Alice is a technical writer ($85k/yr, 40 hrs/wk) with an asset portfolio including part-ownership of McDonald's and Nike. What class is Alice?
Bob is an Amazon warehouse manager ($80k/yr, 40+ hrs/wk) who lives frugally in order to maximize the amount of money he puts in the Vanguard S&P 500 ETF. What class is Bob?
Charlie is an experienced welder ($36.00/hr) who does the same thing as Bob. What class is Charlie?
Dan is an experienced welder ($37.50/hr) who's not so good with financial instruments and doesn't really know what stock markets are. Most of his net worth is in his house. What class is Dan?

Owning some stock or having a 401K does not make one a capitalist. All of these people are workers ─ after all, they for all practical purposes have to sell their labor to the capitalists to survive, and do not make income they can survive off of through ownership of capital. Yes, they might be able to survive for some time if they had a good amount of investments and they sold them to support themselves, but eventually they would run out of money.

Workers whose ability to retire depends on policymakers continuing to prioritize the health of the market - which, to the bourgeoisie, is a desirable mindset to inculcate in a democracy, hence policy support for the existence of a broad middle class.

[Torco]

There are going to be fascinating sociological differences between wealth and income, but come on, who cares?(...)

I mean... you're not wrong, to a first approximation, income is not a bad proxy in the sense that it gives few false positives (if your income is 55 minwages, you're certainly rich^TM). but it is bad in that it yields a lot of false negatives (you can be rich^TM and have a relatively normal income). this isn't so true or so relevant at the 0.1% level and above, where they basically live beyond money, their wealth and income might as well be infinite, but it is more relevant at the 1% level. more relevantly, just making 30 minwages but owning nothing, or maybe a house, is very different from making 30 minwages and owning 300 apartments, or a controlling interest in a business holding, or 30.000 hectares of land. I'd probably call the first working class and not the second.

for various reasons, I know maybe a dozen of these extremely wealthy people with fairly normal incomes. their lives are so weird.

[Lērisama]

Rather, the actual classes are the proletariat, the bourgeoisie, the petty bourgeoisie, the lumpenproletariat, and the artisans.

Nah, quite obviously, the three main actual classes are the dominant class, the stakeholders, and the proletarians.

That's a reference to Etanëism, isn't it? It took me a moment to work it out without the Verdurian.

[Raphael]

Rather, the actual classes are the proletariat, the bourgeoisie, the petty bourgeoisie, the lumpenproletariat, and the artisans.

Nah, quite obviously, the three main actual classes are the dominant class, the stakeholders, and the proletarians.

That's a reference to Etanëism, isn't it? It took me a moment to work it out without the Verdurian.

Yes. I used English translations to make it more accessible.

[Travis B.]

I don't think those are the "actual classes" today, as opposed to 1848-- if it was even useful then.

The key thing is that they are about one's relationship with capital, rather than merely how much money one makes, and one's actual interests are determined by the former, not by the latter.

Are they? I'd say that's to be established, not assumed.

Take myself -- I am decently paid by Milwaukee standards, have a 401K, and like -- yet my interests are more aligned with other workers than, say, a small business owner's would be, even if they have less income than myself. Socialism would mean my gaining a share in the democratic control of my workplace. Socialism would also mean that small business owner being stripped of sole control of their business and being made equal with the workers that were formerly below them. Now what predicts this? I sell my labor for a living, whereas the small business owner profits from direct control of capital and using that direct control of capital to extract the products of their employees' labor.

When I was growing up, arguably the capitalist class had disappeared. Many had lost their wealth in the Depression. Companies were owned by a wide swath of people (i.e. stockholders) whose power was minimized. Pundits were talking about how capitalism was now run by paid professional managers, not by capitalists.

Such paid professional managers are probably an example of what is sometimes described as a labor aristocracy.

The problem with this view is that people like the more better-off programmers who still rely on selling their labor to the capitalists may fall in the "10%", while many people who own capital and use it to exploit other people but who still have to work alongside those they exploit (the petty bourgeoisie) may fall in the "rest of us". Yet ultimately the latter's interests are more closely aligned with the capitalists than the former's are.

Unfortunately I think you're just wrong here. The 10% is the essential class, because the 1% need them and without them would probably be thrown out (or, just as bad for them, waste all their money). If you look at productivity and wage gains since 1980, the 10% has kept up, the 1% has skyrocketed, and the 90% has stagnated. This isn't some kind of coincidence.

It's not that the 10% are politically hopeless-- they lean Republican but not overwhelmingly. But as the rich get richer, they still need lawyers, accountants, doctors, architects, engineers, stockbrokers, newspaper editors, senators, judges, etc. They still want to hobnob with celebrities and send their kids to the best schools. And the 10% is threatened by socialism-- is a specialist doctor still going to make $400K a year? will we need quite that many lawyers? do they still get legacy slots at Harvard? Even when dictatorships fall, there's an appreciable fraction of society which misses them, because they were the ones who benefitted from the system.

As for the 10%, again, it all depends on their relationship with capital. If they are simply well-paid workers, with socialism they will gain a share in the democratic control of their everyday lives. The chance of losing their livelihood just because those who were above them just decide some day that they are no longer needed will no longer hang over their heads. Yes, they may no longer be paid quite as much, simply because pay decisions would be made collectively by the workers at, say, the hospital in a democratic fashion, but that is a small price to pay for freedom. If they are petty bourgeoisie, e.g. they are a doctor who owns a private clinic and who employs other people, though, they stand to lose from socialism, because they will be stripped of that from which they make a profit.

The key thing is that we must wake people up to acting in their own self-interest. This is what class-consciousness is. We are not going to get anywhere until we convince people to do what is actually good for themselves.

Sure, but saying what we want isn't a plan. Not that you have to provide one, but I'm talking about how the system works (and how to predict how it works) and you're just wishing it worked differently. I wish it did too.

Yes, it is not a plan -- it does not specify how we get to that point -- it is just stating a precondition to achieving socialism that we must somehow reach. Of course, the question then is how do we get there?

[Travis B.]

The poor work and don't own; the rich own and don't work; the middle class do both.

Alice is a technical writer ($85k/yr, 40 hrs/wk) with an asset portfolio including part-ownership of McDonald's and Nike. What class is Alice?
Bob is an Amazon warehouse manager ($80k/yr, 40+ hrs/wk) who lives frugally in order to maximize the amount of money he puts in the Vanguard S&P 500 ETF. What class is Bob?
Charlie is an experienced welder ($36.00/hr) who does the same thing as Bob. What class is Charlie?
Dan is an experienced welder ($37.50/hr) who's not so good with financial instruments and doesn't really know what stock markets are. Most of his net worth is in his house. What class is Dan?

Owning some stock or having a 401K does not make one a capitalist. All of these people are workers ─ after all, they for all practical purposes have to sell their labor to the capitalists to survive, and do not make income they can survive off of through ownership of capital. Yes, they might be able to survive for some time if they had a good amount of investments and they sold them to support themselves, but eventually they would run out of money.

I don't usually agree with Nort on political things, but he's got a point here. In all of his cases, their ownership of wealth is likely to make them react differently to certain kinds of events or proposals than someone without that wealth would. The first three are likely to be up in arms if someone proposes nationalization, or running corporations in ways different from the Friedman doctrine. As for Dan, he'll probably be in favor of keeping homelessness high, because building more homes might decrease the value of his home.

All of these people can be fired or laid off any day by the capitalists they sell their labor to at a whim, and really do not have fundamental control over their work lives. Socialism would give them security -- e.g. being let go may require, say, a supermajority vote at their work site specifically to make it hard to let people go on a whim -- and a greater say* in their everyday lives -- in that it would make the enterprises at which they work directly democratic.

* You could argue that Bob already has a say in his everday work life, but the matter is that he is still beholden to the will of the executives above him.

[Travis B.]

There are going to be fascinating sociological differences between wealth and income, but come on, who cares?(...)

I mean... you're not wrong, to a first approximation, income is not a bad proxy in the sense that it gives few false positives (if your income is 55 minwages, you're certainly rich^TM). but it is bad in that it yields a lot of false negatives (you can be rich^TM and have a relatively normal income). this isn't so true or so relevant at the 0.1% level and above, where they basically live beyond money, their wealth and income might as well be infinite, but it is more relevant at the 1% level. more relevantly, just making 30 minwages but owning nothing, or maybe a house, is very different from making 30 minwages and owning 300 apartments, or a controlling interest in a business holding, or 30.000 hectares of land. I'd probably call the first working class and not the second.

for various reasons, I know maybe a dozen of these extremely wealthy people with fairly normal incomes. their lives are so weird.

I agree -- if you make 30 minimum wages but own nothing or just a house you are indeed working class, whereas if you make 30 minimum wages but you own 300 apartments, a controlling interest in a business, or 30,000 hectares of land you are either bourgeois or petty bourgeois.

[Raphael]

All of these people can be fired or laid off any day by the capitalists they sell their labor to at a whim, and really do not have fundamental control over their work lives. Socialism would give them security -- e.g. being let go may require, say, a supermajority vote at their work site specifically to make it hard to let people go on a whim -- and a greater say* in their everyday lives -- in that it would make the enterprises at which they work directly democratic.

* You could argue that Bob already has a say in his everday work life, but the matter is that he is still beholden to the will of the executives above him.

True enough, but thing is, what I wrote is true, too. For the people in question, socialism might have upsides, but it would clearly have downsides, too.

The larger problem is that you seem to assume as a matter of course that everyone should, ideally, be for establishing their own freedom as seen by you. But people might have different ideas of freedom than you.

A follower of the one or other kind of Asian mysticism might tell me that I could only be "truly" free if I followed their preferred form of meditative practice. I would probably start out by politely ignoring someone like that, and eventually tell them to get lost if they should become too annoying.