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Take the Russian oligarch Yevgeny Prigozhin for example, he did in fact have his own mercenary army. Turning on his president did not end well for him.
by morkalork 4mo ago
Take the Russian oligarch Yevgeny Prigozhin for example, he did in fact have his own mercenary army. Turning on his president did not end well for him.
- __d 4mo agoYes. But. I imagine the others did not fail to learn from this.
- zetalyrae 4mo agoWhat evidence would falsify this idea that wealth alone gives you political power?
- sooheon 4mo agoThis straw man doesn't merit falsification. Nobody claims wealth alone gives political power. Wealth applies leverage to all endeavors, but political ends still require strategy and operationalization. It's just a lot easier with a couple trillion dollars, vs. a single individual vote once every couple of years.
- NoGravitas 4mo agoAgree with sibling that this is a straw man. The state exists to protect and serve the capitalist class, not particular capitalists. Actual state policy generally arises out of conflicts between factions within the capitalist class, striving either for direct benefit or for different guesses of what benefits the class as a whole. But the capitalists don't have to provide any benefit to the state to earn its protection, as in your model. It is literally what the state is for.
- morkalork 4mo agoI don't doubt that governments also learned from the same incident.
- varjag 4mo agoHe stopped at the point where Putin had already fled Moscow, and only because of the hostage situation with his family. I'm not sure to which degree that would have deterred Elon.