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The Hotel Capital

Imagine capitalist society as a grand hotel. The floors correspond to your place in society. Most of the people who read this won't be on the ground floor; they will be privileged to live in the "developed" world, and so will be a few floors up.

But most of the people who read this will be far away from the top of the hotel. They will be working for the people upstairs, and will have a worse standard of living than the people upstairs as well. Imagine that the people on the lower floors, the "working class", are given jobs which involve using the equipment and materials owned by the people on the top floors, the "ruling class". The equipment is given to the workers through the service elevator, and the goods and services they produce are transported upstairs. The bosses on the upper floors give the workers money in return, with which they can buy back some of what they produce.

As I said, the people reading this probably aren't on the ground floor. The ground floor doesn't have clean drinking water, or central heating. In fact the ground floor is war-torn, by different groups on the ground floor who fight over scarce resources, and by the armies of the higher floors, who time and again plunder the little resources on the ground floor, sometimes in the name of bringing "democracy" and "freedom" to the ground floor "savages" who can't govern themselves.

The people on the ground floor sometimes make the arduous journey to the middle floors. None get to the top floors, which are heavily guarded. And there are no safe or easy routes to the middle floors, no elevators or stairs. They have to climb ropes, which can break if too many make the journey, or if they lose their grip, and they can plunge to their deaths.

The middle floors are grouped roughly into those who do semi legal (sex work, theft, drug trade) dangerous or insecure work; those who have steady jobs and who are just about managing, and those who either manage others, have highly valued professions or are small employers.

The top floors are composed of the big industrial leaders, including large media owners, manufacturing and retail executives, financiers and large landlords.

Those on the top floor have a number of strategies to keep those on the lower and middle floors from revolting: they set them against each other by saying that those on the lower floors are coming to take the meagre, underpaid jobs from the middle floor inhabitants. They also pit those on the lower middle floors (benefits claimants, precarious workers, hyper-exploited minorities) against the slightly more privileged people on the upper middle floors. They even try to divide people on the floors below them on the basis of gender, race, nationality, religious beliefs etc.

The problem with the hotel isn't ultimately that there are people on the bottom floor with very little, or that those on the middle floors rarely move up to the upper floors. The problem isn't even the "evil" people on the top floors. Some of the people on the top floors are children, or have been raised to believe that they have been put there by God or the natural order. The problem is the structure of the hotel itself, the fact that there are different floors (classes), some with better lives than others for no reason. The problem is that those on the upper floors benefit from the fact that they are above the lower floors.

What is the solution? Not to make the lower floors a bit nicer. Not to allow people to have vacations up to the top floor, or to democratically elect the top floor. The solution is to smash the hotel, the system of domination of the top floors over the lower floors, and to replace that system with one without upper and lower floors, where everyone is on an equal and free.

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