There are 2781 billionaires. That’s it. 2781. Saying they are a subset of the bourgeoisie is like saying that saying that a blade of grass is a subset of a forest.
Technically, one could argue that a single molecule in a forest is a subset of the forest, but by any rational standard, a subset of something needs to exhibit similar properties. It needs to be relatable.
And compared to billionaires, the bourgeoisie isn’t different from any of us. They are pawns, they are poor, and they are negligible.
The actual bourgeoisie, as in the texts you probably have read, and take this concept from, is a thing of the past. It is gone. In our modern world, their wealth has to be extracted differently, but it has to be extracted too.
The discrepancy between billionaires and the rest, in wealth (US$14.2 trillion out of US$110 trillion - the Gross World Product, GWP - (or 12.91%); or out of US$184 trillion - the world’s GDP in terms of PPP - (or 7.72%)), or in demographics (2781 people among 8100000000 (or, 0.000034%)) is making them a glitch.
To illustrate my point better (or at least try to), if we were to divide the entire planet according to that monetary value, each of those billionaires would own between 0.02‰ (GDP) and 0.05‰ (GWP) of the entire planet, on average. That’s equivalent to slices of the planet of 36 arcseconds (GDP) or 1 arcminute (GWP), on its entire latitude, and up to its rotation axle, per billionaire. Those would respectively correspond to slices 1.11km or 1.86km wide at the equator, or 789m or 1.31km wide at 45° latitude.
So, they are not part of our system, of the stupid LARP we all decided to play. They are on the side of it, exploiting it and making friends with the admins. They are not different from 14 year olds who found an infinite money glitch in an online game and keep pressing the fucking button over an over as if it would stop their parent’s divorce.
Eliminating class distinctions will not eliminate the existence of the billionaires. They will still have the same wealth, and so, the same power, because their wealth, or power, does not come from their status, as it used to; or as it does in the literature you are very likely (given the Marxist Leninist roots of this corner of the internet) basing yourself upon. It comes a psychotic abuse of systemic glitches.
Almost none of the literature you can find on the subject of classes will account for this. It is all so outdated it is irrelevant.
More than irrelevant, it is critically dangerous. Saying that “eliminating classes distinctions eliminates the existence of billionaires” is not just wrong: it is giving billionaires an opportunity to gaslight us further by pretending not to be the problem.