Everyone is kinda zipping right past the corporatism part and getting right into shitting on “intellectuals”. It seems to me like a lot of leftist intellectuals’ overarching distaste for the business world is driven by the actions of mega corporations and the people who profit the most off of those. I’ve had a lot of conversations with people who genuinely don’t seem to understand the margins that an average small business owner operates under, yet they hate them for simply owning anything, and that is largely driven by the way that people like Musk and Bezos make them feel rather than the fundamental system of capitalism itself.

Most people like what capitalism fundamentally is, but when you live under it and you see it lead to these levels of income inequality, it’s not difficult to see how you start rejecting the system itself after the reforms you want fail over and over. IMO a shitload of this could be solved by just increasing taxes on the very very upper levels of wealth but that’s an uphill battle when you’re dealing with people who’d rather burn the thing down while looting it on their way out than take any kind of pay cut.