This article is not about Beyonce.
That must seem strange since the title directly references her. My thinking on this began with seeing the conversation around a change in her wealth status. This week Forbes declared Beyonce is officially a billionaire. She is now one of five musicians that are billionaires in the world. In the past few years, musicians becoming billionaires has elicited a repetitious conversation centered on the same question: is there a such thing as an ethical billionaire?
The answer is simple, of course. There is no such thing as an ethical billionaire. No possibility. No matter what they did or did not do. No mater who they are. Yet, the question persists because the figure of the billionaire means different things to different people. That is why this article is and is not about Beyonce. She is only the newest figure to bring out our collective anxieties around identity politics and wealth accumulation. Ultimately, this is about what the billionaire signifies for us and why our investment in this figure is a fantasy.
The very term "billionaire" is a successful propaganda campaign. Successful because the term "billionaire" controls the very framing of the debate. The term makes the status into an individual's identity. As if having a billion dollars is a feature or result of who they are. Then the conversation becomes about the person and whether they are "ethical." There will be defenders of the person and detractors. Yet, the entire conversation becomes about that individual person. Did they work hard or not? Did they do "good" with their money? We become fixated on the individual, which is great for their branding. The status of “billionaire” has produced a new idea of an icon.
The musician billionaire poses an even more extreme version of this obfuscation. Unlike other billionaires that clearly made their money in scrupulous and openly exploitative ways, it is not always clear how a musician is unethical. In fact, the past few musicians that have become billionaires are popular avatars for identities that are normally represented as either oppressed or marginalized. So, the figure tends to have working class and marginalized people claiming a sense of pride from their accomplishment. This complicates the conversation. The conversation tends to become a kind of accounting of the individual's accomplishments, work ethic, and possible transgressions. In this way, we are weighing the supposed ethicality of an individual.
Yet, when it comes to accumulating a billion dollars, the individual person does not matter. How can that be true? Did the individual person not make a series of decisions that allowed them to accumulate that money? Perhaps. Even though on any given year, many of the new billionaires are actually inheritors coming of age. So, they did nothing but be born. Regardless, the nepotism is not even the point. The reason a family is allowed to hoard and then pass on their wealth to a child that did nothing to "earn" the wealth is because they /own/ their wealth. A billionaire is not an individual then because they can and will pass this wealth on -- whether to a spouse, children, a business, or a foundation. Their wealth is an institutional arrangement that is actually transindividual. Jay Z and Beyonce’s children will be billionaires too. A billionaire is actually a relation to global system of capital. The billionaire class is not about an amount of money, it is about being an owner of a significant amount of productive assets.
When Forbes or whoever declares a person a "billionaire", they do not mean they have a billion dollars in cash. They actually have interesting -- and oftentimes problematic -- methods for calculating their assets and debts. Ultimately, it is less about liquid cash and the valuation of capital assets. The "billionaire" class are more accurately called the capitalist class. This class owns a set of assets that are valued at a certain amount of money. These assets are not the same thing as the property that most working-class people own. When I buy a car, it is not an asset, it is a liability. The reason being is because it is immediately worth less after I buy it. It also will cost me money to maintain and use. It will not generate money for me. When we buy computers and televisions and phones, it is the same thing. These are not assets. Most of us may own property, but we do not own capital, which is to say assets that can potentially make profit (wealth that can generate more wealth). So, this is why most people are not capitalists. We do not own capital.
The capitalist class are those who own capital, which is to say assets and wealth that can generate more wealth. Beyonce owns the company that manages her global brand including her image, her music and, most lucratively, her global tours. This company exploits its laborers, like any capitalist business. This does not mean she necessarily pays slave wages (though I am sure if you investigate far enough into her investments and their relationship to the global supply chain, you will find something like that). This is to say she necessarily pays all her workers less money than they generate from their labor by virtue of her being an owner. This is necessary, not special to any individual capitalist. She charges her customers more money than the money she invested into the product. That is how any capitalist business generates profit. These things have nothing to do with her as a person. All capitalists must do this or else their business will fail. Capitalism is about generating profit, and you make profit through the exploitation of labor and consumer markets: to make labor produce more value than you pay and make customers pay more than you initially invested. If she did not do this, her management company and her other businesses would fail (she, like any businessperson, has many failures). This is what it means to be a capitalist.
In actuality, a billion is an arbitrary number to laud as an accomplishment. One can be a capitalist without being worth a billion dollars. The person who owns a restaurant is a capitalist. Your landlord is a capitalist. They are capitalists because they own an asset that potentially produces more wealth. Not all capitalists are the same though. Some capitalists own one restaurant while others own a portfolio of restaurants. If the capitalist who owns one restaurant experiences a failed business, then the one asset they have becomes a potential crushing liability. If a capitalist who owns 100 restaurants has one restaurant go bankrupt, then it is not a catastrophic loss. So, all capitalists are not equal. Some own so many assets that they can then use their ownership to dominate an industry, a nation, or even the world. A "billionaire" is an arbitrary sign for a capitalist who owns enough assets to leverage their ownership into power over industries. That's really it. A billionaire signifies the possibility for a capitalist to dominate the economy more than other capitalists. The entire system of capitalism is a brutal anti-democratic hierarchy wherein those who own the assets of the world get to dominate those who do not own. The capitalist class, by definition, is an anti-democratic class built to exploit and dominate. Therefore, by definition, all capitalists are unethical.
From here on I will not be talking about Beyonce anymore. I hope it is clear by now this essay was never about her, really. It does not matter how much someone works, no person has the right to dominate others. No person, no matter how hard they work, "earns" this position of domination. I mean this in absolute terms.
No one "earns" any amount of money, let alone a billion. I don't earn my wage. Neither do you. The market sets a price for our labor, and we sell ourselves for that wage. The capitalist class owns assets built on the labor that others sell to them. The labor is what produces the value, but the capitalist owns the asset that accumulates the labor we sell to them. They did not earn our servitude that produces the value they accumulate. We sold it to them when we sold our bodies to work and then buy the products with the money we gained from selling our bodies.
And why do we sell our labor -- the work of our bodies for a certain amount of time? Because if we do not, we will starve to death. We need money to buy the things we need to live. Everything we need to live has been made into a commodity. You cannot live without buying. We did not earn this condition. We were born into a system wherein every means of survival was changed into an accumulated commodity.
This condition is built and protected at gunpoint. How do I know this? Go to a store and take some food without paying for it, in the open, and see what happens. If you don't have money, you will starve and the stores with the food you need to live will protect their assets with the help of the police. The police will then kidnap you if they do not kill you if they catch you eating without paying. The value of commodities and the capitalist ownership over commodities are protected by state-sanctioned violence. If this sounds dramatic, then just know most of us are much closer to being homeless than we are to being the billionaires we all respect so much. Most of us are closer to the gun of the police than the top of the capitalist hierarchy.
Yet, the value comes from us. The entire global system's values are not generated by capitalists, they are owned by them. But the value comes from us. The value comes from our work and our consumption. The value is not made by capitalists, it is stolen and hoarded. Every single person that owns enough assets to be valued at a billion dollars STOLE our global collective value and is hoarding it for themselves. How can I call it stealing? Because we generate the value and yet the majority of the world is in some form of food insecurity. Starving. Poor. Working paycheck to paycheck. Debt accumulated against our lives. That is what has generated the entire world's value.
None of us have earned these positions. They are positions created by brutal and exploitative systems. They are held together by gunpoint and starvation. No homeless person earned that position. No billionaire earned that position either. Capitalism is not about what we deserve. It is a system built for the small group of owners to squeeze profit and value from the exploitation of the global majority and the earth. None of this ethical. In fact, capitalism exists by not caring about ethics. All ethics are sacrificed for the means to make profit. No matter how much a person may desire to be ethical, once they decide to build a business built on exploitation, domination, and accumulation, then they have also decided to be indifferent to the ethics of the entire system. All capitalists are unethical then. No action they take can change what their class is. We all work hard, but some decide to participate in a system of anti-democratic accumulation and hoarding. They choose to own the value we all collectively produced.
This system is killing us and the earth. We must either transform this global condition or continue to be crushed by it. There is no ethical choice within the bounds of its violence. A billionaire has chosen to enrich themselves on the gears grinding the earth into dust. The billionaire musician is a figure who tries to make us feel good about being crushed. We identify with them as they identify with the capitalist system that is indifferent to our suffering. We must avoid the trap of feel-good self-destruction. We all deserve the billions -- trillions -- produced. We all deserve the value we helped to make. We all deserve to survive, live, and thrive. The ethical choice is to be found outside the economic despotism we have euphemistically named "the billionaire."
Nicholas Brady is a Black writer from Baltimore and an Assistant Professor of Critical Black Studies at Bucknell University. His scholarly work investigates the ways that Black flesh conceptually disturbs normative understandings of technology, machine intelligence, the political, the urban, ecology, sexuality, communication, and social change. He is currently at work on a monograph exploring the relationship between blackness, sound, and artificial intelligence. You can find more of his work: https://lnk.bio/nicholasbrady