Class flows from the concealed and naturalized capital-labor relation. Facing that omnipresent reality and being forced to sell your labor does not make you a member of the class that falls on the side of capital, even if you make a lot of money. The point of saying the wage side of that relation is possibly home for a politically-aligned class is to say that they have in common not being able to live without handing over time to capital. Even if you make lots of money, you had no choice of being on the side of labor. The alternative to capital, its potential negation, is that there will be no money, capital, or class, and that all will possess their time. That means you are rewarded not with money, but with your life and your time.

Falling on the side of labor now, against capital, means your life is taken, and your time is over-coded with capital’s prerogatives. You do not have direct access to your labor as it functions in the world. It functions via capital’s prerogatives. You are not paid in terms of meaning or purpose. There is a layer of abstract labor you must work through, that alienates you from the actual work you do. Capital takes your time and life, and it pays you what it thinks it needs to in order to get you to return to work each day.

What it pays you is a totally separate question form the value it is extracting from your labor. And value for capital is a totally separate question from personal value for workers or society. If capital must destroy the socially valuable in pursuit of economic value, it will. Your time does work for capital, and it is assessed as something that points towards survival, first, before any higher human satisfaction. Capital does not pay you based on the social meaning of your work, or how emancipatory it is.

You may find plenty of meaning in your work, but you also will always know you are at the mercy of the economy, too. You will always know that if you lose the job, you are back to facing a situation where you must find a way to sell your time again. If you have money saved up? Great. You are still not a capitalist, because you are not compelling other people to work. There’s also the fact that your little stockpile of money itself changes its value depending on economic factors.

Six months of savings becomes six weeks of savings in the right economic crisis. Your time is also not only unobstructed by capitalist labor in this kind of break from work, but also undisturbed by capital’s demands on economy in subordinating others. Meaning, there is no guarantee you will have capital’s interest just because you have a little pile of money. Having capital’s interest is to be in the economy, moving through it on the capital side of the relation, or attempting to cross over to capital from a weaker position.

Capital pays you what it thinks you will need to survive, and its extraction of surplus is untethered from such an arrangement. These appear to us as one reality, that we are getting paid in conjunction with what value we produce, but they are in fact separate realities.
Having money to buy time, if unobstructed by capital’s demands, may radicalize you. When I became disabled, I got on welfare, and that free time radicalized me. Even if you make good money in labor, your time is always capital’s, and always works first at the economic level.

Capitalist society’s dominant layer is economic activity given to the market. Secondary is what any of this labor means for the workers. This blind system itself is perfect for the capital owners in obscuring society enough that their power can’t meaningfully be challenged. Even if that means they are occasionally at its mercy as well. Even if you are fortunate enough to find a job that allows you personal meaning, it is always at the mercy of the economy or political power.

It points towards survival, first, before any satisfaction, even if you can afford to forget that from time to time. See: all these supposedly bourgeois academics, faculty, and students workings towards those positions, who have been forced out in recent years. That personal meaning for those students and academics evaporated immediately in the wake of both actions for Palestine and state attacks on education. In a flash, they no longer had their luxury of meaning.

To fall on the capital side means you own the present. You have to tend to that time, but you tend to your ownership of your own life and your own time. You command others and feed off their time, even if there is an unconsciously mediated economic thrust shaping your actions. If you are on the wage-labor side of the relation, you live in capital’s present, which means your time is capital’s. You will be interpellated again and again to watch over that time with capital’s interest.

The only problem for capital is that ownership becomes a zero-sum relation, and in communism that reality disappears. Communism is technically where life becomes stable at a baseline for all, which is in everybody’s interest, but this cannot be taken as obvious or as a pre-given. Communists have to demonstrate why common care is preferable. We are in a society that says personal wealth is the highest human ideal. It also says there is no other possibility.

To make the case that capitalist ideals are not the real ceiling for humanity, we have to fight to make the case. Which always means developing a social practice that illustrates common social care and collective freedom. You can’t just point to the fact that the value of free time or common care isn’t already apparent as a way to refuse the task of the task of communism. Of course it isn’t apparent, but we certainly are not accepting capital’s premises for ourselves or anyone else, either.

Even the capitalist would be better off with communism, never mind a labor aristocrat. A communist must be able to make both an ideological appeal on that level, but also understand scientifically why such societies prior to communism are unstable. You can’t just point to the fact that the value of free time or common care isn’t already apparent as a way to refuse the task of communism. Of course it isn’t apparent, but we certainly are not accepting capital’s premises for ourselves, or anyone else, either.