In colonial Brazil it was possible to go from being a slave, to being free to being a slave owner. That doesn't justify slavery. When wage-slaves do the same under capitalism it doesn't justify capitalism. The existence of social mobility does not justify a social system. Not all slave owners were millionaires or billionaires, either.
Those who attempt to go from wage-slave to business owner usually fail, few make it. Those who do become members of the petty bourgeoisie (small business owners) and are generally dependant on the bank. The small business owner exploits his workers but the bank gets all or most of the profits from it. Most of the economy is controlled and run by members of the capitalist class, the super-wealthy. Small business owners are a tiny influence. A small-time boss is still a boss, just as a small-time slave master is still a slave master.
While production does require coordination and administration, this does not justify capitalist forms of production or the grossly disproportionate amount of wealth capitalists are given. In a slave society slave drivers and owners would sometimes do coordination necessary for production while making their slaves produce for them. Just as it is possible to coordinate production without slave drivers it is also possible to coordinate production without capitalists. There have been many examples of worker-run cooperatives, run on a non-hierarchical basis without capitalists, producing things just as effectively as a capitalist corporation.
Like slave owners, capitalists may spend a large portion of their time manipulating their underlings to maximize the amount of money they make, but that time neither produces anything nor justified the privileged position of the capitalist. Most of the “work” done by capitalists running a business is in reality manipulating workers so as to maximize exploitation (thereby maximizing profit). Most capitalists hire people to do whatever coordination and administration is necessary for production and do little of it themselves. In contemporary capitalism this has lead to the growth of a separate techno-bureaucratic class that controls the workers for the capitalists. In general the higher up the hierarchy and the farther from the point of production the less genuine coordination and administration is done. A thief that does a lot of scheming is still a thief.
In the United States the richest 1% of the population (the capitalist class) owns more wealth then the bottom 95% of the population combined . It is physically impossible for that one percent to work harder then the other ninety-five percent. There simply aren’t enough hours in the day. The average American worker works around 50 hours a week; for the capitalists to work ninety-five times more then the average worker he would have to work 4,250 hours a week! There are only 168 hours in a week; it’s not possible for this wealth disparity to be the result of capitalists working harder.
America is rich because it has a history of imperialism & neocolonialism in other countries. As a result the sweatshops that corporate capitalism would produce anyway are distributed unevenly. The weaker countries get more of them, the imperialist countries less. The only way for capitalism to not have sweatshops, etc. is to implement a welfare state and the structure of capitalism is such that welfare states are temporary phenomena.
