I just looked up the exact stats and it turns out my hypothetical world isn't hypothetical. Currently the average "small business" owner takes home less than $70k a year. [1] Small business in quotes because that term has been distorted so politicians can give handouts to big business and claim they're supporting small business. 99.9% of all businesses in the US are classified as "small business" which includes companies with hundreds of employees and revenue in the tens of millions of dollars, so the "average" there is misleadingly high.
Factor in the fact that a business owner is going to be working far more hours on average, than a 'worker', and it turns out that we do live live in this apparently not-so-hypothetical world where proles make more than bougies if we just define classes by their 'modes of economic interaction'! We can argue/nitpick the specifics in Marx's time, but I don't think you can claim in good faith that the situation was even remotely like this, and his logic was largely based on the conditions that he lived in. Even the most fundamental concepts like means of production are obsolete because in modern times everybody owns the most valuable (by a very wide margin) means of production.
And the pleasure or pain of labor is always relative to itself. For most people there's about a million things they'd rather be doing than working (including for business owners), but everybody has to put food on the plate and in modern times that's so much more pleasant an endeavor that it can't really be overstated, and this applies even to relatively recent times. When I, and I assume you, were growing up don't you remember getting endlessly spammed on TV with the non-stop 'Hurt on the job? Call Mr. Ambulance Chaser at 123-4567 today, and get what you deserve!'
Factor in the fact that a business owner is going to be working far more hours on average, than a 'worker', and it turns out that we do live live in this apparently not-so-hypothetical world where proles make more than bougies if we just define classes by their 'modes of economic interaction'! We can argue/nitpick the specifics in Marx's time, but I don't think you can claim in good faith that the situation was even remotely like this, and his logic was largely based on the conditions that he lived in. Even the most fundamental concepts like means of production are obsolete because in modern times everybody owns the most valuable (by a very wide margin) means of production.
And the pleasure or pain of labor is always relative to itself. For most people there's about a million things they'd rather be doing than working (including for business owners), but everybody has to put food on the plate and in modern times that's so much more pleasant an endeavor that it can't really be overstated, and this applies even to relatively recent times. When I, and I assume you, were growing up don't you remember getting endlessly spammed on TV with the non-stop 'Hurt on the job? Call Mr. Ambulance Chaser at 123-4567 today, and get what you deserve!'
[1] - https://altline.sobanco.com/small-business-revenue-statistic...