bUt He cReAtEs tHe JeRbS!
this post was submitted on 17 Aug 2023
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They aren't greedy! They're exercising rational self-interest!
They aren't cruel! They're acting in the best interests of shareholders!
They don't sociopathically betray the workers who helped them succeed, they curtailed redundancies to maximize workplace efficiency!
We have always been at war with Eurasia!
I couldn't have phrased that any better!
It's the people at the company working that make the money. So technically the people create their own jobs or smth. A company should be owned by the workers at that company and they should get to elect leading personnel. I think this sounds rad.
Come on now, that's not fair!
I, for one, think we should show our appreciation for Bezos being a titan of capitalist virtue by crowdfunding an experience he'll never forget, a deep sea excursion into the depths to view the wreckage of the storied Titanic!
Who's with me?!
Titan 2: Bezos Boogaloo
I want to have a serious conversation on this if possible. As devil’s advocate, if I want to start a business that helps people, what would I have to do to not run afoul and garner this type of criticism? Are you indicating that I must relinquish my business once it gets too big and that I am only entitled to a certain amount of success? Are you indicating that I must pay my workers far beyond what the free market dictates they are worth? Trying to understand how those are my issues. It would seem to me that these would need to change with far reaching government policies. Those policies in many ways go against capitalist principles when you start to consider having to pay a janitor for a company hundreds of thousands of dollars if the company is successful and employees are paid in revenue share. That makes far less sense than the owner of the company reaping the benefit of their innovation. I would also argue that an entrepreneur will potentially use these earnings more interestingly than a janitor, potentially to start additional businesses that help the public by increasing offerings and jobs.
I don’t really have a direct reply to these ideas but I would like to point out an interesting example of a business model that addresses some of these concerns, that is the worker cooperative, where the workers have some portion of ownership of the company, either in revenue sharing or decision making.
Worker coops are wildly underappreciated. I'm a big fan of "workers' right to first refusal". If a business owner is selling, the workers have a given amount of time to match that offer and buy it themselves.
If your net worth breaks a billion dollars, you will garner this sort of criticism nearly no matter what you do with it. Bill Gates, at least recently, has been just about as close as you can be to a model philanthropist, and people still spit on his name regularly.
A few things that help though, would be A) paying workers higher than the federally mandated minimum amount that you can legally pay them without running afoul of labor laws, B) Reinvesting profit back into the company instead of paying yourself a gorillion dollar yearly bonus while the rest of the employees get a 2.5% cost of living raise, and C) donating to charitable causes or human rights groups.
But some CEO's (I won't say many, but definitely some) do all of these things and still come under public fire. Realistically, if you actually manage to hoard enough money to become a billionaire, you've already abandoned your morals. No human being needs that much money. By all means profit from your innovations and rake in enough to live a comfortable life off them, but when your take home pay for a month is 12x what your next best paid employee makes in a year, you're a motherfucker. Doubly so, when said employee is the one with boots on the ground and all the CEO is doing is signing papers and looking pretty for the shareholders.
In my opinion, there should never, ever ever, be a discrepancy of more than 5x the amount your lowest paid employee makes. If you're paying people 25k a year to do the work that runs your business, the guy at the top of the chain of command shouldn't make more than 125k. If you pay your guys 100k a year, sure, take home 500k a year if you've got the profits. Live comfortably. But when a company makes record breaking profits, turns around and cans half their staff, then pays the bigwigs a million dollar bonus while everyone else gets next to nothing, yeah, fuck you, fuck your product, and fuck your shareholders. If you look around there's been quite a lot of that going on recently.
I guess my point is, the act of dishonestly hoarding the money in the first place is what makes us hate the rich. If you made that money fair and square and you deserve it, man, more power to you. I don't think anyone is upset with Dolly Parton even though she's worth an estimated 650 million US dollars, because she sweat and bled for that money and hasn't taken to lording it over everyone else just because she can. Bezos invented a website and then rode it's coattails into the realm of the obscenely rich without hardly ever lifting another finger for it. So did Musk. And the better-than-thou attitude they get about it makes it so much worse.
Not all the rich are bad people, but for the most part, good people don't become rich. Not like that. It takes a certain amount of gleefully taking advantage of your fellow humans to get there. That remorseless exploitation is what we hate.
The devil doesn't need more volunteer advocates, he's got plenty of paid ones.
Those philosophies are not the only way to do things. Workers don't have to be paid the minimum possible. At some point, wealth accumulation becomes so extreme that it's immoral, like when people have so much money that they could never possibly spend it and are spending $300 million on a new boat or whatever. Tax rates used to be much, much higher on wealthy people and they still were "reaping the benefit of their innovation". Even better than paying taxes would be giving the money to employees. Paying a janitor (not sure why that is your example of someone who is lesser) enough money to buy a house and pay for their children to go to college is not a waste. It's also how the economy works. Capitalists and the wealthy class in the US seem to think they can keep all the money and economically starve their employees without realizing that the public has to have enough money to buy their products.
If you're paying your employees what they're worth (not the minimum the market will bear, but actually in line with the value they contribute), and you're still making Bezos money, then you're fleecing your customers.
There's no way to get to a billion dollars without 1) exploiting your labor and supply chain by taking advantage of capitalist forces to pay less than the value of their contribution or 2) exploiting your customers by taking advantage of capitalist forces to charge more than the value of your product. Usually both, to extreme degrees, enabled by monopolies, regulatory capture, collusion, and other capitalist tricks. That's not "a business that helps people".
No matter how "innovative" an entrepreneur is, the actual value of their product or service is generated by the people who actual do the work. Of course, you're entitled to the value that you personally create, but the best business idea in the world is worth exactly zilch without implementation. Bezos doesn't build those fulfillment centers, he doesn't manufacture the products, he doesn't pack the boxes, he doesn't drive the trucks, he doesn't program the website. He only has the wealth he fits because he pays the people that generate the value of his company the absolute minimum that he can get away with, skimming a big slice of everyone's labor value for himself. That doesn't help the public.
There is no reason for any indivitual or rich group to own the means of production and steal the benefits a worker produces, fuck the "free" market!
If I invent a means of production, why can’t I be rewarded for my creation?
because...!
Not sure if that guy is trolling or not, but you don't seem to be, so to answer that question you aren't who Engels and Marx were referring to in the communist manifesto. If you invent something, you could sell your invention, either in the form of plans which do take labor or for actual builds of that invention (also taking labor), that's you being rewarded. But Marxists also (usually) don't believe in intellectual property - it's not very intuitive but the idea here is if you trace any novel invention's steps leading up to it, it is never the product of one person but of society as a whole. An inventor consumes media, sees problems in society, may be educated by a lot of different people, essentially given the seeds for their novel invention from the rest of their society. What you then shouldn't be able to do with your invention is skim off the top of everybody who ever builds your invention or uses your invention, just by virtue of having invented it without having to actually put in any additional labor. And what somebody else in general shouldn't be able to do is give someone else money to build your invention on their land, and skim off the top of everybody who ever uses it.
This is all unrealistic ideals. Consider that in the case of Amazon it took around 15 years for Amazon to become really this huge. This doesn't come out of nothing, it comes out of the hard work and decisions of tons of people who have incentives to get rich and make the business plans to make the company succeed.
On one hand, the moment you make any of this public property, the quality will drop considerably and it'll collapse, because no one will ever gain anything by this business thriving. It's the same reason why governments' employees are well knowns for being lazy and slow once they get their jobs and can't be easily fired. I've seen that first hand in Germany.
On the other hand, consider that Amazon doesn't have a trade secret, really. There's nothing that other companies cannot do. There's no secret sauce here in this case, like you're suggesting with inventions.
Oh I wasn't really responding to OP's meme, just providing context for what that guy was asking. For what you're saying, I mean, maybe? I don't think it's a particularly good comparison to look at current government employees in the society we have and say that's what a Marxist society of workers would look like. The incentives are different because imo "job security" isn't that important in a society where people aren't being threatened with homelessness or starvation if they don't have a job. Even that bit has to tie into a lot of systems, it's a society wide change in perspective. I don't think either of us can honestly say definitively what would and wouldn't work.
I do think Amazon has a secret sauce, though, in the sense that they have privilege that other companies don't. At the time it started, it may have just been any other online store. They weren't the only ones. Now it's a well known brand, and they got there through burning a lot of money to aggressively get customers, then sellers, to only then profit. It took them almost a decade to become profitable, I don't think there's many businesses that could afford to not be profitable for that long. Their secret sauce when they were growing was tons of money that most companies don't have access to (which of course also gets you the best people since money is just about everyone's main incentive in the society we've built), now their secret sauce is their network. Because of how entrenched they are, you'd need a lot more money than they did to try to recreate it now.
"The mine owners did not find the gold, they did not mine the gold, they did not mill the gold, but by some weird alchemy all the gold belonged to them!" - Big Bill Haywood, 1929
They convinced investors to buy into the mining company, they bought the land, they paid the prospector, they bought the mining equipment, they paid the miners
The gold paid them back.
How else could it work?
Edit. Interesting that no one has an answer on how else it could work.... For example, in Bolivia there are mining cooperatives, but they still use all the tools of capitalism to extract the gold, and the co-op members are no different to investors really. The hours worked and conditions are no different. Mining is hard and dangerous.
They bought the land? They paid the miners?? Mining has a history of forcing native people out of their lands through threats or worse killing people, making slaves out of poor people and forcing them into 12+ hours shifts in horrible and unsafe conditions.
And you're using the products that result from that mining, so you're just as culpable
No demand, no mining.
We should improve society somewhat.
And it's never enough
This is the problem with capitalism. The workers do all the work, but the "owning" class keeps all the rewards of all that work.
I don't agree with the size of the wealth gap between owner and regular employee, but I don't understand why people think the heads of these companies - and I'm talking the ones that started them from nothing - did no work or continue to do no work. It's pretty ludicrous to think that the low level employees at Amazon are doing "all the work." Are they doing all the grunt work? Yes. Is their job the most physically demanding? Yes. Are they underpaid? Yes. But to pretend like the owner does nothing is just so idiotic and shows a lack of understanding of what goes into running a massive organization like amazon.
There definitely needs to be reform. I don't even think taxation is the way to go, I think putting laws in place for higher wages is key.
Yes, bootlicker. Totally right... But in actual reality: What are you talking about!?
I've met and worked with C Suite, Executive, and Officer-level employees... They do as little as you think they do. Unless they're a results-focused executive trying to turn around a failing business, their impact is... very little, in fact. Yet they make 100+ times what you or I make, every single year. It's not fair, it's not logical, yet it is one thing: corruption.
I highly doubt that owners of large companies actually do a lot of work, even for massive organizations. The corporate web is highly complex, and it's kind of impossible for outsiders to know how everything works internally, but judging from how many management positions there are, and seeing how much free time they have judging from their media presence and them having enough time to go to space (which requires training might I add), it's hard for, at least me, to see how they do much of anything besides speaking in events, owning the means of production and occasionally using their money to expand the company.
Again, it's hard to tell with these companies being secretive and this large, and maybe the owners do a lot more work than I'm giving them credit for. But from the various stories and their media appearances, I have my doubts.
You can look at civilization throughout history and see that the ones that lasted the longest cared about the individual rights of every citizen. When you allow a certain class to violate individual rights you end in revolution.
If they can even get there. At this point there's so much money poured into vitriol and smear campaigns, divisive propaganda to keep everyone off the same page, hell, even people getting murdered or imprisoned just for trying to do what they can to get their voice out on a public platform and improve their countries... I hope the revolution actually happens, but it seems like it'll take some grand feat of coordination..
You forgot one additional picture, "we, together, allow this madness to exist".
Money has too much power
I bed the creator of the meme is using Amazon frequently and doesn't give a dime about the people there.
Buy local when you can, if you have to order a chinese made products (most are these days) buy from Aliexpress, you save a ton of money not paying amazon markup or a 3rd party Chinese seller running business on Amazon.
Listen, I can order a plethora of items, from the comfort of my recliner, and get them within two days for a yearly subscription fee of $140. A subscription that also includes Prime video streaming, a service that typically costs about that annually from an alternative provider.
I know it's fun and easy to shit on multi billion dollar companies but Amazon is Amazon because people voted with their wallets to make them that way.
Bezos deserves to reap what he sowed. If you think you can do it better, more equitably, you're welcome to try.
Someone who lets his employees piss in bottles because they don't get breaks, someone who uses his excess wealth for unnecessary luxuries, using up an unimaginable amount of resources, preventing other people from using them, someone who lives in his billionaire bubble not giving a fuck about people or the environment - someone like this deserves just one thing.
Totally unrelated:
Like I said, do it better so we can support your company instead of Amazon.
And compete with amazon? By virtue of the sheer amount of wealth Bezos has accumulated it's far too late for that. You can't compete. Amazon can just sell at a loss until my new business tanks. I absolutely agree that amazon is a fantastic product from a consumer standpoint* but it's now a behemoth that is basically immune to any fair competition. It's said that America is the land of opportunity but at this point these massive corporations have long since used up that opportunity and are working hard to make sure nobody can follow them. That's simply not fair, and not a proportional reward for bezos' innovation. I'm not saying take it all away from him like some here are saying, I'm saying it's time to realise that while innovation needs to be rewarded it should be reasonable and not be an uncontrollable and never ending leech on society.
You still believe in free market? The rules are rigged in favour of shareholders, ethical solutions can't thrive in this system. America is not free market at all.
You have to blame how he made the money not how much he pays himself. Almost all of his wealth comes from the stock market and how inflated his amazon shares have become. He isnt taking money away from his laborers this is just incorrect
He underpays his employees to make higher profits to increase his company's value...