Comment on It's unacceptable that people like Jeff Bezos exist.
UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world 5 days agoIn fact, many cottage businesses have found success on Amazon
Amazon Let Its Drivers’ Urine Be Sold as an Energy Drink
Love my cottage businesses.
What’s causing it is Bezos’ untreated OCD, which manifests as uncontrolled compulsive financial hoarding.
I think there’s an element of truth to this. But trying to medicalize what is, at the end of the day, just economic autocracy presumes that there’s a person who could do Bezos’s job (such that it ever even existed) “ethically”.
America could do what they do with uncontrolled hoarders whose collections start to have a negative affect on those around them - we get them mental help
This sounds like you’re talking about Trust Busting.
BarneyPiccolo@lemmy.cafe 5 days ago
It’s not that hard. All an “Ethical” CEO would have to do is reduce the profits to 25%, and invest the rest into employee pay and benefits. Then market the shit out of that.
That CEO would be an American Hero, and his company would boom, lifting the share price, and keeping the stockholders happy.
But he wouldn’t have multiple yachts, including one he has to sell, because it was “too big.”
7101334@lemmy.world 5 days ago
No, all an ‘ethical’ CEO would have to do is provide workers with the full surplus value produced by their labor. Otherwise he can get put into the woodchipper 75% faster as thanks for him stealing only 25% of my existence.
BarneyPiccolo@lemmy.cafe 4 days ago
Valid.
UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world 5 days ago
That is, at best, a kind of National Socialism (or perhaps, trade unionism) that’s great at benefiting everyone directly below the CEO but not so great at socializing the wealth accrued by the company at-large. I would argue that even above and beyond the immediate miserable labor practices of Amazon as a company, what you have is an “Infinite Paperclip Machine” under the hood. Amazon is an engine of industry that snatches up cheap raw materials and transforms them into expensive finished products without bothering to ask the question “Do we need another box of paperclips?”
Redistributing profit is nice, I guess. But so long as Amazon operates on the principle of maximized profits, it becomes a meat-grinder of primary accumulation.
He’d be the next Henry Ford, a man famous for really high quality political opinions and a legacy of ecologically friendly public-private partnerships.