Amazon is a very problematic mega-corporation in many respects, not the least of which being worker exploitation. It really needs to be either broken up or socialized.
Breaking it up, sure. I believe Amazon has profited in the way many tech companies have - in that law makers don't understand the inter-connectedness of technology and how an advantage in one area will lead to an advantage in other areas.
But socialization of Amazon? Why? We already have a publicly funded package delivery service. . . .
By the way - in some world states, mail delivery is being privatized, or becomes under-funded, starved - and then privatized. Overall, this process results in postal service quality deteriorating significantly, letters getting lost etc.
The government would love to have more power over tech to both gather information on people and to control the narrative.
Did anyone not see how Tim Cook was kissing up to the President and how much he enjoyed it? Do you really prefer to have a potential abusive government With the power of the state with more power.
Completely anecdotally, I can feel a pretty big shift taking place. At least that's what it feels like online, which may not be at all representative of the overall population. A new generation has come of age, and they are far more comfortable with concepts like socialism and even totalitarianism than the previous generations are. It was evident before COVID19, but since the pandemic began it has become even more pronounced.
It's fascinating, really. Maybe scary. It's weird to get a little older (I'm Gen X) and feel like the culture of your society is shifting out from underneath you. No wonder old people seem to trend conservative.
Edit: And the hive mind does not care to recognize it. Welcome to the new world, introspection not welcome.
Socialism and authoritarianism are very linked. They're not the same, and you can have a socialist society that isn't authoritarian, but many socialist countries are centrally authoritarian and that's held true historically.
Socialism and authoritarianism are linked -- in the default North American political education. That is not the case worldwide, or for all of us.
Before there was ever a socialist political party or government there were regimes all through the 19th century with capitalist market economies and highly highly authoritarian governments. But that link is not made by many.
Corporate structures are highly controlling in ways that governments could never get away with -- controlling their employees time and expression as well as their access to basic services such as health care. But, again, in the default (small-l) liberal concensus in North America, this is not identified as authoritarian because the classical liberal concept of individual agents participating in a free market is assumed and enshrined.
If one makes broad and reductionist statements about people who don't agree with you philosophically, and do so with the tone the commenter had, I don't see why one should be expecting not to be downvoted.
Yes there was a small period in the 19th century where we had kings who had market economies but they typically had senates which contained most of the power and were generally just figureheads.
A corporation can't keep you from voting. It doesn't prevent you from donating money to your favorite political candidate, or telling your neighbors about it.
On the other hand as an example of authoritarianism, Xi Jinping has literally removed the ability for Chinese people to select someone else as their leader. Even their ability to elect non-CCP parties depends on his approval.
Socialism depends on cohesion. You can't have 40% of the country riot because you won't be able to maintain services, whereas capitalist economies tend to survive such upsets quite well. You don't usually see mass political actions shut towns down in the US. That's part of why authoriarianism is attractive to socialist countries because it's one way of maintaining cohesion. Unfortuntely, it works because you remove the rights of people.
Tell that to all of the people locked up because of the “War on Drugs”, civil forfeiture without a trial, and government using eminent domain to take property and give it to a corporation.
A corporation doesn’t have the force of law - and military weapons (SWAT) - to enforce compliance.
This is one of the fundamental philosophical points of confusion in discussion between radical socialists and libertarians or classical liberals: we, too, have a problem with the state and its control. _But_ we consider the state to be the _creation_ of the market economy. It exists to enforce property rights, to negotiate between different corporate entities, to use its diplomatic or military power to expand markets and market influence abroad, and in extremis it uses its coercive powers to subdue labour disruptions and political dissent that hurts the market.
This is why we bristle when we see comments like the one here that associate directly the concept of socialism with one of government/state control. Because for us the government _is_ capitalism. Without its intervention the market could never exist. And it's why we see right wing libertarianism as either naive or authoritarian itself: because it ignores the coercive nature of the origin of the market: in the historical destruction of the feudal commons, the removal of the very minor security that the peasantry had, its privatzation of agricultural land, and then the establishment of the industrial economy on the basis of those so disposessed.
The state which right wing "anti-statists" so despise is an agent of the market which they glorify. That market couldn't exist without it and its coercive power.
You even touch on it above: eminent domain to take property and give it to a corporation. This doesn't surprise us at all. Such actions are intrinsic, from our point of view, to _capitalism_.
Marxism, and even Leninism -- before the word became marred with its association with authoritarian Stalinist regimes -- wants to destroy the existing capitalist state, and replace it with a system controlled by the majority of the population, the working class. Marx's term for this is very 19th century, and very unfortunate because it is easily misinterpreted: "dictatorship of the working class"; what he meant was not dictatorship in the form of a Stalinist, single, Communist Party, cult. He meant majority control. To some, "mob rule." It's just... we like this "mob"
Anyways, this is all very much a tangent. But I'm trying here to point to some of the fundamental points of confusion in these discussions. To most North Americans, "socialist" has become synonymous in their language with "government control", to the point where things like the 2008 bailout were called by many "socialist" interventions. In my mind this is an absurd misinterpration of the concept caused by 100 years of propaganda in political education and language.
The “majority” being in control is fine if you are part of the majority. The majority wouldn’t have a problem with laws that suppressed the minority.
Anytime we discuss systems of government, we have to deal with the reality of those systems. You can design a utopia on paper, but it doesn't usually play out that way. Governments also take some time to have observable effects, and so often times our discussion of forms of government have to rely on history as an element of that.
> In my mind this is an absurd misinterpration of the concept caused by 100 years of propaganda in political education and language.
But it's historically perfectly holistic in frame of the Stalinist regimes you mention. Supporters of full socialism and communism both like to reject every historical example and claim they don't count.
The reality is the whole notion of talking about "government systems" like they're replaceable components that we can evaluate like scientific experiments is delusional. Societies and especially economic systems develop their characteristics organically over hundreds of years. Bolsheviks slapping a "socialist" label on their society after their revolution has little bearing on the fact that in many ways Stalin's Russia was contiguous with Tsarist practice [and in fact many top members of his bureauracy were ex-Tsarist bureaucrats, and by the 30s pretty much every leading Bolshevik from 1917 was murdered or exiled...]. Minus the drastic influence of the orthodox church, of course
Holodomor is a clear example that genocides belong to socialists and communists too.
You're right that we can't talk about government systems strictly in the abstract which is why we use history, and while history has different context in each instance it consistently shows us that pure socialism ends at authoritarianism, whether that's the Bolsheviks, the Maoists, or the PCV.
True, and I generally try to avoid it. But sometimes pique gets the better of us.
> who don't agree with you philosophically
That's a pretty big leap you made. I tried (and continue to try) to keep my philosophy from being the focus of my comments. Perhaps you might be surprised to find yourself to my right, you never know.
As to whether the comment was broad and reductionist, who knows, it was a short comment on a huge topic on a niche web site. I wasn't trying to have a formal debate :). It also sounds like you took the comment a lot more personally than I ever intended.
The problem is, if you don't have a powerful government, you get something worse: powerful corporations. At least government (in a democracy) has to maintain some pretense of serving individuals. The only times corporations have to pretend to serve individuals is if their customers are individuals, and even then they can just lie about it: the whole field of advertising is devoted to that. Governments can (and do) lie about serving people too, but they have it a bit harder: consider the difference in connotation between the words "advertising" and "propaganda". And in an ideal government, there's a great deal of transparency, which makes it harder to lie. In contrast, corporations have largely unquestioned active protections over their internal secrets, and corporate transparency is practically oxymoronic.
The role of government is to protect the weak from the strong, and in order to do that, unfortunately, government has to be strong. In this context, that means regulating corporations so that they can't trample individuals. Ideally, government also has checks and balances so that government also protects individuals from government. Obviously that's hard to do, and no government I know of has implemented it perfectly, but it's the best idea we have--if you have a better idea feel free to share it. And so we're clear: having an anemic government isn't a better idea: that just gives you rule by corporations.
Have you read about the history of the US? Segregation? Laws against interracial marriage? “Sodomy” laws to persecute homosexuality? The Mulliford Act?
Historically the US has only “protected” the majority. The same is true today if you look where the “War on Drugs” is taking place compared to “treating drug addiction like a disease” is taking place.
“Powerful corporations” can’t take away your liberty or your property.
> Have you read about the history of the US? Segregation? Laws against interracial marriage? “Sodomy” laws to persecute homosexuality? The Mulliford Act?
Government often does terrible things outside their role, a fact which I clearly acknowledged as a problem in my post.
> Historically the US has only “protected” the majority. The same is true today if you look where the “War on Drugs” is taking place compared to “treating drug addiction like a disease” is taking place.
The US is also one of the worst examples of a government.
I think if you look at where addiction is being treated as a disease in other parts of the world, you'll find that those places have pretty powerful governments.
> “Powerful corporations” can’t take away your liberty or your property.
They can't take your liberty away because government says kidnapping is illegal. Corporations absolutely take away people's liberty when it's legal to do so: corporate prisons, mercenary corps, etc. In the past, when slavery was legal, it was corporations who obtained, sold, and often kept slaves.
I would argue that buying up all the property, paying you a pittance, and forcing you to pay rent, so that you can't obtain property in the first place, isn't meaningfully different from taking away your property.
Since Amazon is a US based corporation it should be controlled by the “worst example of government”?
Part of that improvement is fulfilling their role, and refocusing on protecting individuals from corporations, which includes protecting workers at Amazon.
The role of government is to maintain the social order, the basic social relations w.r.t. ownership of property, particularly capital like land, production facilities, access to natural resources etc.
This means mostly protecting the interests of the strong few against the weak many. In some cases of misconduct by powerful individuals or companies - outside the bounds of the acceptable and resulting in potential jeopardy of the social order - it may protect the weak against the powerful as well.
In the US “it’s not the strong few”. The majority can and does use the government to impose its will.
I hope the simile is clear enough...
Specifically - persecution of minorities is not a "natural" social phenomenon, it is very much an acquired tendency on the personal level and encouraged and stoked by social, economical, and political institutions.
Well, obviously I'd prefer the government used their powers for good, i.e. actually protect workers.
And that's not to mention the basic places where government protects the weak from the strong, like arresting murderers and rapists.
So, I'd say, while it certainly could be working better, it's working out a lot better than you're giving it credit for.
At this point, both the hyper-capitalist trust in the free market, as well as the hyper-socialist belief that labor/the state are always better than private corporations are both closer to dogmatic religious beliefs than actual reality. There are certainly instances when the government will do a much worse job at running an economy than free enterprises. And there are instances when clearly government intervention and regulation is needed to protect society from bad actors (as what seems to increasingly be the case for certain megacorporations in tech, finance, the insurance industry). A balanced, case by case approach is necessary.
Unfortunately, more simplistic, easy to digest platforms based on worthless platitudes get more traction, probably because those fit on a bumper sticker or in a tweet more easily.
So we're on much more familiar territory here -- a large semi-monopoly corporate entity with an industrial workforce.
There's not a lot of Alvin Toffler here, and more of Henry Ford.
A trust is when multiple companies are in collusion. Are you claiming that Amazon is in conclusion with its competitors?
To call 'online sales' a single market is silly. Because other companies use the internet changes nothing. Amazon owns their segment.
But I still disagree with the notion that somehow because Amazon is "tech" this is different.
No, my solution is far more radical and is more along the lines of the socialization line above. And almost nobody here will agree with it :-)
"The government would love to have more power over tech" - the government fawns over big tech anyway. And the love is returned - with large tech companies helping the US government's military endeavors, and performing mass surveillance and feeding the subjects slanted pro-regime news.
And despite the lovers' quarrel, he has been considering a $10 Billion deal to do some shady evil computing work:
https://www.cnbc.com/2019/07/18/trump-says-seriously-looking...
and Amazon might still get some of it:
https://www.geekwire.com/2020/dod-likely-split-jedi-contract...