this post was submitted on 30 Aug 2024
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Well it has always been an illusionary personalization to call it greed. It's a systemic imperative in a competitive system (compete or cease to exist). By calling it greed you pretend companies in capitalism could just be good christians or smth and the bad would go away.
1000%
It isn't greed, the system is coercive. There aren't people at the top pulling the strings of the system, they wield incredible political and social power but they're alienated from the system the same as everyone else, its just the system delivers to them our stolen wages in the form of profits which makes them want to preserve the system whereas conscious workers want to see it ended. The fundamental contradiction at the heart of capitalism: opposing interests of workers vs owners.
If there is an avenue to pursue profit that is morally wrong or whatever, and company A's executives don't pursue it, that works for a while until competitor B emerges who can take advantage of it, and reap all of the profits. If executives from company A still refuse they can be replaced by the board until they deliver competitive profits to their shareholders. If not they probably just get bought up by company B in the next recession for cheap.
This is why the working class is the revolutionary class. All competition under capitalism is a feature of the system, corporate malthusianism is the norm. Different industries are more or less affected by this at different times, so it is an uneven process of development, but its baked into every interaction. The only thing that has ever worked to force the system to make reforms or brought it to a halt is worker solidarity. When the workers say "we won't work for the capitalists anymore" and stay the course, that's it. The only remedy for a system of forced competition is a system of voluntary solidarity.
'Alienated from the system the same as everyone else' reads wrong to me.
Abstracted by stock ownership to buffer away the moral decisions and compromises.
Some tho wield direct influence as fund managers, VC orgs, or investment banker types.
That "abstraction" is the alienation. I don't want to have like, a symmantical argument or anything. Like you say, surplus value appears to them in stocks, which is just a form of capital; but it also appears on profit and loss reports. They don't actually starve the poor, but the existence of the starving and destitute is a great motivation for working people to consent to their own exploitation. they don't actually build or drop the bombs -- but they invest in the companies that do, and profit when they drop, like you said about venture capital for example. Big corporate landlords look at their income and try and figure out how to increase profits year on year, but they never have to see how it affects peoples lives when they raise rents. Consumers don't see where or how the things they buy are made, it just appears in a retail space. Workers don't make an entire commodity like a craftsman might, they interact with a machine (owned by the capitalist) that mass produces some little spring or whatever that is integrated into the final commodity, and the capitalist has purchased the workers time to operate it, thus the workers are alienated from the product of their own labor.
So maybe you don't want to use the word alienation and you'd rather call it abstraction. Alienation is the word Marx used to describe it, abstraction is something different, so that's what I call it. But I think its the same concept.
I think a neat way to put it is: Alienated acting/being is what's left after you pretend you would not cooperate with other people.
Liberal ideology imagines every person as a autonomous agent "taking their own decisions". Except you live in a cave and gather berries on your own, this is a radical misconception. In fact almost everything you do depends on other peoples doing and vice versa.
Alienation is the ideological and practical renouncement of this fact of beeing part of a social species.
If you deny this fundamental property of your beeing and doing, you end up with confusion and moral atrocities. And principally this goes "for both sides".
Of course the war-stock-financed yacht is worse, but even in the case of a US-minimum-wage-financed banana the buyer profits from the exploitation of some dude in south america. If heshe has not developped a critical consciousness of the individualist illusion of liberalism, heshe won't see it, cause "im not greedy I just want a fuckin 'nana".
Alienation does not explain the vertical (quantitative) unfairness, the exploitation, but the general disconnectedness (qualitative) of humans from their social system, their history, each other, their work and themselves.