Are large corporations evil?

don’t you guys believe in freedom?

― the late great

post of the year

i've had shitty experiences at small companies and big companies. i don't think large corporations are _uniquely_ evil.

lol at "people who presumably care", that's pretty slick

You thought you cared... but you really don't!!!!

heh ya thats p dickish rhetoric. that guy's writing actually drives me up the walls a lot of the time, but that's the only piece i know representing this view, which is useful to consider imo

"ppl who presumably care" is great shorthand for the elites of the D Party

the R Party doesn't pretend

lol what are you talkin about doc?

And people who presumably care about workers should also rethink their passion for tininess:

i just thought it was funny how he was implying "if you don't know about this way to help x, you don't really care about x"

just had to air that out.. i'm a petty man

Mostly, the argument Henwood is trying to make is privately owned shops with 150 or fewer employees, versus publicly traded ones that have 150+ or whatever.

small businesses aren't harder to regulate than large ones. The opposite argument is made just as easily - big ones span state lines and national borders, like IKEA. Try to regulate that. IKEA is one gigantic tax haven for a Swedish family. Regulate that how, again? To what end?

small businesses don't treat their employees worse by default. They tend to treat them pretty well until they go public (or get bought by a traded entity). Again, the bigger businesses are beholden to one thing - the board. This phenomenon has created more inequality than any proliferation of small businesses ever.

Lastly, for now, name some big traded firms that didn't start out with under 20 employees just trying to cover the lease. The top 10 tech companies all come to mind. Every business was a small business once, and the thing that changed was the board demanded some GRC quad charts showing how they were going to achieve regulatory capture by spending x% on white shoe lobbyists and lawyers.

I could fisk his essay for a few more hours but it's not worth the time. There are lots of things small businesses do that are stupid and a mess. Few of them are of the degree that giant firms commit, and multinationals also fuck shit up in ways that no small business could ever hope to do.

u can fisk deez nuts

jkjk

i do like IKEA tho

ime small firms are sad sketchy fiefdoms and large firms are kafkaesque bureaucrohell with no one at the wheel, sort of a pick your poison

i think the idea of class struggle a socialist like henwood believes in makes a lot more sense in a setting with large firms in industries with increasings returns where workers can strike and bargain over the surplus rather than with a multitude of small firms barely making ends meet; to a neoliberal shill like me i can't say i have a strong opinion about it except some two-handed answer like 'it depends on the firm and the industry blahblah'

i love intra-left beefs in that vein tho (reclaiming a position seen as reactionary by contemporaries in context). this piece by bhaskar sunkara on naomi klein is the kind of thing i like seeing out of the radical left; there was something too 'feel-good' about a certain strain of the left in the 90's and early 00's that it articulates well

https://jacobinmag.com/2012/10/naomi-klein-as-anarcho-liberal/

i think the idea of class struggle a socialist like henwood believes in makes a lot more sense in a setting with large firms in industries with increasings returns where workers can strike and bargain over the surplus

Has this been working out that well over the last few decades, though? How much has neoliberal globalization changed the terrain when it comes to this aspect of big business and organized labour?
xp