#monopolistic capitalism

[sharedrm]

Exactly this - let's break up the unhealthy monopolies ( unhealthy for our country), and keep on top of that moving forward. We aren't about helping the rich get richer, while taking away from the common citizen.

[nando161mando]

Stop using blatant, monopolistic, persistently worsening malware, and switch to Firefox 🦊

https://prism-break.org/en/

https://12ft.io/

https://www.removepaywall.com/

https://www.hackthissite.org/

[zvaigzdelasas]

Which do you think will collapse first, Israel or the United Stabes?

Israel without a doubt, much less stable material basis for statehood.

[orc-apologist]

Every single danger and problem AI poses is actually not posed by AI at all, but the fact that these programs are possessed privately by the few instead of being owned publically by the many. That is to say: AI only poses a danger to artists under capitalism. In a society in which private property no longer exists and therefore no longer follows the profit motive, AI will help to liberate the artist instead, freeing them from performing art-adjacent labor, such as writing instructional pamphlets or designing bus seat patterns. Then the artist will be allowed to create freely.

[king-of-men]

This but delete the bottom text.

[technoregression]

Because what is exclusive?

It’s defined by all it excludes, NOT by who or what it includes

[thirst2]

The number of times I see a (presumably) grassroots software or application come out that claims to solve a major point of erasure or negligence by corporations regarding marginalized people so I message them to immediately ask whether their tech. is open-source and…always No.

[capitalism-is-a-psychopathy]

Monopolists and the ultra-wealthy enable fascism.

Throughout history, the nexus between concentrated wealth and authoritarianism has repeatedly threatened democracy. In the early 20th century, industrialists in Europe backed fascist regimes. Their financial muscle propped up leaders like Mussolini and Hitler. Why? Fascism promised stability, control, and a favorable environment for their business empires.

Modern parallels are stark. In recent years, billionaires and corporate giants have influenced politics in ways that undermine democratic norms. Take the United States, for instance. The Supreme Court's Citizens United ruling in 2010 unleashed a flood of money into politics, allowing the rich to wield disproportionate power. This creates a fertile ground for authoritarian leaders who promise to protect their interests.

Look at Russia. Oligarchs there support Putin's regime, a blend of authoritarianism and capitalism. This support isn't altruistic. It ensures their wealth and power remain unchallenged. Similarly, in China, billionaires thrive under a regime that curtails freedoms but guarantees their business interests.

These alliances are dangerous. They erode public trust in democratic institutions. They foster inequality, resentment, and division. When the few control the many, society fragments. Democracy withers.

The ultra-wealthy fund campaigns, lobby for laws, and influence media. They shape narratives to their benefit. This concentration of power in the hands of a few threatens the foundation of democracy – the idea that power belongs to the people.

To safeguard democracy, we must limit the influence of concentrated wealth in politics. Transparency in political funding, robust antitrust laws, and policies that promote economic equality are essential.

History warns us. When monopolists and the ultra-wealthy align with authoritarianism, democracy suffers. It's a pattern we cannot afford to ignore. By addressing this issue head-on, we can protect democratic values and ensure a fairer, more just society for all.

[ehj3]

DIGITAL GRAFFITI

“Most people are other people. Their thoughts are someone else’s opinions, their lives a mimicry, their passions a quotation.” —Oscar Wilde Commuters/consumers are dazzled by a sea of billboards above them in an otherwise dark cityscape, which unlike Vance Packard’s “Hidden Persuaders” or the ones in the short story and film “They Live,” these hoardings come right out and plainly state their…

[bedupolker]

the worst part of spore has to be the city stage where you get to pick between military dictatorship, forced religious conversion, or monopolistic capitalism. I just wanted to be a little animal.

[vollesroah]

Capitalist Heroes.

Sounds like a monopolistic system.

[mostlysignssomeportents]

There’s no such thing as “shareholder supremacy”

On SEPTEMBER 24th, I'll be speaking IN PERSON at the BOSTON PUBLIC LIBRARY!

Here's a cheap trick: claim that your opponents' goals are so squishy and qualitative that no one will ever be able to say whether they've been succeeded or failed, and then declare that your goals can be evaluated using crisp, objective criteria.

This is the whole project of "economism," the idea that politics, with its emphasis on "fairness" and other intangibles, should be replaced with a mathematical form of economics, where every policy question can be reduced to an equation…and then "solved":

https://pluralistic.net/2023/03/28/imagine-a-horse/#perfectly-spherical-cows-of-uniform-density-on-a-frictionless-plane

Before the rise of economism, it was common to speak of its subjects as "political economy" or even "moral philosophy" (Adam Smith, the godfather of capitalism, considered himself a "moral philosopher"). "Political economy" implicitly recognizes that every policy has squishy, subjective, qualitative dimensions that don't readily boil down to math.

For example, if you're asking about whether people should have the "freedom" to enter into contracts, it might be useful to ask yourself how desperate your "free" subject might be, and whether the entity on the other side of that contract is very powerful. Otherwise you'll get "free contracts" like "I'll sell you my kidneys if you promise to evacuate my kid from the path of this wildfire."

The problem is that power is hard to represent faithfully in quantitative models. This may seem like a good reason to you to be skeptical of modeling, but for economism, it's a reason to pretend that the qualitative doesn't exist. The method is to incinerate those qualitative factors to produce a dubious quantitative residue and do math on that:

https://locusmag.com/2021/05/cory-doctorow-qualia/

Hence the famous Ely Devons quote: "If economists wished to study the horse, they wouldn’t go and look at horses. They’d sit in their studies and say to themselves, ‘What would I do if I were a horse?’"

https://pluralistic.net/2022/10/27/economism/#what-would-i-do-if-i-were-a-horse

The neoliberal revolution was a triumph for economism. Neoliberal theorists like Milton Friedman replaced "political economy" with "law and economics," the idea that we should turn every one of our complicated, nuanced, contingent qualitative goals into a crispy defined "objective" criteria. Friedman and his merry band of Chicago School economists replaced traditional antitrust (which sought to curtail the corrupting power of large corporations) with a theory called "consumer welfare" that used mathematics to decide which monopolies were "efficient" and therefore good (spoiler: monopolists who paid Friedman's pals to do this mathematical analysis always turned out to be running "efficient" monopolies):

https://pluralistic.net/2022/02/20/we-should-not-endure-a-king/

One of Friedman's signal achievements was the theory of "shareholder supremacy." In 1970, the New York Times published Friedman's editorial "The Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits":

https://www.nytimes.com/1970/09/13/archives/a-friedman-doctrine-the-social-responsibility-of-business-is-to.html

In it, Friedman argued that corporate managers had exactly one job: to increase profits for shareholders. All other considerations – improving the community, making workers' lives better, donating to worthy causes or sponsoring a little league team – were out of bounds. Managers who wanted to improve the world should fund their causes out of their paychecks, not the corporate treasury.

Friedman cloaked his hymn to sociopathic greed in the mantle of objectivism. For capitalism to work, corporations have to solve the "principal-agent" problem, the notoriously thorny dilemma created when one person (the principal) asks another person (the agent) to act on their behalf, given the fact that the agent might find a way to line their own pockets at the principal's expense (for example, a restaurant server might get a bigger tip by offering to discount diners' meals).

Any company that is owned by stockholders and managed by a CEO and other top brass has a huge principal-agent problem, and yet, the limited liability, joint-stock company had produced untold riches, and was considered the ideal organization for "capital formation" by Friedman et al. In true economismist form, Friedman treated all the qualitative questions about the duty of a company as noise and edited them out of the equation, leaving behind a single, elegant formulation: "a manager is doing their job if they are trying to make as much money as possible for their shareholders."

Friedman's formulation was a hit. The business community ran wild with it. Investors mistook an editorial in the New York Times for an SEC rulemaking and sued corporate managers on the theory that they had a "fiduciary duty" to "maximize shareholder value" – and what's more, the courts bought it. Slowly and piecemeal at first, but bit by bit, the idea that rapacious greed was a legal obligation turned into an edifice of legal precedent. Business schools taught it, movies were made about it, and even critics absorbed the message, insisting that we needed to "repeal the law" that said that corporations had to elevate profit over all other consideration (not realizing that no such law existed).

It's easy to see why shareholder supremacy was so attractive for investors and their C-suite Renfields: it created a kind of moral crumple-zone. Whenever people got angry at you for being a greedy asshole, you could shrug and say, "My hands are tied: the law requires me to run the business this way – if you don't believe me, just ask my critics, who insist that we must get rid of this law!"

In a long feature for The American Prospect, Adam M Lowenstein tells the story of how shareholder supremacy eventually came into such wide disrepute that the business lobby felt that it had to do something about it:

https://prospect.org/power/2024-09-17-ponzi-scheme-of-promises/

It starts in 2018, when Jamie Dimon and Warren Buffett decried the short-term, quarterly thinking in corporate management as bad for business's long-term health. When Washington Post columnist Steve Pearlstein wrote a column agreeing with them and arguing that even moreso, businesses should think about equities other than shareholder returns, Jamie Dimon lost his shit and called Pearlstein to call it "the stupidest fucking column I’ve ever read":

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2018/06/07/will-ending-quarterly-earnings-guidance-free-ceos-to-think-long-term/

But the dam had broken. In the months and years that followed, the Business Roundtable would adopt a series of statements that repudiated shareholder supremacy, though of course they didn't admit it. Rather, they insisted that they were clarifying that they'd always thought that sometimes not being a greedy asshole could be good for business, too. Though these statements were nonbinding, and though the CEOs who signed them did so in their personal capacity and not on behalf of their companies, capitalism's most rabid stans treated this as an existential crisis.

Lowenstein identifies this as the forerunner to today's panic over "woke corporations" and "DEI," and – just as with "woke capitalism" – the whole thing amounted to a a PR exercise. Lowenstein links to several studies that found that the CEOs who signed onto statements endorsing "stakeholder capitalism" were "more likely to lay off employees during COVID-19, were less inclined to contribute to pandemic relief efforts, had 'higher rates of environmental and labor-related compliance violations,”' emitted more carbon into the atmosphere, and spent more money on dividends and buybacks."

One researcher concluded that "signing this statement had zero positive effect":

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/08/companies-stand-solidarity-are-licensing-themselves-discriminate/614947

So shareholder supremacy isn't a legal obligation, and statements repudiating shareholder supremacy don't make companies act any better.

But there's an even more fundamental flaw in the argument for the shareholder supremacy rule: it's impossible to know if the rule has been broken.

The shareholder supremacy rule is an unfalsifiable proposition. A CEO can cut wages and lay off workers and claim that it's good for profits because the retained earnings can be paid as a dividend. A CEO can raise wages and hire more people and claim it's good for profits because it will stop important employees from defecting and attract the talent needed to win market share and spin up new products.

A CEO can spend less on marketing and claim it's a cost-savings. A CEO can spend more on marketing and claim it's an investment. A CEO can eliminate products and call it a savings. A CEO can add products and claim they're expansions into new segments. A CEO can settle a lawsuit and claim they're saving money on court fees. A CEO can fight a lawsuit through to the final appeal and claim that they're doing it to scare vexatious litigants away by demonstrating their mettle.

CEOs can use cheaper, inferior materials and claim it's a savings. They can use premium materials and claim it's a competitive advantage that will produce new profits. Everything a company does can be colorably claimed as an attempt to save or make money, from sponsoring the local little league softball team to treating effluent to handing ownership of corporate landholdings to perpetual trusts that designate them as wildlife sanctuaries.

Bribes, campaign contributions, onshoring, offshoring, criminal conspiracies and conference sponsorships – there's a business case for all of these being in line with shareholder supremacy.

Take Boeing: when the company smashed its unions and relocated key production to scab plants in red states, when it forced out whistleblowers and senior engineers who cared about quality, when it outsourced design and production to shops around the world, it realized a savings. Today, between strikes, fines, lawsuits, and a mountain of self-inflicted reputational harm, the company is on the brink of ruin. Was Boeing good to its shareholders? Well, sure – the shareholders who cashed out before all the shit hit the fan made out well. Shareholders with a buy-and-hold posture (like the index funds that can't sell their Boeing holdings so long as the company is in the S&P500) got screwed.

Right wing economists criticize the left for caring too much about "how big a slice of the pie they're getting" rather than focusing on "growing the pie." But that's exactly what Boeing management did – while claiming to be slaves to Friedman's shareholder supremacy. They focused on getting a bigger slice of the pie, screwing their workers, suppliers and customers in the process, and, in so doing, they made the pie so much smaller that it's in danger of disappearing altogether.

Here's the principal-agent problem in action: Boeing management earned bonuses by engaging in corporate autophagia, devouring the company from within. Now, long-term shareholders are paying the price. Far from solving the principal-agent problem with a clean, bright-line rule about how managers should behave, shareholder supremacy is a charter for doing whatever the fuck a CEO feels like doing. It's the squishiest rule imaginable: if someone calls you cruel, you can blame the rule and say you had no choice. If someone calls you feckless, you can blame the rule and say you had no choice. It's an excuse for every season.

The idea that you can reduce complex political questions – like whether workers should get a raise or whether shareholders should get a dividend – to a mathematical rule is a cheap sleight of hand. The trick is an obvious one: the stuff I want to do is empirically justified, while the things you want are based in impossible-to-pin-down appeals to emotion and its handmaiden, ethics. Facts don't care about your feelings, man.

But it's feelings all the way down. Milton Friedman's idol-worshiping cult of shareholder supremacy was never about empiricism and objectivity. It's merely a gimmick to make greed seem scientifically optimal.

The paperback edition of The Lost Cause, my nationally bestselling, hopeful solarpunk novel is out this month!

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/09/18/falsifiability/#figleaves-not-rubrics/a>

[handweavers]

"Those who point to the lumpenproletariat as the revolutionary vanguard disregard the objective laws of historical development. In pre-capitalist societies, poverty and oppression were even greater than under capitalism. But oppression in itself, no matter how great, does not create the basis for the struggle to abolish oppression.

Because of the specific nature of exploitation under capitalism, the working class, which collectively operates the mass production process of the privately owned monopolies, is transformed into the gravedigger of the system. That is why Marx and Engels wrote in The Communist Manifesto: “Of all the classes that stand face to face with the bourgeoisie today, the proletariat alone is a really revolutionary class.”

No fundamental change—or even a challenge to the monopolists—can occur without the working class. And today the proportion of Black workers in basic industries such as steel, coal, auto, transport and others is transforming the prospects for the class struggle and Black liberation.

The degree of exploitation of Black workers is clearly much greater than that of white workers. Nevertheless, the collective form of exploitation in the decisive mass production industries is suffered by all workers. This creates the objective basis for solidarity, for their unity and leadership in the struggle against the monopolist ruling class.

At the same time, history has assigned a doubly significant role to Black workers—as the leaders and backbone of the Black liberation movement, and as a decisive component of the working class leadership of the anti-imperialist struggle as a whole.

It is the monopolists’ fear of Black, white, Brown, Yellow, Red and working class unity, which in turn can form the basis for still broader people’s unity, that is behind racism and anti-Communism, the main ideological weapons of the ruling class.

Leninism, the Marxism of the imperialist epoch, is the ideological weapon of the working class. It is the scientific guide that enables the working class to combine its struggle with national liberation movements against imperialism.

No other theory has served to free a single working class, a single people, from imperialism anywhere in the world. Beginning with the October revolution, only those guided by Marxism-Leninism have been able to free themselves from class and national oppression and take the road of socialist construction."

— "Objective Laws of Development" Henry Winston, The Crisis of the Black Panther Party (1971)

[13thpythagoras]

"tHeRe'S nO eThIcAl cOnSuMpTiOn uNdEr cApiTaLiSm"

*batman smack* do not ever give money to chick-fil-A under any circumstances.

Chick-fil-a has declared war on us, we cannot support warlike genocidal companies like that.

Getchoself some 79 cent ramen, no one is so hungry they gotta pay into active genocide.

Don’t eat here

[autolenaphilia]

Why enshittification happens and how to stop it.

The enshittification of the internet and increasingly the software we use to access it is driven by profit. It happens because corporations are machines for making profits from end users, the users and customers are only seen as sources of profits. Their interests are only considered if it can help the bottom line. It's capitalism.

For social media it's users are mainly seen by the companies that run the sites as a way for getting advertisers to pay money that can profit the shareholders. And social media is in a bit of death spiral right now, since they have seldom or never been profitable and investor money is drying up as they realize this.

So the social media companies. are getting more and more desperate for money. That's why they are getting more aggressive with getting you to watch ads or pay for the privilege of not watching ads. It won't work and tumblr and all the other sites will die eventually.

But it's not just social media companies, it's everything tech-related. It gets worse the more monopolistic a tech giant is. Google is abusing its chrome-based near monopoly over the web, nerfing adblockers, trying to drm the web, you name it. And Microsoft is famously a terrible company, spying on Windows users and selling their data. Again, there is so much money being poured into advertising, at least 493 billion globally, the tech giants want a slice of that massive pie. It's all about making profits for shareholders, people be damned.

And the only insurance against this death spiral is not being run by a corporation. If the software is being developed by a non-profit entity, and it's open source, there is no incentive for the developers to fuck over the users for the sake of profits for shareholders, because there aren't any profits, and no shareholders.

Free and Open source software is an important part of why such software development can stay non-corporate. It allows for volunteers to contribute to the code and makes it harder for users to be secretly be fucked over by hidden code.

Mozilla Firefox and Thunderbird are good examples of this. There is a Mozilla corporation, but it exists only for legal reasons and is a wholly-owned subsidiary of the non-profit Mozilla foundation. There are no shareholders. That means the Mozilla corporation is not really a corporation in the sense that Google is, and as an organization has entirely different incentives. If someone tells you that Mozilla is just another corporation, (which people have said in the notes of posts about firefox on this very site) they are spreading misinformation.

That's why Firefox has resisted the enshittification of the internet so well, it's not profit driven. And people who develop useful plugins that deshitify the web like Ublock origin and Xkit are as a rule not profit-driven corporations.

And you can go on with other examples of non-profit software like Libreoffice and VLC media player, both of which you should use.

And you can go further, use Linux as your computer's operating system.. It's the only way to resist the enshitification that the corporate duopoly of Microsoft and Apple has brought to their operating system. The plethora of community-run non-profit Linux distributions like Debian, Mint and Arch are the way to counteract that, and they will stay resistant to the same forces (creating profit for shareholders) that drove Microsoft to create Windows 11.

Of course not all Linux distributions are non-profits. There are corporate created distros like Red Hat's various distros, Canonical's Ubuntu and Suse's Opensuse, and they prove the point I'm making. There has some degree of enshittification going on with those, red hat going closed source and Canonical with the snap store for example. Mint is by now a succesful community-driven response to deshitify Ubuntu by removing snaps for example, and even they have a back-up plan to use Debian as a base in case Canonical makes Ubuntu unuseable.

As for social media, which I started with, I'm going to stay on tumblr for now, but it will definitely die. The closest thing to a community run non-profit replacement I can see is Mastodon, which I'm on as @autolenaphilia@chaosfem.tw.

You don't have to keep using corporate software, and have it inevitably decline because the corporations that develop it cares more about its profits than you as an end user.

The process of enshittification proves that corporations being profit-driven don't mean they will create a better product, and in fact may cause them to do the opposite. And the existence of great free and open source software, created entirely without the motivation of corporate profits, proves that people don't need to profit in order to help their fellow human beings. It kinda makes you question capitalism.