The problem is: these guys aren’t foundational to how these companies work. Killing them might cause some confusion, and even make it so the upper management stops squabbling for personal gain for a decade. You’d probably strengthen it.
If, by some miracle, you do cause the whole organization to unravel and split up: you’ll likely get a repeat of standard oil, where the new companies combined expanded so much quicker and made so much more profit. Just like how pruning a tree makes it healthier and grow with more vigor.
Better to let the rot start from the roots.
Thankfully, there are a hell of a lot more of us, than them. Otherwise agreed; but the endgame for these sorts of ghouls has to be the wall (or re-education camps for those salvageable… and who for that matter deserve salvaging ie. don’t have such extensive, bloody crimes that they should be sent to the Hague and then shot)
I think you if you redact a fair number of those at the top who reap all the benefits it will cause a noticeable dishevelment in the organization’s structure. I don’t think megacorporations are stable configurations where the whole being extracts value rapaciously for the shareholders and the CEO or whatever. There is always a lot of policing required to make sure that it functions in the way it does. That’s the reason why tyrannical managers and pinkerstons exist.
The amount you’d need to get rid off would put you in territory or pure fantasy though. Also, the government would probably step in and force a merger.
I think you make a good point here, that relates somewhat to the general idea: although we do need to understand the systems we’re up against and how to overcome their functioning, we don’t need to believe in the myths perpetuated by them of an inherent strength and unwavering power they don’t have. At the end of the day, it’s humans running these systems and humans choosing to support them in spite of any moral qualms they may have. The inertia of that, and the inertia of the organized violence that protects capital, can be a powerful and dangerous thing, no doubt about it, but it is a kind of inertia and things that disrupt that inertia are going to have an impact, whether it’s the impact we wanted or some other one.
Where I’d venture to say the pointlessness of it shows is in isolated acts that are not seized upon in order to make use of how they impact the inertia of things and are instead looked upon naively as a form of damage that will stick, no matter what, and won’t be repaired or worked around. As if human society is a jenga tower and if you just pull enough pieces out, it will topple and you’ll replace it with what you want instead.
To use an example that relates to the US, Lincoln was far from the ideal figure of taking the US people in an actually good direction, but I do think it’s safe to say that if he hadn’t been assassinated, the reconstruction efforts probably would have done a better job of dealing with the whitewashing of slavery. Groups like the United Daughters of the Confederacy, however, did not sit around and hope such whitewashing would organically happen in the absence of sufficient opposition to it. They organized and shoved that whitewashing into school textbooks.
So in despicable systems, there is inertia, but there is also those who organize and seize upon that inertia. And the same can be said for systems of liberation and the fight to maintain them against imperialists and against the reaction.
What you said is correct 100%. This discussion is different from the idea that the comic is presenting but that is not important.
It is true that the merely redacting, let’s say the top 20 net worth individuals, will automatically lead to a more equitable society with them gone. As you said, the only guarantee we can make is that it will lead to instability and chaos, and the grand outcome will depend on which organised forces are able to take advantage of it.
a quote that supports your statement
To paraphrase William C. Roberts, capitalists are simply at the top of the pyramid of market-dominated producers. [9] What if humans, capable of rational deliberation, want to make healthcare free? What if they want to assert that the environment is valuable in itself? The invisible hand imposes itself decisively: “No.”
Marx described the phenomenon of “commodity fetishism”: through many small separate acts of exchange, we command each other to behave in very specific ways, while disclaiming this same power and attributing its commands to blind necessity. Commodities are inert objects, and humans are rational beings, but society operates as if humans were helpless against the pressures exerted by the market. Market domination even finds lucid expression in natural-sounding phrases like “if I don’t sell out to Facebook, they’ll just copy my features, so may as well do it myself” and “if I paid you more, I’d have to pay everyone more, and then we’d lose to the competition and all be out of a job.”
There is nothing wrong with denouncing American plutocrats like Bezos and Gates for greed, but we cannot stop there: we must understand that the system of exploitation is not held together by any individual’s vices. As Lenin put it, “The capitalists divide the world, not out of any particular malice, but because the degree of concentration which has been reached forces them to adopt this method in order to obtain profits.” [10] If one of them had a major change of heart and stopped pursuing ruthless accumulation, they would quickly be ousted by stockholders for endangering their investment. In the unlikely event that their stockholders were cooperative, a competitor would swoop in and relieve them of their commanding market share. This is not apologia for Bezos, but we need to understand that there is a talent to being a capitalist exploiter, or else we will underestimate our enemy. The market selects for profitability, and it selects well — it just doesn’t select for environmental responsibility or decency or who can bring the most benefits to the greatest number. From Marx, to Lenin, to Deng, we can observe a baseline level of respect for the enemy: “Management is also a technique.” [11]
On my view, the core Marxist insight is the following: Feudal lords were the masters of Feudalism. Capitalists, however, aren’t the masters of capitalism. They are merely the high priests of capitalism. The master of capitalism is Capital itself.
