Fun fact that chart is outdated, it’s worse now!
In a future capitalist dystopia, the Empire (aka USA) will be renamed “United States of Amazon Prime®”, and every 4 years the name will be replaced by the name of some other mega oligopoly
We are Verizon-Chipotle-Exxon, and we’re proud to be one of America’s eight companies!
What happened to our anti trust laws?
What’s funny about the US experiment is that capitalism is supposedly the better way but at the same time when capitalism runs its course the government feels the need to intervene because it doesn’t take long for capitalism to become a monopoly and for the free market to disappear, but that’s as far as the reflection goes…
Conglomeration occurs naturally - economies of scale in a large organization give it an advantage over smaller ones. Similar to how cities naturally occur. The problem is the organizations are not democratically controlled and so they act in ways that are unsustainable, anti customer and anti worker. Workers should manage the organization through a one person one vote principle (sometimes multi-stakeholder coops would make sense), and all commercial entities should be regulated by a democratic government.
That would be better true but I argue that even if you compare companies to cities the same problem occurs with cities, mega or very big cities are not sustainable or easier to manage, they just occur naturally.
I don’t think even if a company is worker owned or democratically controlled may still choose to go against the customer or competition with monopolistic practices so I’m not sure it’s possible to have mega corps be very positive in any way to society.
How do those people feed themselves? How do they move around? How far away is the average person’s house from the workplace, or the market, or the hospital? In the end is the average energy consumption per person smaller? The existence of mega cities requires a lot of land elsewhere to sustain those people with the added transportation costs. There is not much to gain from gathering too many humans in one place for the sake of it.
