this post was submitted on 30 Dec 2023
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[โ€“] [email protected] 3 points 11 months ago (1 children)

I agree with you up until the "hates employees" part. You're mistaking indifference for hate. The system doesn't give a shit about anyone who is not a capital owner collecting more capital. The plight of anyone outside of that group means nothing to the system.

[โ€“] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago)

...which always manifests itself as causing material harm to the working class, to the non capital owners.

The logic of for profit businesses, especially in the American legal framework, is known to reward the most ruthless with the positions of the most power in the company, and this gets dramatically amplified the more money is at stake.

And these people, empirically and historically, as well as theoretically from a psychological and basics of running a business / economics standpoint...

They will always lay people off and go through a restructuring phase to focus on the fundamentals. These days the CEO and VPs do not even take meaningful, if any, pay cuts. There are some counter examples to this in some other countries where cultural norms are vastly different, but in America, in the last decade in particular? It's basically always the owner capital class extracting wealth from the workers and then shedding them off when its time to.

And I say that that constitutes harm. And is thus hateful.

Time and time again we see all sorts of for profit businesses laying off workers, overworking them, underpaying them, micromanaging their non work lives, trying to instill a culture that they are their job, that there is no real non work life, cutting corners of all kinds that result in consumers overpaying for flawed products or services... etc etc.

I suppose you can take the philosophical angle that the system itself is amoral, mechanicistically speaking.

But I would argue two points:

  1. A vast and all encompassing system should be looked at both mechanistically, internally, as well as externally, or in totality.

It doesnt matter what the inner mechanisms of a system are if they continuously and predictably cause massive harm to many people in many ways, some that are direct and obvious, and others that are indirect, less obvious and more gradual.

  1. There are human beings, people, that make the decisions to lay people off, to cut safety corners, to price hike, to lie to the media and consumers. And there are people who suffer from all this. When a person does something that harms another, I call that malice, ill will, hate or cruelty, especially on the scale and of the scope that so often happens in large for profit enterprises. They are moral actors regardless of what their excuses are, harming other human beings with a capacity to feel and think and have emotions.

In its grand totality, the system uses and abuses the many, and benefits the few.

Whats worse is that its logic has now fundamentally overriden any possible communal species wide survival mechanism as it has now warmed the Earth beyond the tipping point of being able to stop climate change, ensuring even more harm.