Thursday, January 10, 2019

Does Bezos exploit Bezos?

Does Bezos exploit Bezos, according to Marxist exploitation theories and generally leftist notions about the relationship between labor and capital?  Does Bezos stand over and against Bezos in a condition of alienation?  Bezos has labored and labored and labored with his intellect, as CEO (this guy runs the company at the behest of the capitalist owners) to create a company approaching one trillion dollars in market value, and yet, what does he have to show for it?  Only about $120 billion of that.  Bezos owns, like, one-fifth of Amazon, a publicly-held company.  I guess in effect his one-fifth of the shares is the main form of compensation he takes from the capitalists.  But he's also one-fifth of the capitalist ownership here, so apparently capital (Bezos) is extracting an unjust share of the proceeds from labor (Bezos)?

If socialists and their ilk don't get this example right down to the economic foundations of value-added, they simply can't and won't characterize the nature of the capitalist system properly.  Or maybe they're just somehow a lot more clever than the defenders of capitalism?

[Addendum: Perhaps the exploitation is that it's all Bezos's creation, value-added-wise, and it's the owners of 4/5th of Amazon who have exploited him.  So we have Bezos being exploited to the tune of having a net worth of only $150B.  But certainly he didn't do all the creating himself, there were other minds involved that had to implement subordinate-level work and they create value-added in their own way, and what if the owners of 4/5th of Amazon stock are being compensated directly or indirectly for the labor, intellectual or otherwise, that they do?  But then when you carry out that analysis to the very end, isn't it more or less plausible to say that everyone does in the end get roughly the proportion of value-added they created in return.  Does this ever occur to socialists?  Could you tell based on the things they say?]