Faceless, mechanized, dehumanizing profit maximization, or the personal, in-your-face viciousness of a petty tyrant lording over a fief. Tough choice.
Small business owners are tricky because maybe you open up a pizza place because you genuinely love the craft of making pizza and want to become an integral part of your neighborhood, or maybe you open up a pizza place because you want to see your name on a big sign.
It's calculated, efficient, clearly motivated evil verses narcissistic, deranged, inconsistent evil.
The reason the latter often feels preferable is it's a devil you can understand. I can analysis the haute-bourgeois and predict their actions with some accuracy, makes them easier to organize against. For all I know my local petty-bourgeois is one citation for improper sewage dumping away from driving an armored bulldozer through my house.
It can be difficult for many to contemplate the sheer evil and depravity of the owner of a chain of car dealerships in Idaho.
While it is helpful to vent, Marxist speaking they are not needed to be evil, the structures and systems mean they fill a role in which they are molded into acting in a way that makes you see them as evil.
Moral categories are not needed, but emotional fulfilling.
I think about this story often:
They called the cops on a disabled guy for playing the trumpet outside their store in the middle of the music district.
I just checked and yelp covered up all the negative reviews the bookstore received after that lol
Can't let "tried to have a man killed 1/5" skew the averages for important shit like "they greeted me upon entering 5/5"
I've mentioned this before but there was a dude busking on a horn years ago outside where I worked and the amount of people that were like "if he put as much energy into finding a job as he did playing that trumpet..." almost made me snap.
He's making music, it's free music, and he's fucking good at it you ungrateful motherfuckers. This is his fucking job and he's doing a great job. I was so goddamn mad.
Also, finding a job is like gambling. I could do it for a day and get lucky, I could do it for several years and not.
As I've explained to my co-workers in restaurants before, they're no better morally than any other business owners they're just too egotistical or stupid to just follow the easy money and open a franchise, which makes them more unpredictable and dangerous.
Like you think they wouldn't own large businesses if they could? That remaining small is their goal? Fuck no, your mom and pop store's dream would be to be Wal Mart. They're the capitalists coming near last place and don't deserve your pity any more than another richer capitalist. The exploitation is the same and it's harder to organize against a business where the owner is there every day.
Absolutely. A coworker today relayed their cousins path from coin op carwash owner, to PPP loan multiple car wash owner, to PPP loan apartment owner. Dude’s still actively seeking to acquire more.
Well yeah because you never meet the shareholders of large corps, theyve delegated the nasty stuff to managers and such.
If I hear one more person talk about "ma and pop landlords" as inherently good against some big landlord corporation homie oh my god
The petit bourgeoisie are the worst because they're not as powerful as the major corpos, but for that reason alone they're more indignant, more annoying, and more fascistic.
And 'support local business' libs have given them this complex that they're a social good and any hardship they face as a business owners real or imagined is a form of martyrdom for the greater social good. The poor small business owner can't afford the new minimum wage proposal and big business will eat up all the smol babies etc. At least big business owners played the game and won, they were out competed in the capitalist market they paricipate in and endorse and want our sympathy for being the smallest predator in the pond and that we ought to believe it's socially constructive to throw ourselves into their mouth because their ego says they should be a shark? Fuck that, let em be the chum to the sharks that already are out there for all I care. The person who owned the hole in the wall vegan restaurant I previously worked at still took time off from.the business she ran over Christmas to be a part time postal worker and deliver mail, cutting out what is a sweet yearly possible entry to an amazing long term union gig as a postal worker if you don't wash out after Christmas and keep up the hours. She also bought rental properties that her husband renovated and then she resold. They're all absolute scum on equal level, they're the ones with any stake in this imaginary competition where they were doomed from the start but lacked the sanity to realize it and unless they offer workers a better deal than the big guy, they can take a fucking hike. They decided to be capitalists, apparently taking the risk is why they deserve to exploit workers so, here's your risk assholes, when you sit down at the table you may go bust.
This is why we got to make a Faustian bargain with the billionaires that we will let them have New Zealand if they help us crush the middle class. One mega yacht is better than a thousand little boats.
What? No. Have you read Faust? It doesn't work out. That's an essential part of your metaphor, you don't deal with the devil cause you'll get fucking screwed. A thousand little boats is way better than the aircraft carriers and battleships our billionaires essentially have at their admittedly less than immediate disposal but I doubt I need to explain the military industrial complex. If we're sticking with a boat metaphor, yeah, sometimes it'd a yacht but that yacht is being protected by an advanced military force as well. I've gone off hard against small business owners enough in this thread I don't feel the need to here, but comparing them is a false exercise as a communist They're the same but on different stratus of power, there is no fundamental difference morally between small or big businesses, they're both our enemy and the only difference to consider is in strategy to destroy them. Otherwise it's a distinction with no difference.
No class collaborationism, that's literally fascist ideology.we will let them have New Zealand
don't they already own it?
I worked for a small business last year and experienced wage theft every workday.
The worst is the next rung up from "small business owner". The guy who might own a few small business and/or some investment properties. Still an ant in the eye of the Amazons of the world, but has vastly more power to victimize a larger number of people.
These are always the most fucking disgusting, pathetic, annoying and cruel people I have met. They brag about all the awful shit they do to people and they get away with it. Rapists, thieves and wife beaters the lot of them, but actually having the money to shield them from any blowback in the way the petty tyrant who just owns like a restaurant or something does not.
I worked for one of these types when I was younger. Truly the most psychotic vile piece of shit but with a good outward image which made it so much more annoying for anybody to believe he was a garbage boss.
While working for him he got diagnosed with some kind of cancer with a small survival rate that he ended up beating somehow. I thought naively at the time that the experience might change his ways, but nope, as soon as he was better he fired or reduced the hours without notice to a whole bunch of people across his businesses.
Quite a radicalising moment tbh.
When you're closer to the exploitation, you have to be more dehumanizing to live with the acquisition of profit.
If you can abstract far enough away from your part in exploitation, you don't have to inflict excessive suffering to justify the cruelty of the exploitation itself.
Throw in the fact that small business tyrants want to be millionaires, things get more unpleasant.
Most exploited I ever was was when I worked for a non profit mom and pop theater company. Pay was $5/hr officially but I worked about twenty hours of unpaid overtime every week, so even if you include the hypothetical rent I saved living in the shared accommodation it came out to well below minimum wage for the time (this was 2012ish).
Everyone but me was pretty much sponsored by their parents to be there. I subsisted off of top ramen and mooched food for about six months before realizing that the economics simply were never going to make sense and cut my losses, leaving that job with more debt than I had when I started it.
I would be tempted to say that that's just the nature of the industry and that the people there were doing it for the love of the art form - but I also saw the homes that the owners and their son all lived in, so I'm not tempted to say that at all.
People who work for large corporations have some form of oversight because the bosses always have bosses and there's always some kind of company policy that at least in theory they have to follow and the government is at least in theory somewhat interested in what they do, especially if they're publically traded.
Small business tyrants have none of that oversight, can do whatever they want and treat workers however they want because they're the rulers of their own little fiefdoms. Obviously this also means they start thinking they're hot shit because they OwN A BuSiNeSs and PrOvIdE JoBs.
Large corporations suck in different ways, but my own conclusion is that in this capitalist hellscape the best kind of job would be as some anonymous person in a large corporation, as long as your boss wasn't the micromanaging type (yeah good luck) and corporate bureaucracy didn't care too much about what you do, that'd probably have the least amount of bullshit.
i like how Bryan from street fight would always refer to them as "small business tyrants". some of the worst people on the planet. worst boss/human i ever knew was a "small business" owner.
I can hide in large corps for the most part. When I worked in a small business i couldn't hide at all the fucking CEO would walk into the bathroom banging on the door telling me to get back to work.
Where i work now i can piss about with no real oversight
