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It's just an analogy, to show the vast scale of modern multi-national corporations. It's like when they say "If you lined up all of [X] in a row, it would encir
by lapcat 4y ago
It's just an analogy, to show the vast scale of modern multi-national corporations. It's like when they say "If you lined up all of [X] in a row, it would encircle the Earth [N] times." Nothing more than an analogy. [X] never actually encircles the Earth. Some people are taking this analogy a bit too seriously.
The point is that these corporations have an unprecedented amount of market power, and as a result, political power too. Which makes it even more problematic that corporations are inherently non-democratic and don't answer to anything except profit: "By design, the corporation is not a democratic enterprise. Its management is hierarchical..."
Corporations are not exactly like authoritarian countries. Nobody is dumb enough to think that. It's just that there are some troubling similarities.
- CrazyStat 4y agoIt's a bad and misleading analogy, because most readers will understand it as "companies are richer than countries"--which is probably exactly the feeling that Jacobin wants to evoke. I wouldn't accept such an analogy from a right wing news source (Fox News, say), and I won't accept it from a left wing news source. To build on your analogy, it's like saying "if you laid all the people in the world in a line it would circle the globe N times" but not mentioning the fact that you're lining them up belly to back instead of head to toe. We should hold ourselves to a higher standard.
- lapcat 4y ago> most readers will understand it as "companies are richer than countries" Says who? You're not giving readers much credit.
- CrazyStat 4y agoNo, I'm not. Most people don't understand the details of either corporate or national accounting, and the very important difference between an annual production measure like GDP vs a total market value measure like market cap will be lost on them, especially in passing.
- lapcat 4y agoAgain you're speaking for "Most people" with no empirical evidence or polling. Let me take a turn though: "Most people" aren't reading a Jacobin article at all. The only relevant audience is the readers of this article.
- CrazyStat 4y agoUnfortunately readers of Jacobin are perhaps particularly unlikely to understand the details of corporate and national accounting.
- lapcat 4y agoYou're one of them.
- CrazyStat 4y agoOnly in passing.
- lapcat 4y agoThereby admitting that you actually know nothing about readers of Jacobin, and your slur was completely unjustified.
- CrazyStat 4y agoBad reasoning. I bet you don't watch Newsmax, but you probably know some things about people who watch Newsmax. I wanted to make a joke about it being exactly the kind of reasoning a Jacobin reader would use, but I'm refraining.
- lapcat 4y ago> I bet you don't watch Newsmax, but you probably know some things about people who watch Newsmax. I don't, and I don't. > I wanted to make a joke about it being exactly the kind of reasoning a Jacobin reader would use, but I'm refraining. I'm not a regular Jacobin reader, "only in passing" as you say. In any case, you're just spouting stereotypes invented in your own mind.