It's about shareholder value added. A public company or a VC-backed private company can focus on making creative nice widgets and services for only a limited time before growth inevitably stalls. After that (unless the management can and wants to screw over their owners) they will need to look elsewhere for more profits.
Capitalism has always been about greed, and I say that as a profound advocate of it. Its very convenient to blame capitalism now for stuff we don't like when I'd argue we knew all along about greed being a core part of capitalism. Convenient in that it somehow absolves government out of it, and hides how we as the supposed democratic participants have been utterly powerless to direct the state towards reigning in these supposedly greedy/evil capitalist companies.
I mean, the Soviet Nomenklatura had a reputation for similar behavior. Pre-capitalist societies also had plenty of corruption, graft, corruption, and destructive avarice.
To a Capitalist, the only possible deal is a profitable one. However, to be profitable, the arangement between participants has to be unfair. It is only through an unfair exchange of goods and services is a profit produced. So it imperative the other parties believe they are getting a fair deal, otherwise they would not participate. So, it is unmentioned while required that the Capitalist control the information of the participants such that they will believe they are getting a fair deal, while the Capitalist is in fact always getting the unfair advantage, or they would not participate. This is the nature of the corruption that is Capitalism.
I pay an electrician a slight premium for knowledge and experience that won’t burn my house down. Sure, I could look it up on YouTube but the probability that I do something wrong probably outweighs the premium I would pay for a qualified electrician.
Communism advocates for the workers owning their own means of production. An electrician working as a sole trader is an example of this. It is perfectly consistent with anti-capitalist thought to hire someone to perform work.
It’s completely fair and it’s also not quite what people who critique capitalism are talking about. Imagine you’re hiring a company that has electricians on payroll, then by definition the electrician you hired will get less than the labor he performed, and the company will pocket the difference as profit - or it won’t stay in business long. Electricians have the option of going alone, many other industries not so much.
Another profession where freelance is a common option is coding. So if going alone should always better, is the implication that all the employed electricians and coders are irrational or want to be exploited?
There are clearly advantages when working for someone else. Is the negotiation between the employee and the employer always fair when an industry has a few established incumbents? That depends and there’s a large spectrum of possibilities.
Unfair in the sense that the buyer pays more than the cost of goods sold, but trade often increases utility for both parties anyway. People happily pay $1,000/year for homeowners insurance even though the expected losses and expenses are only $970 or whatever, because they don’t want to be on the hook for a new home if theirs burns down, and they’re generally better off for doing so. And they may buy it from for-profit insurers, even though those for-profit insurers are in direct competition with mutuals (basically co-ops) and there’s full price transparency, because despite the capitalist making an expected profit of $30 or whatever the stock insurer provides a better price or service.
There’s absolutely no requirement that a capitalist (either the same one that stands to profit or a different one) control the flow of information in order to profit, lots of (probably most) capital funds the production of highly competitive and price-transparent goods, and all public stock companies disclose their expenses publicly. Even Google and Facebook provide clear prices to their customers, the issue with surveillance companies in particular is that their users aren’t the customers, but that’s totally orthogonal to the conflict you’re describing.
I am talking about the relationship between the employer and the employee. That is the unfair relationship which Capitalism is dependent and is imperative they control the information of their participants.
I'm not sure that unequal relationship between employer and employee is a feature of capitalism per se - even in a market socialist system in which labor receives all that it produces, any individual worker depends on their employer more heavily than their employer depends on them, so you still have an imbalance of power.
I also don't think it's really relevant here, since Google and Facebook employees are about the least coerced labor there is, considering that virtually all of them could another job earning an order of magnitude more than the minimal living wage in their area at the drop of a hat.
> I'm not sure that unequal relationship between employer and employee is a feature of capitalism per se
It is.
It is also a feature, to a greater or lesser extent, of many systems that are downstream descendants of capitalism and haven’t replaced the elements that produce that feature.
It is also a feature of the upstream immediate predecessor of capitalism (feudalism, in which control of the means of production is unified with land ownership and typically executive, and often judicial and legislative, power over those on it) in an even starker form.
> even in a market socialist system
“even”? Market socialism is a very close relative and (conceptually) descendant of capitalism, not some distant and opposed system.
> in which labor receives all that it produces, any individual worker depends on their employer more heavily than their employer depends on them, so you still have an imbalance of power.
In market socialism, the employer is an agent of the employees, who (in many versions) each individually hold guaranteed rights with respect to it much the same as citizens of a liberal democratic regime do against the State. Both the universal elimination of the employer fundamentally serving an interest outside of its employees and also the common (but not universal, “market socialism” is a broad category with lots of variations) guarantees of individual rights to employees exist specifically to mitigate the adverse effects of the employer/employee power balance that it retains from capitalism.
