I had the thought that the only way to really fight against large corporations and billionaires is to compete against them. Start your own business. Amazon relies on third-party sellers more than anything in their business. So start a business and sell your items there. Don’t have anything to sell? People are a creative bunch, make something. Find a local producer of something and make a partnership to sell on an independent web site.
You know that Amazon has so much money that it can sell at a loss for years if necessary to ANNIHILATE all its competition, right?
No one can compete against Amazon, or Google, or Microsoft, or any of the big companies with profits that exceed the GDP of countries.
You can’t win by playing THEIR game, with THEIR pieces and THEIR rules.
We have to break stuff, THEIR stuff.
“The market can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent.”
oh no, it’s libs reinventing free market capitalism again
OH NO! It’s someone slapping a label on an idea to make it sound bad. Yeah, maybe we should reinvent the wheel. What good does this do to fix the problem? Call it what you want, but give me an alternate solution at the same time. Something that anybody can do.
Go protest to get your government to make corporations follow laws and pay taxes. Vote for the politicians that work towards that.
And how’s that been going for you? When people shout enough, the ones that need to listen start to tune it out. But start hitting wallets? Can’t tune that out.
What you propose isn’t hitting wallets, it’s refilling them
Vote for the politicians that work towards that.
Kind of like asking him to vote for a norwal. Sure, they exist, but they don’t even attempt to make any REAL progress towards closing the wealth gap.
I was kinda assuming not everyone lives in the US and in some countries it might actually be viable
you will never be able to outcompete the 1% because the only way to do that is to exploit workers more than they do. liberal propaganda may talk a lot about how growth without harm is possible, but it’s all just that, propaganda.
what I and a lot of anti-authoritarians propose is starting co-ops whose aim is to fight against competition, and to abolish the profit motive as much as possible. also organizing into neighborhood councils that function based on consensus democracy to autonomously govern the neighborhood against the wishes of oppressors like the state, the cops, landlords and the owning class.
the only way to escape late-stage capitalism is to go against this cancer cell ideology called infinite growth by adopting this thing called degrowth.
the Argentinian example is extremely inspiring for workplace self-management:
if you prefer podcasts, here’s an episode on Fabricas Ocupadas (occupied factories).
https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/anarcho-argentina-one-year-on
https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/jose-antonio-gutierrez-d-workers-without-bosses#fn10
Good shower thought but not really practical on its own.
Amazon will completely destroy a small business at every category except being a small business. Even if you could, Amazon still mandates that vendors have the lowest price on Amazon.
With that being said, I do like that many other companies are getting on board with the Amazon style. It is nice to have options at least.
