The Refreshingly Brutal Honesty of Jeff Bezos
We owe him our thanks, not our scorn
“I want to thank every Amazon employee and every Amazon customer because you guys paid for all of this,” said the billionaire space returnee Jeff Bezos, beaming beneath a cowboy hat.
Appearing triumphant, and perhaps a tad invincible, after his $5.5 billion flight touched the edge of space, Bezos was shockingly frank. “Seriously, for every Amazon customer out there and every Amazon employee, thank you from the bottom of my heart very much. It’s very appreciated.”
Yet this moment of brutal honesty, this quick primer on how Capitalism works, brought tut-tut reproaches from the guardians of public decorum and political correctness.
Why?
Why is it wrong for a Capitalist to gloat about the system that makes him wealthy?
Why shouldn’t a Capitalist revel in the “democracy” that makes it legally possible for him to amass immense wealth without paying the taxes that are supposed to serve the Common Good?
He is, after all, only a messenger.
Loathing Bezos, and clucking about the greed and selfishness of billionaires, may lead to some self-satisfying moral outrage.
But what will it really change?
Bezos is a symptom of a broken system that breeds inequity.
Instead of shock at his honesty, wouldn’t we do better to change the system that bred him?
During all the years of the Cold War, and until China’s rise starting in the 1990s, we revelled in the myth that Capitalism and Democracy are joined at the hip. Free and democratic societies, we were told, enable capitalism to produce wealth, generate tax revenue, and fund public services.
Perhaps it’s time to recognise that Capitalism and Democracy aren’t partners.
They have nothing to do with one another.
China harnesses Capitalism to the service of an authoritarian state. It squashes public dissent while investing heavily in health, education, infrastructure, and the other “common good” fruits of state spending on providing a better material life for its citizens.
Meanwhile, the “democratic” systems with their tax loopholes and write-offs enable billionaires to pay nothing: while working people living from paycheque to paycheque pay their full share of taxes.
Democracy and Capitalism aren’t partners.
They are mortal enemies.
Democracy that works for all of us needs fairness.
Democracy that includes us all needs people with similar autonomy — the autonomy to take decisions about their collective future, without having to worry about how they will provide for themselves and their dear ones.
Otherwise, we will have Chinese “democracy” — the State will provide, so long as you keep your mouth shut and don’t question authority.
Or western liberal “democracy” where you have the freedom to live in poverty, the freedom to live in fear, the freedom to live in constant worry about your daily bread.
Perhaps it’s time to ask if those in India, Western Europe, Mexico, South Africa, the United States, Japan, and a handful of other nations can really call themselves citizens of a Democracy?
Or to wonder whether genuine Democracy can ever flourish, so long as economies are dominated by Capitalism and social structures are under the sway of Patriarchy.
The liberty to lead a life of meaning and purpose, to have our being defined by dignity and a sense of worth, is surely the ardent core of what Democracy ought to confer.
Such a life is far beyond the reach of hundreds of millions of citizens of “democratic” nations.
We are told that the right to vote in reasonably free and fair elections is what defines Democracy.
Yet the right to cast a vote in elections every four years or so is a far cry from having a meaningful say in how your society is shaped and governed.
Citizenship has meaning only when citizens can change the attitudes of those with power. And contribute positively and actively to building a just society.
And with every passing year, that power lies in the hands of powerful Capitalists lavishly funding candidates who will serve the interests of the dominant.
Bezos’s burst of candour precisely illustrates the conclusion offered by the German-Jewish philosopher Karl Marx: Capitalism cannot produce the life of dignity and purpose which is an essential foundation of Democracy.
In his 1867 work Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Marx called for limiting work hours, enabling people to retire from work with dignity and security, and an end to colonialism as a system of economic exploitation and the looting of faraway lands. And he neatly defined the power imbalance which would set the stage for socialist revolution in the decades to come:
“The great beauty of capitalist production consists in this — that it not only
constantly reproduces the wage-worker as wage-worker, but produces always, in proportion to the accumulation of capital, a relative surplus-population of
wage-workers. Thus the law of supply and demand of labour is kept in the right rut, the oscillation of wages is penned within limits satisfactory to capitalist exploitation, and lastly, the social dependence of the labourer on the capitalist, that indispensable requisite, is secured; an unmistakable relation of dependence.”
The ideal Marx envisioned was rather different: instead of a power relationship wherein the employer has near absolute exploitative power over a dependent worker, the worker should in fact be amply compensated for the fruit of their labour.
Marx’s point is well illustrated in our times, in the ferocious pushback against attempts to raise the minimum wage, let alone to establish a living wage that would enable the working poor to afford a life of dignity.
Enabling and empowering workers to have the economic independence to afford a meaningful life of dignity and purpose cannot work in capitalism, even as it is practised today.
As Marx observed, the whole notion of capital is to harvest the surplus value of someone else’s labour and use it to enrich oneself.
Which is precisely what Jeff Bezos did, in his competition with fellow billionaire Richard Branson to commercialise space travel.
Marx’s philosophy did not arise in and of itself. It is built on the revolutionary thinking distilled into political philosophy by his predecessor Jean-Jacques Rousseau. In 1754, Rousseau produced his Discourse on the Origins of Inequality among Humankind.
Rousseau spoke of humans emerging from the state of nature to form organised societies, and to evolve into the concept of private property. This change was the beginning of inequality: individual wealth versus the common wealth, and individual good as separate from the common good.
Eight years later, in 1762, Rousseau refined and distilled his thinking into advocating a “social contract” to enable humans to live in liberty, fraternity, and equality. His book Of the Social Contract or Principle of Political Rights opened with a declaration that was revolutionary because it articulated a self-evident truth: “Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains.”
These were the chains the great 18th and 19th century struggles for equality and dignity aimed to break.
And these were the words that influenced the revolution-fed Constitution of the United States, declaring the highest human aspiration to be “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.”
Rousseau laid the foundations for the American Revolution, the French Revolution, and all the 19th century movements that replaced monarchy with some form of representative governance — with agency and empowerment to come together in collective endeavours.
Rousseau’s Social Contract is the foundation of what we would later come to describe as the Common Good and the Common Wealth.
As Rousseau put it:
“The passage from the state of nature to the civil state produces a very remarkable
change in man, by substituting justice for instinct in his conduct, and giving his
actions the morality they had formerly lacked. Then only, when the voice of duty
takes the place of physical impulses and right of appetite, does man, who so far
had considered only himself, find that he is forced to act on different principles,
and to consult his reason before listening to his inclinations.
“Let us draw up the whole account in terms easily commensurable. What man
loses by the social contract is his natural liberty and an unlimited right to
everything he tries to get and succeeds in getting; what he gains is civil liberty
and the proprietorship of all he possesses. If we are to avoid mistakes in weighing
one against the other, we must clearly distinguish natural liberty, which is
bounded only by the strength of the individual, from civil liberty, which is
limited by the general will; and possession, which is merely the effect of force or
the right of the first occupier, from property, which can be founded only on a
positive title.
“We might, over and above all this, add, to what man acquires in the
civil state, moral liberty, which alone makes him truly master of himself; for the
mere impulse of appetite is slavery, while obedience to a law which we prescribe
to ourselves is liberty.”
This was a radical thought indeed for its time, that civil society and the rule of law would supplant the entrenched hierarchy of nobles and serfs; where absolute monarchs claimed to rule by divine right.
Rousseau’s principles elevated the collective benefit of society far above individual pursuit of self-fulfilment, which would by nature be seen as selfish.
Indeed, Rousseau considered “le bien commun”, or the Common Good, as the highest aspiration of any organised society.
In this he was echoing classical Greek philosophers, particularly Aristotle, who spoke of the common interest.
These are the roots of Democracy. A Democracy that can and should work for all of us. A Democracy that has been so eroded and perverted by the dominance of Patriarchy and Capitalism, that it might as well be a tyranny. A tyranny with the illusion of “free” elections every four years.
By thanking Amazon workers and customers who paid for his $5.5 billion flight, Bezos evoked an existential question:
Are we happy with this reality?
And if not, what are we going to do about it?
What will you do to reclaim Democracy, if indeed it can be reclaimed?
What will you to commit to, to arrive at a Democracy that works for our times, that works for all of us, not just some us?
What will you do to create a future where people of all origins and genders live together with dignity, in community; enjoying freedom from fear and freedom from want; in harmony with one another, and with the natural world?
satya@cambridgestrategies.com
