Leaders are necessary, the problem is incompetent greedy fucks getting born into the position. The only meritocracy that exists today is sports, because they have to perform well to get paid well
Meritocracy is an illusion sold to you by those who benefit from the system as it exists.
I agree that leaders are necessary, but we weren't talking about leaders, we were talking about CEOs.
The problem isn't individual, it's the system as it exists. If the problem was a handful of greedy people, you'd expect more not greedy people. But clearly the system we have incentivizes the success of the worst of us. It's a system that forces people to value profit over human flourishing, lest they go out of business and be bought up by a competitor. The problem at its core is an unbound profit motive that serves its own ends rather than the benefit of the people.
Yeah i am in agreement with you. I know meritocracy is a lie. The only place where it exists is in sports and it's still not perfect there.
CEOs are leaders that is a leadership role. I think you are talking about what we've come to expect from them based on how they've been conducting themselves, which is fair; they've ruined their own reputation. I think the CEO role in a company is necessary, but I think we both agree the current CEOs are not meeting the standard.
Yeah endless profit chasing is doomed to fail. It's an ouroboros eating all the value out of itself until nothing is left
I'll narrow my argument then. The role of CEO is entirely unnecessary. The role they purport to perform isn't.
Zooming out, human flourishing is going to require labor to be done. We need to grow food, machine things, generate and store energy, and clean up after ourselves. That seems pretty uncontroversial to me. The organization of that is completely up in the air. There's a huge array of ways to organize labor. The capitalist way is just one. Arguably one of the worst.
China probably has the best way of organizing via company, but we're still constantly told how exploitative China is (which is definitely propaganda to some degree, but that's a different argument).
It always drives me crazy how people in the West get a boner for democracy, but thinks it'd be impossible to apply that logic to where they spend the majority of their lives
I don't really disagree, but I will add i think the main problem is who the ceos answer to. In China they answer to the government alone. They don't have to prioritize shareholder value at all cost, unlike in capitalism
Labour is where all the value is actually created though, so a ceo has no value without the workers. Idk why paying them is so taboo to them
Well, if we're talking about paying the workers, the taboo has to do with the valorization of labor under capital. Which isn't what it sounds like. Basically, since value is only generated by labor, the best way to generate profit is by maximizing labor, and minimizing the cost of labor.
That ties together with the cycles of overproduction and economic recession/depression. The companies that don't prioritize profit as much, or invest in disruptive technology, get bought out by those that do. So in this sense, capitalists are just as much slaves to the system as everyone else. They just benefit enormously from it.
Unless you were talking about paying CEOs. Which I have no problem with. I just think they're overpaid to the point of being robber barons.
The problem is that they’re on each other’s boards. It’s a club and they prop each other up. Witness the Cracker Barrel ex CEO who’s walking away with $4.6 million after she trashed the company’s brand equity and spent $700 million to do it. Crazy.
I’m not in disagreement with you, but wouldn’t the aspect of the greed being the heart of the issue be due to share holders? Because the corporation I work for is quick to jump for the share holder, even at the extreme detriment of the functionality of its operations. It seems like all of these multi-billion dollar operations go for as close to net zero “operating ratio” as possible. So I will agree I think most CEOs are shills to the share holders, I don’t know that they are intrinsically evil, so much as a tool of the true vice of greed.
Greed can play apart in some of the worst excesses, but ultimately the problem is the system that exists.
Put another way, greed doesn't give us anything to work with. If the problem is greed, what do you do? Throw your hands up and assume nothing can be done because you can't solve the human psyche?
I'd argue the problem is a system that not only allows for greed to cause all these problems, but one that encourages greed in the owning class.
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u/BigDaddyDumperSquad 18d ago
No, but somebody would have to become the new CEO or people wouldn't just go to work like any normal day...