The difference is that liberal ideas will still allow people like Jeff to steal profits that employees made and take them for himself while having little incentive to provide any semblance of a fair wage to the employees. By seizing the means of production, employees will be able to claim their rightful part of the profits and a comfortable living wage.
Youre talking about taking away a private business owners company away from him (and any shareholders/investors he might have), and then giving it to other people. How in the fuck can you, with a straight face, describe the business owner as the one who is stealing?!
Jeff Bezos (and the shareholders/investors) are making profit from someone else's work. not doing any themselves.
there is a difference between the amount of revenue generated by workers and the amount of money they take home. this difference is called a surplus, and without it, Jeff Bezos (and the shareholders/investors) wouldn't make any money.
the Value of work is equal to the amount of money it generates. for example:
suppose there's a restaurant that sells a sandwich for $15, and the combined cost of the ingredients, electricity, and other things used to make the sandwich cost $5. they make a profit of $10 per sandwich.
suppose that, at a given time, there are 10 workers at this restaurant, all doing a necessary job (cooking, waiting, washing dishes, etc.)
suppose, during a given hour, that they sell 100 of those sandwiches.
they have made $1000 during that hour, which means that the collective value of the labour of those employees during that hour is $1000.
in most companies (including Amazon), the workers only get to take home a fraction of this. the rest is, in a very literal sense, being stolen from them and given to people who did no work to earn it (at Amazon, this means Jeff Bezos and his shareholders/investors)
Okay, this has been puzzling me. What constitutes work? How far abstracted from direct production of material goods does a task have to be to still be considered work in these examples?
The people who manage workers and assign them specific tasks and coaching in order to be optimally productive - are they doing work? Human resources and staffing - does that qualify as work? How about the people managing them? And so on, and so forth? How far up the chain do we go until we decide someone in a particular role is not contributing to production of a good? How would this apply to the service industries? ---
~Drewnami: The Drew abides.~ Gonads are useful for their purpose, but they are no substitute for brains. -Paul Harvey