I read it as saying, “there are state economies that, even surrendering all of the goods and services they’ve created and provided in a year, cannot exchange them for the full market value of some companies.”
Hasn't that been the case for at least a hundred years? I'm no economy historian, but I'd expect e.g. Liechtenstein's or San Marino's economy to be smaller than some company's market value since essentially their independence.
All that comparison really does is acknowledge that there are countries of vastly different size and wealth. Large companies from a giant nation will be much larger than a tiny country.
The size of some companies can be taken for granted. Living in a western industrialized country with many large companies, it’s easy to lose a sense of scale. The comparison widens the lens and grounds business organizations within the context of other human organizations e.g. the state. The comparison is also a setup for the next paragraph:
> One reason that’s significant: if many multinational companies actually were countries, they would be authoritarian dictatorships more ruthlessly efficient than any in existence. At many such companies, managers wield virtually unchecked power over subordinates and, thanks to modern technology, increasingly practice advanced techniques of monitoring and surveillance as well.
Yeah, but it compares companies from a state/economic zone of 300m or 450m people to a state of 4m people.
Sure, yeah, but that's like comparing a city of a 1million to one of 10k inhabitants and pointing at the much larger usage of construction material in absolute terms. Technically correct but ultimately useless.
If there's a company in the US that has a larger market cap than the US, that would make it more interesting. But even Apple is barely a tenth of it, and that's comparing the expected total future wealth of Apple to a year's worth of output of the US.
I'm not sure what comparing a year's amount of oranges to all future apples really tells us.
It’s useful in the argument that (1) states, as they’ve grown in size have also been reigned-in due to the power that comes with their size, and (2) that companies, as they grow in size, must be reigned-in due to the power that comes with their size (anti-trust, anti-monopoly).
Metaphors are useful but they can also just confuse the issue through unnecessary abstraction. The fundamental question is already there at the surface: it’s not about market capitalization or about gdp, but about the power that size in either metric represents. That’s the characteristic binding these two dissimilar ideas together.
The missed distinction, of course, being that companies like Amazon don't send workers to penal colonies for forced labor, don't built walls to prevent them from leaving, and don't kill dissenters.
So not much like an authoritarian dictatorship at all.
Using those three characteristics as necessary conditions for authoritarian dictatorship excludes many actual historical authoritarian dictatorships as well.
Of course, in the context of layoffs, Amazon does effectively deport workers who are on employment-tied visas. In a sense, Amazon is sentencing them to "transportation if you can't find a job in a bad job market."
That may be an accurate way to read it, but I’d bet that people just casually reading through it will breeze past that comparison and take away “these companies are bigger than most countries”.
Which, of course, is a comparison that Jacobin is more than happy to let slide. Jacobin’s own description of itself is “Jacobin is a leading voice of the American left, offering socialist perspectives on politics, economics, and culture.”
Maybe, but I’m cautious about assuming my own superiority, i.e. that my lonely cohort and I are the only ones able to read and infer the proper meaning from writing, and that others are too easily misguided.
