Mom and pop operations are less productive, that's why they have to offer lower wages and charge higher prices, all other things being equal. But that's not the same as being evil to others, and many actively prefer them as places to work for and patronize as customers.

Nobody "fetishizes" small business. This sounds like big corporation mouthpiece rhetoric. Big business is responsible for wealth concentration and irresponsible economics that hurt everyone. The alternative? Small business. It's easy to see why people might prefer a reality where small businesses continue to exist. Not everyone likes the Orwell novel we're writing.

"fetishize" is probably the wrong word, but people are certainly a lot more sympathetic towards small businesses. in my city, people are donating tens of thousands of dollars to local businesses that are closed due to coronavirus. can you imagine someone donating money to keep walmart afloat?

as an aside, I've read that jacobin article before and I find it to be a bit myopic. a large part of why small businesses offer comparatively shitty pay and benefits is because they can't really afford to do better. part of this is just inherent efficiencies of scale (generally a good thing), but it's also because the biggest players get to rewrite the rules to make it very difficult to compete with them. it's not unreasonable to think that a friendlier environment for small businesses might lead to better compensation for their employees.

That doesn't make the citizens ill-informed or delusional. The donators think the existence of small businesses provide a benefit to society beyond bottom lines. Small businesses always so close to sinking, so conditions will be worse for workers. Small business workers don't need to be in The Party though, and their social credit score won't come into play. One storm could sink every small business, leaving only big businesses to cover the entire market. Businesses that have gone unchecked for half a century and are big enough to keep legislation in regulatory capture.

That’s because companies like Walmart shouldn’t need those donations - bigger operations like them bring in much higher revenue. They also tend to work around tax laws and find loopholes, which a small business can’t do (and even if they did, it would be chump change compared to the behemoths). So it makes sense for the small guys to get that kind of “grassroots” support.

Revenue seems like a weird thing to look at though. If you only get more profit by hiring more employees, that doesn't change how much you can afford to pay your employees. How do they compare in terms of profit/employee?

Walmart doesn’t need donations if and will they would the people would have little say in that since they’ll get bailed out and the tax payer will pay for it one way or another.

Big business is also responsible for economies of scale. A small mom and pop shop can't really scale the same way a big business does. Another added benefit is that we get to regulate the products much more without swamping the business in costs they can't afford.

So I'm not sure that big business is really "responsible for irresponsible economics that hurts everyone".

Publicly traded companies are profit maximizing machines. Societal wealth has never been higher but the middle class is shrinking. It shouldn't be a surprise, then, when people can't afford to live in their own society. We're facing the natural progression of a society ruled by greed machines: economic depression.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/stevedenning/2016/04/11/is-big-...

This article was from the Jacobin, perhaps the foremost Left-wing publication in the USA presently. Jacobin is essentially the Pravda in English.

tl;dr:

critiques of small business aim to reject the following dilemma as false,

> The alternative [to monopolists and global megacorporations]? Small business.

rather than to promote big business.

In the USA, the Bureau of Labor Statistics calls any business with 500 employees or fewer a ‘small business’, and it's usually something like that which gets translated into policy. Not all that small, imo.

But absolutely people valorize small businesses in a way that elides the fact that what makes businesses exploitative is (contra this former Amazon VP) inherent in wage relations, and smaller employers are still operating under those relations. Because small businesses are romanticized and valorized as they are in their culture, the language of ‘promoting small businesses’ is often used to give cover for massive corporate giveaways on the part of the government. These are [common](https://inthesetimes.com/article/22412/outrageous-corporate-...) [lines](https://www.currentaffairs.org/2018/07/can-business-of-any-s...) of [socialist (this piece has some of the exact language of the grandparent poster)](https://jacobinmag.com/2018/01/small-businesses-workers-wage...) [critique (see Morales on free trade here)](https://inthesetimes.com/article/22412/outrageous-corporate-...).

Generally, calls to treat ‘small business’ with greater scrutiny come from an anti-capitalist (or at least ‘capitalism-critical’, if you will) perspective, and are not motivated by some belief that monopolies or anti-competitive cabals are actually preferable to larger numbers of smaller, weaker, relatively competitive corporations. But there's a sense that the critique should go deeper than ‘big business bad, small business good’— which imo is pretty commonly distilled in a lot of mainstream political rhetoric— and raise questions of worker ownership, decommodification (e.g., of healthcare), the role of public enterprises, etc.

Advising skepticism toward the valor of small businesses also doesn't negate the fact that promoting small business _can_ be [beneficial or strategic for society as a whole](https://inthesetimes.com/working/entry/22385/coronavirus-wor...) in particular circumstances! But I sympathize with the grandparent poster's general sentiment; I feel like on the whole it's called for.

It is extremely strange to see soi-disant socialists fail to recognize the difference between essential traits of small businesses, and qualities contingent upon a legal regime which socialists themselves argue should be changed in ways which would largely alleviate the problems they describe. Unbinding health care from employment makes it available to everyone, whether their employer can afford a group plan or not. Reforming anti-union legislation means small business employees can unionize effectively across shops. And so on.

I haven't paid Jacobin much attention heretofore. If this article is any representation of how well worth taking seriously they are, I'll continue that policy. This reads more than anything like a Republican caricature of leftist thought.

But small capitalists are a bigger problem in someways than bigger capitalists, since the difficulties their workers face are harder to be brought into public attention, because of the small localised scale of them. Large businesses have to face regularly oversight and scurutiny on a much more wider scale.

So there is a strain of left-wing thought that see smaller businesses as a bigger evil that big businesses.

From the article:

"In reality, small business promotion is mostly a bad idea. Small businesses pay lower wages, provide worse benefits, are often exempt from important worker protections, and are incompatible with the way unionization works in the US."

The point I'm making is that - even granting their claim, which I'm not sure I do - unionization doesn't have to work in the US tomorrow the same way it does today. Neither need benefits and worker protections.

Given that exactly these sorts of changes to the status quo are table stakes for socialist political movements including the one that's been trying to form around Bernie Sanders for half a decade or more by now, it is, again, strange to see an ostensibly socialist publication treat the status quo as immutable.

Poking around a little more, I get the sense from Jacobin's articles that they're written by the sort of, again soi-disant, socialist who can spend all day toying with highflown theories, but turns contemptuous on the instant when faced with the expectation to back up words with action, and thinks nothing of crossing a picket line when it'd be even slightly less personally convenient to do otherwise. In other words, I think they're a bunch of useless academic liberals who enjoy the cachet of calling themselves socialist but can't be bothered to do the work of earning the name.

Perhaps I'm doing Jacobin's writers an injustice, but seeing as I'm judging them by their writing, I don't think that I am.

Well, would Marx have joined a picket line? I don't think that joining picket lines suffices as the main credential on speaking on socialism.

I said 'cross', not 'join'. What I mean by it is, I don't get the sense these people, unless they knew someone was watching, would inconvenience themselves by refusing to give their custom to a business whose workers were striking.

Whether that qualifies as a "credential for speaking on socialism", I can't properly say. But I'm not inclined to listen to anyone speaking on socialism who I don't even trust to not cross a line.