this post was submitted on 26 Sep 2023
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Profit is the portion of revenue that is stolen from workers and given to shareholders. Profit is bad. Revenue is good.
Unless you use that revenue to do stock buybacks, then it’s not considered profit but you still get to steal it from the workers. That way you can cry about unprofitability while all your shareholders and c suites crank up the exploitation of workers and consumers chasing “profitability” until the business collapses.
Which is crazy, right? If a stock sale allows an investment in a business, a stock buyback should be a paying off of that debt, freeing more revenue in the future to be used explicitly to pay workers who generate that revenue. How the fuck that is justified in instead enriching the value of other investments still held by other investors shows the selective use of the analogy by corporate interests and that the whole house of cards is just bullshit.
For the most part, it's not given to the shareholders, either. Dividends are pretty rare these days (which is when stocks largely went from being an ownership investment to - mostly - a form of gambling)