[Aunche]

Progressives tend to idolize complainers more than creators. Labor gets more credit for the 40 our work week than the employers who popularized it like Henry Ford. Civil rights activists get more credit than judges and lawmakers who risked their careers. This isn't to diminish the accomplishments of labor unions or the Civil Rights movement as it certainly takes a lot for disenfranchised groups to gain political clout. The problem is that it feeds to the illusion that simply complaining about things as loudly as possible about every single perceived injustice will somehow make the world better.

[teachrdan]

> complaining about things as loudly as possible about every single perceived injustice

What you describe here is how the American right caricatures people who make change in the US. Civil rights activists did more than "complain"; indeed, if they had only complained, it's hard to see how they would have been able to overcome white supremacists in business, law enforcement and government.

Just look at the Montgomery Bus Boycott, or the lesser-known Freedom Riders. These were campaigns organized by a coalition of local folks in the South (mostly, but not entirely Black) as well as anti-racists in the North. These activists were successful because they were strategic (the Freedom Riders forced the Kennedy Administration to enforce existing anti-segregation laws on US highways...) and incredibly brave (...and they endured having their bus firebombed by white supremacists while the police stood by watching).[0]

Much like organized labor, Civil Rights activists created a power base among the disenfranchised in the face of state sanctioned violence, up to and including assassination.[1]

It's fair to say that some progressives caricature the accomplishments of Amazon, which, on a technical level, are tremendous yet difficult for a non-technical person to appreciate. But this comment comes close to saying that ordinary people have no right to criticize the great men of industry like Jeff Bezos and Henry Ford. This is particularly ironic because Ford published and distributed anti-semitic propaganda to the extent that he was personally honored by Adolph Hitler[2]; Ford also hired armed thugs to intimidate and attack union organizers.[3]

There's a particular tendency on HN to lionize successful (rich) founders and CEOs to the point of obscuring their exploitation of labor. This includes Elon Musk, who literally purchased the title of "Founder" for Tesla, and whose factories had, at one point, accumulated more OSHA fines than the next ten car manufacturers put together.[4]

I'm not saying we shouldn't appreciate the staggering achievements of companies like Amazon or Tesla; I personally think Tesla has the only big vision worth pursuing in all of Silicon Valley. But nor should we ignore the human cost of what they do. Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk are among the two richest men in the world right now, and they got that wealth in no small part through the exploitation and human misery of their most vulnerable employees.

0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedom_Riders#:~:text=Freedom....

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Assassinated_American...

2. https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/features/henryfo...

3. https://www.thehenryford.org/collections-and-research/digita...

4. https://www.forbes.com/sites/alanohnsman/2019/03/01/tesla-sa...

[Aunche]

I emphasized in my original comment that I was not diminishing the accomplishments of previous civil rights and labor activists. It's hard to deny how even they are primarily admired for their complaining rather than organizational abilities, and this is what activists primarily try to emulate now.

I agree that Tesla deserves their poor reputation, but Amazon genuinely seems like they care about workers' well-being. People perceive labor to be "exploited" because automation and globalization mean that American workers no longer have a monopoly on labor. It's a simple function of supply and demand. No amount of cherry picked anti-Amazon narratives is going to change that. Increased government spending would, as it does for the Nordic countries. However, nobody cares to detangle the web of perverse incentives baked in, so Americans will always view taxes as a waste of money.

[teachrdan]

You're right that the work of civil rights organizers is misrepresented today. It's described as "They spoke truth to power, and power listened."

Of course that was never the case. They risked their lives and struggled for years to make progress. But that risk and struggle is minimized; to describe the people who undermined and attacked and killed them would be to indict the same groups of business people, police officers and law makers who perpetuate the same anti-civil rights agenda today. This is how Martin Luther King ends up being described as a Black Santa Claus rather than a radical organizer who was building a cross-racial, class-based movement for civil and economic rights. It's how schools across the country teach whole lessons about MLK for every grade, every year, and never talk about how the FBI harassed and targeted him and other civil rights leaders.