The myth of the relationship between the profit motive, productivity and innovation.

the idea that the profit margin is a necessary incentive for people to innovate and run a business

is bollocks

since those people whose innovations become corporate property don't work for profit: they work for a paycheck. They work to be reimbursed for their time, not to benefit from their own work.

The people who run the business that the capitalist owns, are not motivated by the profit margin, and will continue to do their work for as long as they are being paid to do so, even if the business is operating at a loss, and quite some would do so openly, as joyfully or as joylessly as they would had the business been more effective at extracting value from the hours they trade to be allowed to eat, sleep, breathe and drink water on this earth, the apparent property of the very same people to whom they sell the prime of their lives, and most of their lifetime's daytime hours.

The profit motive serves to distance the individual from their humanity, and in this, and only this, does it unite the capitalist from the people of the planet.

I use this term of phrase deliberately - not to deny that capitalists are people, to deny them their personhood, although I can find great empathy for the various type of rumor to bring into question precisely that - I mean the people of the planet, as a body, as an entity comprising humanity as such, outside of which you indeed can say that the capitalist has placed himself, when we consider that Humanity as a whole functions like an organism to which the capitalist has fashioned for himself a relationship more akin to a parasite, living off a host, than a brother or sister of the hive, making the world a better place one lousy day at a time with all the well-meaning they can muster.

Humans are a social animal, that exist only by the grace of our ability to work together, which depends on our ability to form narrative structures, with which to comprehend the world in a number of dimensions that allowed us to place ourselves outside of the food-chain - and as a result, at the top of it.

Well, the relationship of the capitalist in this regard is not unlike that of the relationship of the human being onto the natural world in the neoliberal business model - world view hybrid concept. (After socialism's 'the personal is political' we see capitalism's infinitely more cynical and therefor convincing 'It's nothing personal - just business')

They pick from a menu wether to eat a ubiquitous, commodified living being like a chicken or a cow, and then they nod with some approval as their phone reminds them they are paying Prince Bernhard's WWF to send them pictures of the leopard they are not eating near christmas.

We openly show ourselves concerned about the plight of street urchins in sierra leone , and retweet with lengthy diatribes the latest outrageous wrongdoings of some fascist tyrant or another against his own people or the queer community

but we still spend a few billion a year collectively - and some hundreds or thousands a year individually - on clothing and electronics which have been fashioned in the most deplorable, dehumanizing and ecocidal processes ever imaginable - and I mean that in the literal sense, for nothing seems to have pushed the ability for humans to 'think outside the box' in terms of where to externalize the true cost of their lifestyle as in the feedback mechanism between the profit margin on one side and the consumer's search for self-expression through consumption on the other.

A feedback loop capitalists spend plenty of money to keep running, as it is the flywheel to their mostly effortless opulence. Yes, effortless, even for those who enjoy working and thus spend time and energy doing it - as we can easily use a metric here such as 'monthly income divided by effort" to prove that the Sergei Brin is not the most hard-working laborer at google. Where again I too conveniently choose not even to go into power dynamics that go on between the sweat shop worker and the fashion industry leaders they keep in the top of the lists of wealthiest people in the world. From such things, the mind simply recoils. In my case, i believe it might be an attempt at self preservation. I have a tendency to let myself get depressed by gross injustices I see now way of intervening in.