The CEO of Shopify is contemptuous of democracy
No, Tobi, rich people should not get to have multiple votes in elections.
It’s no secret that Shopify’s C-suite is filled with right-wing sympathizers, going beyond just their apologetics for Trump and their defence of his ludicrous lie that we are a fentanyl den. There has been a fair share of controversy over the Shopify e-commerce platform explicitly removing the “hateful content” ban for merchants using their services, with the end result being that they now allow products to be sold which deny the Holocaust, with a cut of revenue going back directly to Shopify for providing the infrastructure.
In the most high-profile incidence of Shopify’s complicity with the sale of hate material, when Ye—formerly known as Kanye West—attempted to sell a t-shirt emblazoned with a swastika to promote his song “Heil Hitler”, Shopify initially refused to take down the listing, and in the end said they only did so not because it was Nazi merchandise, but because they were concerned about fraudulent transactions.
To have Harley Finkelstein, President of Shopify, feign concern over antisemitism in the National Post, for him to fearmonger about Canada no longer being safe for Jews like him and I, while at the same time he profits from Holocaust denial? Calling it a joke would imply that this is funny, but it is not. The absurdity of the Shopify C-suite is not amusing, it is dangerous to the fabric of Canadian democracy. Indeed, according to recent remarks by Shopify Founder and CEO Tobi Lütke, it appears he is openly contemptuous of our democracy.
Starting things off last night, Mr. Lütke tweeted that the reason the Billy Bishop jet expansion was blocked was because of the “retired, unemployed, unemployable, and useful idiots”, implying that the poor, the elderly, and the disabled do not have valid perspectives that belong in government consultations with the public.
But in less than twenty minutes, Mr. Lütke would stop merely implying that some votes shouldn’t count, and start to outright say it. Here, he posits that anyone who is retired and receiving their pension should explicitly be categorized as a “dependent” and stripped of the right to vote.
Riffing off this in a back and forth with Eric Thor, a banking executive working for TD in Ottawa, Mr. Lütke described it as a “good system” when Mr. Thor proposed that those who have an annual income higher than $100K should get additional votes for electing government officials, scaled to their income level, while those below the basic personal amount would not be allowed to vote at all. When interrogated about this today, Mr. Lütke doubled down, mounting a defence that he would want only five votes “max”, not over a hundred. He claims that by giving the wealthy more of a say over who governs the country, we will “reward productive people with leverage”.
To translate this, by “productive”, he means the rich. He describes the “unemployable” in derisive terms that harken back to Nazi Germany’s descriptor of “useless eaters”, an epithet used to label those who could not perform work for the regime, and thus those whose lives were forfeit.
It is not an exaggeration to say that attitudes like Mr. Lütke’s are a threat to freedom and democracy. These billionaires wish to force us back into serfdom, a lower class of human who can be exploited for all we’re worth, and then discarded and disposed of once we’re used up. You can argue over exactly which label to apply to Mr. Lütke’s preferred system, but it is clearly not one in which human life has inherent and equal value. His philosophy is a cold, Darwinian attitude which has caused tremendous sorrow in the past, and will do so again if it is allowed to take hold.
In our current political environment, we are offered on one hand the dictatorship of capital that the Shopify C-suite proposes, a world in which capitalism abandons even the pretense of a democracy. But on the other hand, democratic socialism provides the opportunity to reassert control over our society, to take back the power from the billionaires who seek to divide and degrade us.
The choice here is not a difficult one. I am a socialist, because I believe in democracy. And the Shopify gang are capitalists, because they do not.