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the true costs of its “free shipping” for workers, communities, and the environment.
Amazon’s rise illuminates a pivotal moment in global capitalism that demands naming, interrogating, and resisting. Amazon, the corporation, is not simply a “bad apple,” nor is its peculiar business and labor practices the product of the individual greed and maniacal impulses of its founder, Jeff Bezos, and other top executives. All corporations share one fundamental objective: to maximize profit. Indeed, the problems associated with Amazon capitalism are systemic within our global capitalist system, which is embedded and interacts with other social and political relations of domination that operate at multiple scales, from the local to the global. Amazon’s rise in power reflects, and makes visible, the larger global trend of the increasing influence of finance capitalism, neoliberal politics and policies, and corporate power. Indeed, the world’s leading transnational corporations today continue to accrue revenues far ahead of most nation states. Of the world’s top 200 economic entities, 157 are corporations and 43 are governments.5 Even back in 2019, Amazon’s market capitalization was slightly more than the combined GDP of nine Latin American countries combined.6
Together, the chapters in this volume provide empirically grounded and critical case studies of the dynamic and multiscalar development of the Amazon corporation, and the emerging networks of community and labor activists that are resisting its practices. Our contributors thus deepen our understanding of what Jamie Peck and Nik Theodor call the “variegated” nature of capitalism; variegated capitalism takes plural forms over time and across multiple spaces, places, and geographic scales.7 Extending these insights, we argue that there are distinct types of capitalism that are emblematic of, and promoted by, the world’s largest transnational corporations, such as Amazon, that are of enormous significance and worthy of investigation; their scope and influence are multifaceted, dynamic, and extend far beyond the workplace, leaving their footprints on our communities, politics, and environment. Just as the operations of Amazon, and other large transnational corporations, occur at multiple scales and sites—transnational, regional, national, and local—so do our investigations cover multiple scales, from global and regional patterns to differences across local and national contexts.
This introductory chapter provides an overview of some of the key features of Amazon capitalism. First, we review the significance of Amazon in terms of its rising but uneven influence globally and its role in promoting both one-click consumerism and surveillance capitalism.8 After describing the increasingly diverse nature of goods and services Amazon produces and sells, we discuss its rising monopoly power and exploitation of third-party sellers. We then examine how the rise of Amazon has reshaped logistics and retail, and negatively affected workers, communities, and the environment.
THE RISE AND SIGNIFICANCE OF AMAZON CAPITALISM
Amazon’s influence in the global economy is uneven, reflecting regional patterns of global trade and global inequities that characterize the imperialist and capitalist world economy. Although many of the consumer goods bought and sold through Amazon’s shopping platform are manufactured in the Global South, they are mostly consumed in the Global North, particularly North America and Europe, where much of the world’s relatively affluent consumers reside. Amazon’s growing market dominance has been especially pronounced in the United States, where it has become the nation’s second largest seller of clothing.9 In addition, Amazon is the fastest growing logistics provider; the biggest seller of toys, books, shoes, and countless other consumer products; and, since its acquisition of Whole Foods in 2017, the fifth largest grocery retailer in the United States.10 Meanwhile, “Over the past decade, Amazon has paid less than three percent of its US$27 billion in profits for federal income tax.”11
Amazon’s reach extends well beyond the U.S.,12 especially with respect to cloud computing, provision of Kindle content, and management of fulfillment centers that service cross-border shopping.13 Despite challenges by Microsoft, Google, and Alibaba,14 Amazon made headlines in summer 2019 for owning fully half of the world’s public cloud infrastructure market, valued at more than US$32 billion.15 In terms of retail sales, Amazon has invested heavily in shipping lines and warehouses that facilitate sales and services in Europe, Latin America, Asia, and Australia. Revenue from Amazon’s businesses abroad represented 28 percent of its total for 2018.16 Yet it remains unclear that Amazon’s success in the U.S. will be duplicated abroad.17 Amazon’s retail market share in Western Europe was 8 percent in 2018, according to Eurobarometer, compared to 35 percent in the United States.18 Despite Amazon’s significant e-commerce inroads in Europe, European consumers’ demands for products that are difficult to market online and increasing preference for “experiences” rather than “things” has been challenging for the corporation.19 Amazon has also found increasing government scrutiny of, and organized resistance to, its negative impacts, including reducing brick-and-mortar retail—the “Amazon effect”— and air pollution, and bad working conditions.20
Amazon’s economic influence elsewhere outside the U.S. is weaker than in Europe. In China, Japan, and South East Asia, Amazon has so far yielded to regional e-commerce leaders, such as Rakuten in Japan and Alibaba in China.21 In 2019, Amazon formally closed its retail business in China,22 and strengthened its efforts in Latin America, Australia, and India. The established Argentinian online retailer, Mercado Libre, has kept Amazon at bay in Latin America.23 Still, Amazon’s Latin American operations include logistics centers in Mexico and Brazil, multiple call centers in Colombia, and corporate offices as well as call centers in Costa Rica—Amazon’s biggest Latin American location.24 Direct competition from multi-service e-commerce companies remains less consequential in Australia and India. It took two years for Amazon to double its sales in Australia, where the company’s retail market share was 3 percent in 2019, just ahead of Melbourne-based Kogan. com’s 3 percent retail market share, though both were eclipsed by eBay’s 22 percent share.25 Though e-commerce in India is an emerging market—3 percent of the nation’s total consumption—the nation’s 1.3-billion customer base represents “one of the world’s fastest-growing retail markets.”26
Although not omnipresent around the globe, Amazon capitalism remains important not only due to its sheer size and value, but also because it has propelled many novel features that currently animate the world’s economy. Amazon capitalism pioneered and helped to spread “one-click” instant consumerism at the expense of workers, communities, and the ecological balance of our planet. Amazon’s 440 million-metric-ton carbon footprint rivals that of competitors, such as Walmart, and even the world’s largest energy companies.27 Indeed, the speed-up of consumerism, including expedited (free) shipping of consumer products, represents a tidal shift in the global economy, driven largely by finance capitalism. Each month, approximately 200 million unique users visit Amazon.com to purchase consumer products.28 Along with Amazon products, they purchase goods sold by third-party sellers, who have been using Amazon’s shopping platform since it became public in 2000. By 2016, as many as 2 million sellers across the globe sold their goods through Amazon.com, although most were individuals selling a few items.29
Along with other high-tech companies, such as Google, Amazon has also been on the forefront of a phenomenon that Shoshana Zuboff calls “surveillance capitalism.” Surveillance capitalism refers to “a new economic order that claims human experience as free raw material for hidden commercial practices of extraction, prediction, and sales.”30 Amazon employs a collaborative filtering engine to surveil consumers using its electronic shopping platform in order to promote its own commercial interests. Each time customers purchase products through Amazon’s online shopping platform, they turn over their private information and buying habits to the corporation.31 Amazon executives use this data to decide which products to manufacture and sell, and at what price, as well as what products to suggest to customers, and in what order. Although Amazon claims this strategy is designed to serve customers by “anticipating” their needs, critics highlight how Amazon’s use of surveillance technology manipulates consumers to further the corporation’s own