The Left has yet to prop­er­ly absorb two major rev­e­la­tions of 2020: 1) The rul­ing class, for all its plat­i­tudes, deci­sive­ly does not care about small busi­ness, and 2) We are all small busi­ness­es now. To the first point, a court-ordered Small Busi­ness Admin­is­tra­tion data dump in Decem­ber con­firmed that more than half of the $521 bil­lion doled out in April’s CARES Act small busi­ness res­cue pro­gram were snagged by just 5% of well-heeled recip­i­ents, includ­ing sec­tors like con­struc­tion and law that were mere­ly incon­ve­nienced—cer­tain­ly not dec­i­mat­ed — by Covid-19 shut­downs. Mean­while, the clique of gig app devel­op­ers behind California’s suc­cess­ful pas­sage of the ter­ri­fy­ing­ly abso­lutist Propo­si­tion 22 in Novem­ber — which effec­tive­ly repeals the very con­cept of employ­ment for any work­er who takes orders from a smart­phone app — have vowed to nation­al­ize the law.

We can expect the col­lapse of the ser­vice sec­tor to lead mil­lions of dis­placed sous chefs and bar­tenders and fish­er­per­sons to open Etsy and Lawn­Starter accounts, live on couch­es while rent­ing out their apart­ments on Airbnb, sign up to dri­ve for Door­Dash, cook for a Cloud­Kitchen, or sign up to be a third par­ty sell­er on Ama­zon. Thanks to the busi­ness mod­el cod­i­fied in Prop 22, they’ll be the CEOs of their own immis­er­a­tion: sourc­ing their own equip­ment, with­hold­ing their own pay­roll tax­es, shop­ping around for insur­ance and, inevitably, hir­ing oth­er gig work­ers to assist with the unman­age­able work­load of the 21^st-cen­tu­ry sub­sis­tence entre­pre­neur. The line that once dis­tin­guished work­ers from the small-time mer­chant-farmer class Marx called the ​“petit bour­geoisie” will be all but obso­lete, erased by the hands of a few deep-pock­et­ed data-min­ing con­glom­er­ates that are (gen­er­al­ly) yet to even make money.

It’s impor­tant to bela­bor that point: None of the com­pa­nies who brought you Prop 22 is actu­al­ly prof­itable; Uber has lost $26.5 bil­lion since 2014. Uber’s part­ners on Prop 22 have bled anoth­er $9 bil­lion. Crit­ics of cap­i­tal­ism tend to view prof­it as the system’s orig­i­nal sin, but for gig apps and Ama­zon, the abil­i­ty to burn through cash is what actu­al­ly makes them unstop­pable. The rest of Sil­i­con Val­ley learned it from Ama­zon, which uses its grotesque cloud-com­put­ing earn­ings to sub­si­dize the bil­lions it los­es ship­ping dia­pers overnight for free.

Sell­ing any­thing indef­i­nite­ly at a loss is tech­ni­cal­ly ille­gal, because the sell­er typ­i­cal­ly does it to crush com­pe­ti­tion in the short term so as to secure absolute pric­ing pow­er in the longer run. Case in point: the gig app car­tel and Ama­zon have increas­ing­ly mit­i­gat­ed its loss­es by forc­ing retail­ers, restau­rants and deliv­ery dri­vers to sub­si­dize them; one study esti­mates Door­Dash dri­vers lose mon­ey on near­ly a third of their orders, while restau­rants that do not rad­i­cal­ly over­haul their menus and pric­ing for­mu­las gen­er­al­ly lose mon­ey on most deliv­ery app orders, a predica­ment they share with untold legions of Ama­zon (and increas­ing­ly Etsy) sell­ers. A full-time rideshare dri­ver recent­ly broke down his finances in a Jalop­nik col­umn that con­clud­ed he had paid $250 for the priv­i­lege of Lyft and Uber dri­ving in 2019.

This whole despi­ca­ble busi­ness mod­el might have been nipped in the bud with stronger enforce­ment of Sec­tion 2 of the 1890 Antitrust Act, which pro­hibits anti-com­pet­i­tive busi­ness activ­i­ties. But no one real­ly paid atten­tion to antitrust until a few years ago, when some Belt­way wonks dis­il­lu­sioned by the finan­cial cri­sis began lay­ing the ground­work for a legal crack­down on cor­po­rate concentration.

The so-called ​“hip­ster antitrust” movement’s biggest achieve­ment thus far has been the House antitrust subcommittee’s inves­ti­ga­tion of the big four tech giants (Ama­zon, Apple, Face­book and Google); the sub­com­mit­tee recent­ly filed a 450-page report report that laid out a damn­ing case that the firms had effec­tive­ly and delib­er­ate­ly installed them­selves as gate­keep­ers over all online activ­i­ty, extract­ing enor­mous fees and/​or valu­able pro­pri­etary data from vir­tu­al­ly every­thing Amer­i­cans do on a phone or lap­top, and that they had used their pow­er and con­trol of infor­ma­tion to either buy off or crush any­thing they inter­pret­ed as an even a plau­si­ble threat to that gate­keep­er sta­tus. The report was writ­ten by Demo­c­ra­t­ic com­mit­tee staffers, but quick­ly scraped and deployed by Repub­li­cans in the Trump Jus­tice Depart­ment and state attor­neys gen­er­al offices, who sued Google for monop­o­liz­ing search in Octo­ber, and in Decem­ber Trump’s Fed­er­al Trade Com­mis­sion sued Face­book along­side a bipar­ti­san group of 46 state attor­neys gen­er­al (plus the AGs of Guam and Wash­ing­ton D.C.) for essen­tial­ly con­spir­ing to Google­fy social media. This is the oth­er big achieve­ment of the new trust­bust­ing move­ment: It has suc­cess­ful­ly har­nessed Trumpian astro­turf pop­ulism for a legit­i­mate­ly pop­ulist cause. Eighty-five per­cent of Amer­i­cans think big tech has too much con­trol. It’s not hard to see what’s in it for Repub­li­cans: 95% of big tech employ­ees spend their cam­paign dona­tion dol­lars on Democ­rats; in 2016 Sil­i­con Val­ley spent 60 times as much con­tribut­ing to Hillary Clin­ton as it did Don­ald Trump. The antitrust sub­com­mit­tee even hand­ed the MAGA crowd some use­ful talk­ing points by evis­cer­at­ing the Oba­ma Admin­is­tra­tion repeat­ed­ly in its report over its lais­sez faire atti­tude about prob­lem­at­ic big tech deals like Facebook’s acqui­si­tions of What­sApp and Insta­gram. But where the intel­lec­tu­al basis of the Oba­ma FTC’s clas­sic ​“neolib­er­al inac­tion” stance toward cor­po­rate con­cen­tra­tion was mas­ter­mind­ed by right wing Uni­ver­si­ty of Chica­go econ­o­mists, Missouri’s Repub­li­can Sen. Josh Hawley’s cru­sade against the big tech giants is fun­da­men­tal­ly, not that he’d ever admit it, anti-capitalist.

Case in point: in April Haw­ley for­mal­ly asked the Trump DOJ to open a crim­i­nal inves­ti­ga­tion into the Ama­zon pri­vate label department’s prac­tice of sys­tem­at­i­cal­ly min­ing data on third-par­ty sell­ers for pop­u­lar prod­ucts to copy, then under­cut­ting their price by a few pen­nies or using oth­er meth­ods to abuse its mar­ket­place pow­er to give its own copy­cat ver­sions pref­er­en­tial treat­ment. Lib­er­tar­i­ans scoffed at this demand; after all, plen­ty of gro­cery stores sell their own down­mar­ket pri­vate label sand­wich cook­ies right along­side Ore­os. What’s dif­fer­ent now is, of course, the gap­ing pow­er imbal­ance. Mul­ti­ple third par­ty sell­ers and oth­er ​“mar­ket par­tic­i­pants” con­tact­ed by the antitrust com­mit­tee stopped coop­er­at­ing with the inves­ti­ga­tion or polite­ly refused to talk even anony­mous­ly out of fear of retal­i­a­tion, explain­ing that they ​“live in fear” of an all-know­ing com­pa­ny that, as the subcommittee’s chair­man Rep. David Cicilline (D‑R.I.) put it, is ​“the only game in town” in retail anymore.

This under­stand­able fear is shared by the company’s work­ers. As Ama­zon has hiked com­mis­sions for sell­ing mer­chan­dise over its plat­form it has also slashed wages; ware­house work­ers in one South Car­oli­na coun­ty saw their salaries shrink by 32% after Ama­zon opened a site.

No group of Ama­zon work­ers has suc­cess­ful­ly union­ized — though some at a ful­fill­ment cen­ter in the for­mer steel town of Besse­mer, Alaba­ma are cur­rent­ly try­ing. Work­ers right­ly fear Amazon’s omni­scient sur­veil­lance appa­ra­tus, which tracks every­thing from phys­i­cal work­er move­ments to pri­vate Face­book groups formed by its ​“inde­pen­dent” Flex dri­vers. (In Europe the com­pa­ny even hired the Pinker­ton spy agency to infil­trate nascent union dri­ves.) And if the usu­al union-bust­ing tac­tics fail, with unem­ploy­ment at mul­ti-decade highs, Ama­zon can eas­i­ly do like Wal­mart and just shut down any facil­i­ty that tries to orga­nize, just as uncer­e­mo­ni­ous­ly as it shuts down the accounts of sell­ers it deems some­how dis­obe­di­ent. Notably, Uber has ripped off Amazon’s labor rela­tions blue­print, noto­ri­ous­ly using its sys­tems to spy on work­ers and oth­er ene­mies while bom­bard­ing dri­vers’ phones with Prop 22 pro­pa­gan­da and, when a Cal­i­for­nia judge attempt­ed to force the com­pa­ny to com­ply with state labor law in August, threat­en­ing to shut down ser­vice alto­geth­er in the state.

There is sim­ply no way to win against Ama­zon or Uber with­out mak­ing them less pow­er­ful first. Antitrust at least gives us some tools to do so, and the Left should rel­ish the oppor­tu­ni­ty to join forces with GOP oppor­tunists like Josh Haw­ley if it gives us the chance to snatch them from the neg­li­gent hands of the Demo­c­ra­t­ic Party’s rul­ing cor­po­ratist hack estab­lish­ment. Unfor­tu­nate­ly, I think most­ly because the ​“break ​‘em up” move­ment is iden­ti­fied with Eliz­a­beth War­ren, antitrust has few allies on the Bernie Left (and I am wear­ing a Bernie 2020 T‑shirt as I write). For years, social­ist intel­lec­tu­als — such as Bhaskar Sunkara and Nicole Aschoff of Jacobin, the People’s Pol­i­cy Project’s Matt Bru­enig, and (deserved­ly!) beloved pod­cast­er Vir­gil Texas—have argued that antitrust law is ​“quaint” at best (in Texas’ esti­ma­tion) and coun­ter­pro­duc­tive at worst. In Bruenig’s view, big busi­ness is bet­ter for labor because ​“fetishized” small busi­ness­es are exempt from cer­tain labor laws; Sunkara believes the larg­er social­ist goal of nation­al­iz­ing the means of pro­duc­tion is accel­er­at­ed by cor­po­rate consolidation.

This view is mis­guid­ed. Ama­zon is infi­nite­ly scari­er than the most tyran­ni­cal pizze­ria own­er, taxis were eas­i­er to reg­u­late than Uber, and nation­al­iza­tion is mean­ing­less out­side of ​“big struc­tur­al change” (and we know because ​“we” did it to AIG and Fan­nie Mae). Even if your goal is to col­lec­tivize Ama­zon by bloody force, the infor­ma­tion derived from the antitrust clique’s string of sub­poe­nas is your ammunition.

Bernie Sanders him­self is an ardent sup­port­er of break­ing up monop­o­lies — he said as much in an online event this week co-spon­sored by People’s Action and the Amer­i­can Eco­nom­ic Lib­er­ties Project (an advo­ca­cy group for which I some­times con­duct research) — but it’s not one of his com­mit­tee assign­ments; the gory arcana of how to unwind bad merg­ers and police preda­to­ry prac­tices is not real­ly his thing. Nor is it tech­ni­cal­ly Warren’s thing; most of the leg­work has hap­pened in Cicilline’s House antitrust sub­com­mit­tee, while the small Sen­ate subcommittee’s rank­ing Demo­c­rat Amy Klobuchar has shown heart­en­ing signs of will­ing to be at least as oppor­tunis­ti­cal­ly rad­i­cal as Josh Hawley.

Giv­en all of the big busi­ness vic­to­ries in 2020, the War­ren Wonks and the Bernie Bros would be wise to stop get­ting dis­tract­ed by how annoy­ing they find the other.