 Hello, hello, hello, and welcome. I'm Merron Khalili. We are DM 25, a radical political movement for Europe. And this is another live debate with our coordinating team featuring subversive ideas you won't hear anywhere else. And today we're talking about how to make Amazon pay. Amazon is a company that emits more CO2 than three quarters of the world's countries combined. And last year, its emissions actually rose by 18%. It's a company that recently cut its workers' wages in the middle of a cost of living crisis while it made record revenues, $121 billion it made in the second quarter of 2022. It's a company whose warehouse conditions have been condemned by rights groups and workers for years with adjectives like grueling and unsafe. It's a company that actively suppresses workers' efforts to organize for better conditions. It's a company that doesn't contribute. It paid no income tax in Europe last year and instead was given 1 billion euros in tax credits. What this planet-trashing, tax-dodging, union-busting corporate giant does matters to us all because its bad practices drive down standards everywhere. So here's that phrase that I often find myself using in these calls. What can we do about it? Well, the good news is that for the third year running, a global coalition of trade unions and political organizations, including us here at DM25, will stand together against Amazon on Black Friday, that's this Friday, three days from now. We're organizing a day of action with strikes and protests around the world to call for an end to Amazon's squeeze on workers, communities, and the planet. So that's the subject of today's call. What have we learned from previous organizing efforts against Amazon and how can we use Amazon's global presence against the company to support these campaigns across borders? And what does the fight against Amazon tell us about our struggle against capitalism more broadly? Our panel, including Daniel Copp, who's our special guest today, who's coordinating the Make Amazon Pay campaign, as well as our own Gannis Spirofrakis and our team of campaigning and policy experts will be weighing in on these questions and you. If you've got thoughts, comments, questions, rants, concerns, things to get off your chest, then please do put them in the YouTube chat and we'll put them to our panel. Let's kick off with Daniel. Over to you. The floor is yours. Thank you so much, Mehran. And thank you for having me on the panel today. And I'm glad to speak to all of you and those who are watching. For those who don't know about the Make Amazon Pay campaign, I think it makes sense to go back around two years to explain a little bit where it's coming from, its motivations, its strategy, and its very ambitious goal of making Amazon Pay. In May 2020, the Progressive International, of which DM is a founding member, was founded with the very lofty ambition of uniting, organizing and mobilizing progressive forces. And already back then it was clear to us that Amazon would be a prime target to sort of fill that lofty ambition with life. Why Amazon? First, it was a particular moment during the pandemic when brick-and-mortar stores were closed and Amazon had this explosive growth. It essentially became an essential service to many people who couldn't go to stores. While at the same time it was treating its workers very badly, they weren't given adequate protective equipment, masks, many of them actually died of COVID during the pandemic. So there was something brewing at the time. So, and obviously Jeff Bezos famously became the richest person during the pandemic. So it was a very symbolic target to test out proper transnational organizing. But then at the same time, we already saw that a lot of organizing was going on in different spheres and in different geographies. So we said, why not bring all of these organizations, whether that's the established trade unions, other workers organizations like Amazon Workers International, climate groups, tax watch dogs, citizens groups that are fighting against the construction of Amazon warehouses in their neighborhoods and consumer organizations together under one umbrella and have them take action on one joint global day of action. So with this in mind, we brought together this coalition. We had them draft a set of common demands that we want to win essentially from Amazon as part of this campaign. And we organized the first global day of action on Black Friday in 2020 to, I think, major success. We had coordinated strikes and actions in 15 countries. We had lots of different people taking action in support of striking Amazon workers. We had a super good digital strategy. Our videos went viral. The make Amazon pay hashtag till this day is used by people to kind of voice their grievances towards Amazon. So I think this was a really good start and showed that the coalition is more than the sum of its parts. A year later, we organized another global day of action. I think what was remarkable about that one was not just that it was geographically more broad. So we had actions in around 20 countries, but also its steps. So we organized all the way down the supply chain, for example, with garment workers in Bangladesh and Cambodia that are supplying Amazon directly and that actually weren't paid during the pandemic. So it gave this whole another dimension to sort of the Amazon struggle. And now this year in three days actually, we'll have our next global day of action and without me being able to give too much away already, I think I can safely say without exaggeration that it's gonna be historic, both in the depth of the transnational organizing and in the breadth of the geography. So we're expecting at least 100 actions in 30 places around the world and 30 countries around the world. Also in countries where we haven't organized before, notably Japan, where Amazon workers have recently founded their first two unions, which was a great success. And so I'm excited for the day and I would ask everyone who's watching this and who's excited about the campaign to check out our website, makeamazonpay.com, where we have all the actions that are happening listed on a map and to join those actions. And if they can't join those actions to organize their own and make some noise on the day. And I'm happy to take this conversation forward with all of you about what will happen on Black Friday, how we can take on Amazon and what our campaign should do in the future. So thanks a lot. Thanks for setting the scene there, Daniel. Janis? Amazon is not just another company and it's not so much size. Of course, size is crucial in terms of its impact on the environment, on the number of workers it exploits, the footprint is large and that matters. But it's not just size. It is, from where I'm standing, from my perspective, it is the beginning of a major apocal historic transformation. Not too dissimilar to what the Dark Satanic Mills, this was Edmund Burke's description of the factories in the late 18th century where for feudalism, the ashering in of capitalism, of a completely different level of excretation, a different process, system for exploiting humans producing enormous wealth and, of course, setting the scene for the climate catastrophe that we are facing today. The reason why I'm saying this about Amazon is this. People make a mistake of thinking of it as a large monopolistic company that has created a marketplace, Amazon.com. It's not strange. To monopolize a market, it means that you take the market over, you're the only seller. So Walmart is another large American company that monopolized local markets. In the United States, town after town were taken over by Walmart. The small shops were closed down and the huge Walmart supermarket replaced them. That was a monopolization of an existing market. Amazon.com is a very different beast. And let me explain why it's very different. The moment you enter Amazon.com, you exit capitalism. Because think about it, you exit the marketplace. Amazon.com is not a marketplace. Things are being sold, they're buyers and they're sellers, but it's not a market. For a market to be a market, you need to have a common space where there's interaction, at least between buyers, even if there is one seller, right? There is interaction between buyers. You walk to a market town, let's say that the market down belongs to one person. Again, you and me were walking down the street, we're seeing the same things, we can comment on what says, we can even stage your consumer boycott. We can decide, you know what, we're not going to buy it from this bastard who owns this market town. But the moment you enter Amazon.com, you have no communication with anyone unless the algorithm that belongs to Jeff Bezos brings you together under the circumstances chosen by the algorithm that belongs to Jeff Bezos. So you've got sellers who have no access to you, the buyer directly, but only through the algorithm. You've got buyers, if you and I, if all five, 10 of us, however many we are on this call, if we, as we speak, imagine we were to log on on Amazon.com, I'm not recommending that we do it. This is, you know, imagining. If you were, if we were all, you know, Daniel, Daphne, Julia, David, Judith, you know, Dusan, me, Amir, you know, if we all logged on and we typed in something, find me a nice book. Each one of us would be directed to a different book, to a different item. It is the equivalent of us walking down a market street side by side, turning our eyes to the same spot and seeing different things. And what we see is determined by the owner of the algorithm or the digital space, the digital fiefdom, because this is not a marketplace. It's a fiefdom. It goes back to a kind of feudalism, where only it is a digital, technologically based feudalism. So we've got three types of exploitation happening within one company. There are the people like Chris Smalls, who organized magnificently the union in New Jersey, Staten Island, right? It's a very small union, but it's a huge success story that he managed to do it. Still, it's only a drop in the ocean of what needs to be done to organize Amazon proletarians, people working in the warehouses. These are the standard proletarians. They're being exploited, like proletarians have been exploited throughout the world. And they're not exploited more than other proletarians. I mean, there are other companies that pay less than Amazon, for instance, and whose conditions in the warehouse or the slaughterhouses are even worse. But what makes Amazon especially evil is this combination of three types of exploitation. I just described one, the proletarians. Those proletarians, each one of them has a gadget on them. It's a little machine connected to the same algorithm that you and I tap into. When we log on to amazon.com, the difference is that in the warehouse, that little device monitors the movements of the worker, makes the worker pick and pack fast, speedily, okay? And it resembles anybody who's seen modern times by Charlie Chaplin, the clocks of the machine that drive the proletarian around until the proletarian is driven insane. Now that is no longer science fiction, it's not Charlie Chaplin movie. It comes in the form of a device with the software of Amazon. That's one. A second type of exploitation. The capitalists, small-scale capitalists, medium-scale capitalists, and some loud capitalists that produce the stuff that are being sold on amazon.com are like vassal capitalists, like the vassals under feudalism. In the sense that they have to pay 30% of any revenues they get to Amazon, to the algorithm, to Jeff Bezos, 30% fixed. So that's rent. They go a lot of ground rent as in feudalism. That's not even capitalism, right? So you have vassal capitalists being exploited and of course the labor, the wage labor that works for those vassal capitalists that produce the stuff that is being sold on amazon.com. You have the proletarians working in the warehouses and the drivers and so on. And then you've got the consumers. Now, I don't know if you are familiar. You've heard, some of you have heard me speak about this before. I don't know whether you're familiar with Alexa, the little device sitting on your desk produced by Amazon which is sold to you as a mechanical slave, a digital slave. And it does lots of things for you. A very capable assistant. Google has its own, Apple has its own, Samsung has its own, Amazon has Alexa. Now, Alexa is connected to that same algorithm, driving the workers in the warehouses, deciding whose vassal capitalists products you will be looking at when you go into amazon.com. It is driving Alexa. Alexa does things that you're ready to do like switching on lights, switching off lights, ordering milk, ordering books, organizing your schedule and so on. But what it really does, connected to this cloud algorithm, cloud-based capital, I call it, cloud capital, I call it, it trains you to train it to know what you want before you know that you want it and to give you good suggestions for books, for records, for music, for gadgets, for things that surprise you because they're so good. So the next time it recommends something, you are already preconditioned to like the recommendation, okay? And it's the same algorithm that effectively sells this to you and drives the proletarian that picks and packs it for you. That degree of control by one algorithm of three kinds of exploitation of the consumer, of the vassal capitalist and of the proletarian in the warehouse. Operating at the level, as we said right at the beginning and Daniel made this point very well, of the big ecological footprint of destroying the planet. So you've got universal, maximal exploitation of people and planet. That is the Amazon model. Of course, there are other companies that are emulating. There's Alibaba in China, which is a direct copy, carbon copy of Amazon. There are national ones that are springing up, regional ones, regional versions of Amazon. But Amazon is the starting point of all this. This is why I think it's important to target it. And here I'm going to part from the official script of making Amazon pay because I am disappointed by one aspect of make Amazon pay. Even though I've been part of it right from the beginning, I even described the campaign to bring down Amazon in a science fiction novel that I wrote a few years back. Some of you may remember it. I'm disappointed that we're not organizing an effective consumer boycott on Black Friday. And I'm saying this because the left needs to revise our thinking regarding collective action. Before Amazon, before Apple, before Google, before Big Tech, it used to be indeed the case that exploitation took place inside the factory, the office, the workplace during the labor process. It was the exploitation was the process by which capital was produced and reproduced. And organizing the proletarians, the wage laborers who were part and parcel of this process of creating capital and capital accumulation was of course the number one and only priority, really. But since Amazon, we have those two other categories of people who are contributing more to the capital of Amazon than the proletarians and the Chris Smalls of the world. These are the vassal capitalists, the small scale producers producing stuff as capitalists, but vassal capitalists and millions of people out there who write reviews for Amazon, who enter Amazon.com and contribute their own psyche to Alexa, to know and to exploit through hard work. People do a lot of hard work on Amazon.com and don't even realize it. Simply by visiting, by buying, by writing reviews, by reading reviews and so on, they are contributing to the capital of, okay, those people are not on trade unions and they cannot never be unionized because they're me and you watching, entering Amazon.com on their phones, tablets, laptops. They must be organized. And the only way to organize them is to organize a consumer boycott, not generally, just for the one day. Because comrades, let me put it briefly. Jeff Bezos doesn't give a damn about our Black Friday action. It doesn't even register on his radar screen. The needle doesn't shift at all for Jeff Bezos. The only thing that would affect him is a fall in the share price. There will be no fall in the share price, even if a significant proportion of Amazon warehouses don't work well for one day because of the strike. It's important that we have this rolling strike from Vietnam to Bangladesh to Germany to New Jersey to Seattle, this is crucial. What we've done in the last few years is essential but there has to be, I would love to have, you know, 20% reduction in traffic on Amazon.com during that day because that would really piss off Jeff Bezos. That would have a negative impact on the share price. We would be able to say we struck in your warehouses and we struck where it really matters to you in your stock exchange market valuation. Even for one day, that's when he takes notice. That's when we win. Now, trade unions don't like this idea. The reason why we haven't done this is because our trade union comrades have said no to this. Why? Because they're scared. And they're scared because Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan won. Remember, you don't remember, you're all too young to remember. I'm the oldest here. But I remember Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher attacked trade unions. First, the first right that they removed was the right for secondary action. That is for industrial action in support of somebody else. Yeah. And since secondary action was banned in Britain and then the European Union and, of course, the United States, trade unions are afraid that if they're accused of secondary action, of not only striking the warehouse but also supporting a consumer boycott, that they will be taken to court in the United States, in Germany, for sabotaging the company, which is not the same thing as striking against the company. And they are scared. And they distanced themselves from any idea of consumers, of citizens, supporting them during the Make Amazon Pay Day of action through a consumer boycott. And I put it to you, comrades, as long as we are afraid in this way, as long as we are not prepared to break the law, we will lose time and the game. So within the PI, the Progressive International, I happen to be the lone voice who keeps insisting that, yes, let's keep organizing workers to strike, but let's bring together, find a way of combining strikes with consumer boycotts targeted, short-term, one day, to demonstrate to the Jeff basis of the world in a way that they can uniquely understand the collective power of the movement. Thank you. Thank you, Yanis. And I'd love to get to Daniel's perspective a little later on your point about consumer boycotts. I'd just like to read a little bit. Earlier this week, I spoke with a trade unionist from Amazon, a worker in Amazon in Poland. And I just wanted to add a little flesh to the way Yanis described it, like the Charlie Chaplin movie Hard Times that described the working conditions at Amazon. Here's a quote that is something she said to me. They measure our work through scanners and computers. They have total control of us, total control of our speed. And if you slow down, a manager with a smile will come to you and say, here's a disciplinary letter because we noticed you didn't work for eight minutes here, five minutes there. And they accuse you that you made a break that was 40 minutes too long. And then they take your day off because all these minutes add up. It's all made by computers and programs. What a dehumanizing experience that is. And that's straight from the horse's mouth, as it were, of someone that's working at Amazon in a warehouse right now. OK, you did. You did Maya, our IT coordinator, based in Germany. Floor is yours. Thank you, Omechan. I think that Yanis described it very well. The likes of Amazon could never have come about, say, 30 years ago. Probably even 15 years ago. There was nothing comparable to what we are seeing today. If you think about the commerce as it existed before the internet, of course, they were not just the small businesses who had one shop, two shops in two different cities. They were already bigger companies that delivered their products to various cities, even to the entire country or several countries. But they could not be everywhere. They could not advertise everywhere. This is something that the internet has brought to us, the ability to reach all customers and to accept payment from them electronically through the internet in a click and immediately dispatch. And it just makes things so convenient that very few people will refuse to take part of that. And that is why we have these huge billionaire conglomerations now that basically monopolized this ability, not just on Amazon, of course, primarily on Amazon, but also in the social media sphere, in the sphere of renting movies like Netflix, who still goes to an actual video rental place. Nobody. So everything is becoming centralized in the hands of very few companies. And this is very scary for us, because these companies then have an incredible amount of power also over our democracies, over our politicians. So something that I found encouraging, but also worrying, is that lately, all of these big companies have placed a bad bet. They all bet that, I think it sounds really stupid, but somehow they all bet that our behavior would be the same at the end of the pandemic as it was at the beginning of the pandemic. So at the beginning of the pandemic, they all hired lots of workers. Amazon itself hired 450,000 workers within 10 months. That's a third of their workforce nowadays. They hired within those 10 months. And similarly, all the other tech companies, Netflix, got a huge boost from the pandemic. Facebook, Twitter, everything got a good boost from the pandemic, from everyone being stuck inside and just using their services all day, every day. And somehow they didn't manage to guess that we would change once the pandemic is over, once people go outside again, and we would stop watching as much Netflix. We would stop using as much Facebook and so on. So because of that, their stock prices have been crashing for the past year or so. Facebook lost 2 thirds of their stock value. Netflix is 53% down. Amazon is comparatively less down, I think, 40% less I checked or something, because they also have video rental. But what scares me is that all of these other tech billionaires are kind of imploding because of their bad assumptions, including Twitter now. They're all losing the billions that they hoarded. But Amazon will not, because they actually have a product that they're selling. They're not depending on investors. They're not depending on the stock market. They are making a profit with every item that they sell with every person on their website. And so I believe that we are about to see a future where the circle of billionaires that are able to influence our democracy will be smaller, but even richer. And that, I think, is a more scary place. If Jeff Bezos does not even have competition, even from the likes of Mark Zuckerberg and so on. Thank you, Judith. Dushan, can we move towards some solutions? Yes, but first let me point out what pieces mean the most. So yes, we are probably slaves to the technopedilism system. And thanks group, which is Amazon part of. So Facebook, Amazon, Apple, Netflix, and Google. They need to pair their fair share. They need to pair their tax in dividends that would result in universal basic dividends. They will easily avoid taxation in profits as they did. And they would even get subsidized. So today we are here to talk about Amazon specifically. And it's not just that Amazon molests their workers. They need to pee in a freaking bottle, you know. But they're also molest common citizens. They molest the planet, animals, and everyone else. So we need to stand up together against this. And I think that both psychology and technology play a vital role. Both of those sciences are neutral, but we can use it in a good way. They're using it in a bad way. They're playing with dopamine and serotonin on one way and on the other way, they're playing with algorithms and using tech. These are stormtroopers of technology and of psychology. We need to make something of our own. Giannis described that in a perfect way in another now, where he talked about, where he brought about targeted boycotts and targeted attacks at certain big monopoly companies. We need to do that. And I, in my own name, call for people that are watching us right now to do that boycott. Maybe Daniel will change my mind, but I strongly believe this is the right idea as well. On the other hand, when we talk about solutions, now I'm speaking to DM members and DM supporters. PI has created this amazing map on May Amazon Pay website. You can see what protests are near you and you can join them or you can create one of your own if you would like to do something else or if there is nothing that matches your interests. So I created a forum thread on this and Metamos thread, both of all of our members know about both of these platforms and they can write to me directly. They need help with ideas, with the structure, with the organizing. So this is a message for our members. If this doesn't piss you off enough, this Amazon molesting of everyone and everything basically. And if this doesn't leave you from your comfortable chair, I'm wondering what will. So please get up and make this effective. And on the other side to those viewers out there who are not our members yet, I don't know what's stopping you. Join us and make Amazon Pay and help us to finally bring down the oligarchy. Please put the link in the chat and we will see you on the streets. Thank you. Thank you, Dushan. dm25.org slash join is the link and you can jump into the forum threads that are available to our members, discuss.dm25.org to take actions. Further, two quick comments from the chat. H.E. says inflation is organizing a Black Friday boycott for a lot of us. Fair enough and a question from KD. Unfortunately, Amazon makes money not just from selling objects, but also from renting servers and infrastructure so that every organization needs Amazon in the end. How do we fight that reference to Amazon web services? I mean, Amazon in many ways is like the backbone of the internet. Please factor that also into your comments. I'd like to bring Daniel back in for his reaction to some of the things he's heard so far. Daniel. Yeah, just on Janus's point, which is very well taken, obviously, I personally would be happy to see a consumer boycott, although I would maybe call it a digital picket line on Black Friday. My question is rather who should call for it if the trade unions can call for it and who would be most effective at calling for it? So for instance, this year, we're working with an organization that is called Gen Z for Change, which is essentially young TikTokers in the US that launched a while ago in solidarity with the Amazon labor union, a pledge called People Over Prime, where they got TikTokers with a combined following of 50 million people who refused to monetize their videos with Amazon content. That was so powerful that the company, it was all around the media and the company had to respond because obviously they're courting influences to sell their products, and Amazon is also becoming one of the biggest advertisers on the internet. So maybe it's not the make Amazon pay campaign as such, maybe it's not the trade unions who should call for it, but those people who have actually the most direct line to consumers, whether that's TikTokers, whether that's Twitch streamers, right? Like Amazon recently bought Twitch and overnight changed its revenue model to its own favor, and so Twitch streamers are also paced. So maybe, it's different type of organizations that can actually organize effectively something like a digital picket line on the day. For the moment, as the make Amazon pay campaign, we're not calling for it, but who knows what the future will bring. Thank you, Daniel. If I could just react to that also, if the goal here is to attack Amazon's share price, there are also other ways. I mean, whistleblower campaigns, hacktivism, you saw what happened with the Eli Lilly's share price just because some enterprising person took advantage of the chaos of Elon Musk's Twitter takeover and tweeted out that insulin was free. Something very small, targeted correctly, can sometimes make a big... I'm sorry, I'm going to have to disagree with this. I'm not against that, but it's not, instead of, the consumer boy is crucial. I like the idea of calling it digital picket line, Daniel. The digital picket line is crucial to organize the masses. Okay, everything else, what you're suggesting, Maren, may be a very good guerrilla tactic that can only involve one person, right? Or two people. But what we really must do is find ways of bringing together the hundreds of millions of people who are exploited in different ways, but by Amazon and to bring them together. So workers, the proletarians strike in the warehouses. The consumers join a digital picket line. Now, if we can have hackers that can do what you suggest, that's a nice thing to have in addition, not instead of the mass organization. As for your question, Daniel, who should organize it? The progressive international. You cannot ask the trade unions to organize the consumer boy could it's illegal. But it's not the trade unions that organize make Amazon pay. It's a progressive international, it's the PI. So the PI can do two things. In association with trade unions, organize the trade unions to strike, which is what we're doing already. And then with the Tik Tokers, with the Facebookers, with people out on the street, I think it's important to have a physical presence, not just a digital presence, of going from neighborhood to neighborhood and distributing leaflets saying, on 25th November, just don't visit amazon.com for a day. Insolidarity for the global movement to make Amazon pay, that's I think my answer. Thank you, Kiernis. Juliana, Juliana Zeta from Germany. How was yours? Thank you, Mechner. Yeah, I want to stick with that point for a minute because I agree that the consumer boycott would be important. And also because when we think now, now Amazon has a lot of workers, but I remember I saw the commentary like three years ago and I don't remember what it was, but essentially it was about how these companies try to have less workers and to replace them with robotics to replace workers much more. So I think at some point, I mean, in the future, and that can be like in a few decades, you might have a company like Amazon that has just the lowest number of workers that they actually need. And that most of things would happen by robots, by, I don't know, flying drones and bring packets. I mean, that sounds like sci-fi at this point, but then still then even more consumers would be kind of the pressure that you could vote against such a company because only, and I agree with that, that this is what they are mostly scared of. And also when you see in reality, when Amazon started, it started like, I think it was a book selling platform. And at the beginning, it was the book shops who called to not buy books at Amazon and to go into your local bookstore. And now we don't have the local bookstores anymore. I mean, I know in the city of Frankfurt, where I grew up, we had a lot of bookstores and now you have like one big like a chain company that has bookstores in every city, but you don't have those local shops anymore. So I think there is also a problem in reality with people not being able to maintain their business anymore. And if you see what Amazon sells, I mean, I don't know, maybe the algorithm thinks I'm a very cheap person, but I only get, like my recommendations are like really stupid stuff, like really cheap products, like, you know, which is even worse carbon footprint if you think that this is just stuff that you buy and that would break after two days. So I have no motivation to buy at Amazon because it's really not good products, but you know, I think that reality, real life has to fight back against these online companies. And I think it's in the interest of little business owners, it's in the interest of also consumers to also question what they're buying there to do such a boycott. And yeah, that's what I want to add like a little thought to that. Thank you, Juliana. Tushan, we bring it back to you. I just remembered my favorite strategy and my favorite, and in my opinion, most successful campaign that happened, which is Shack, Stop Huntington Animal Cruelty. So what they did is they, not only they pressured the company directly, but they also pressured their partners, sponsors, and so on and calling for them to stop business with that Huntington company. So we can do the same for Amazon. They have a lot of shops that are connected to them. They have the banks, people can write emails, activists can appear in front of the offices or houses with whistles and mega phones and not letting them do the work. And other types of pressure that would eventually lead big sponsors and big partners to leave Amazon in its own space. That's dropped, like Shack campaign, dropped billions and billions in revenue from Huntington. So I think that needs to be replicated and it's one of the most effective tactics section. Thank you. We'll have a link to the Wikipedia entry for the Shack campaign, Stop Huntington Animal Cruelty for you to follow that. Okay, Johannes, Johannes Fair from Germany. Thank you for your views. Thank you. Thank you all for the contributions. And I want to pick on a little more on why actually all of you out there should also be getting involved this Friday into the Make Amazon Pay campaign. I spoke and had an interview with an Amazon worker from Germany, close to Hamburg, which will come out on our German Meta25 YouTube channel on Friday. Subscribe if you understand German. And the most interesting thing he actually said to me was for the most impressive thing and why I also again understood how important it is to organize this campaign globally and transnationally is how also the workforce in Germany, when they were trying to set up a union on the ground in their warehouse, which was quite difficult because of course the company tries everything to prevent that. And they had to actually translate the ballots and the voting papers and information into 17 languages because that was the amount of languages the workers in the warehouse are actually speaking. And I think it will be very important on Friday that we now after this campaign is already running for the third year that we'll make a step forward and become even closer and even closer to the masses that we have been already speaking about in this call. So very concretely, if you're in Germany, for example, in Bremen, we will gather at the main train station at 1.30 PM on Friday. Just as an example, or here in Berlin where I am, we'll gather at the U-Bahnhof Warschauer Strasse at 6 PM on Friday. On the website, you can find many more dates on makeamazonpay.com. And if you're still wondering, it's not only to support actually the workers because we don't only want to make Amazon pay its workers because it's squeezing the workers. We also, and this is from the flyer that the comrades here in Berlin have been sharing with us the Amazon workers that they're actually organizing for the Friday strike and protest. It's also squeezing our communities because it has already been mentioned. It's not paying its taxes. So we also want to make the company pay its fair share of taxes. And it's also squeezing our planet has been mentioning as before. So we want to also make Amazon pay for the climate. So it's not only if you're interested in workers' rights, it's also if you're interested in tax justice in climate transition, all those people should come together in this campaign. I wanted to point this out and hope to see you on the streets. Thank you, Johannes. Julia, Julia Moore from the UK. Hi, thank you. Thank you, Mirren. Hello, everybody. Yes, linking Johannes and what Juliana colleague from Germany, Juliana was talking about, about the impact that these very visible, massive Amazon depots have on our local communities, our local economies, the amount of money that circumvents local economies. This means that there's activism for everyone. And I would urge, as Johannes is urging and Dushan, Daniel is urging activism for Friday, I would urge people to really step up to the plate and use this as a force of activism because there are so many levels for this. And we have a campaign that can fit any of those levels. And as Johannes has just said, the impact on local businesses. And I think taking Johannes's point about the trade unions, we've clearly got some equivocation with trade unions not backing certain forms of action because there's legal constraints. There are massive impacts that happening on local economies and local economies are going to be the mainstay of our general drive of climate change, of keeping things local, carbon footprint, et cetera. So we really would urge people to make connections with local businesses. If our members are local business traders, we would love to get to know you and talk to us and we can work on a campaign for all of us. These Amazon depots are massive buildings on our horizons. I can only speak for the UK. But if you live close to one, you will know the impact that it's had on your local landscape and your local impact. So I would urge people to get in touch with us. You know how to get in touch with us globally, European-wise and certainly for the UK. And we can help you and be involved with your campaign locally. Thanks. Thank you, Julia. Definitely, definitely Delcara, based in France. Go ahead. Thanks. Yeah, just on what Julia said, I mean, just reminding of that, I think it was in Scotland where there was the whistleblower that also showed how the Justin Time model was, like that Amazon was like throwing away tons and tons of unused materials, just how destructive the whole business model is. And I just want to touch up on a very small thing. Janice said, and it's very interesting how as consumers we are expected to put our inputs, like not only as buyers, but as people who feed into the algorithm and write comments. And this is not about Amazon, but I was really shocked the other day when I got an email from Darty under the title of Darty Mutual Aid Society Needs You, where it's actually connecting buyers to each other that buy the same items and they're expecting you to help each other with problems with their things. So it's just a really, like that would be called Mutual Aid and all the, it's very cynical and awful. And this is how why Amazon pay campaigns, I think it's so great as well because I think we were like, you know, consumers king and we have stopped identifying ourselves as laborer citizens, but we're like really consumers in this world. And then it really kind of re-visualizes what it is as a company all around the world and how it exploits and how it operates and just kind of maybe opens up the curtain and like, let us see the horrible entrails, see how the sausage is made if you like. Yeah, so thanks. Thank you, Destiny, for your comments. Amir, what do you think of the policy coordinator? Thanks, Mehran, I'm just, you know, obviously echoing everything was said before and very short intervention regarding, you know, to think about where Amazon is going and what it's trying to do. And only, for example, in 2021 alone, that's the most recent data that we have. Amazon donated to over 660 US state and local candidates, for example. And another 460 US based trade associations and NGOs and social welfare organizations. So you can see that sort of the spreading of the behemoth in that way and ownership over the politicians that quote on quote are representing the public. And of course, there's also expansion of Amazon in other areas of life. Amazon is involved in relief aid, for example, during natural disasters. Amazon is involved in the state building by securing government data of the Ukraine, for example. It's building homes in Washington DC. It has 71 renewable energy projects. It's involved in venture capital. It's involved in education through cloud computing training. It's getting involved in water and sanitation in the third world and so on. And we have to really think about where is Amazon going and how it's getting involved in these other areas of life beyond its, you know, techno feudal market in that sense. And whether this is preparing for the next stage of the Amazon's environmental and global level beyond just its market. Thank you, Amir. Two comments from the chat. Well, one from Salvatore Peligra. He says, let's say that the boycott succeeds and that Amazon shares take a hit. Then what? You might get some better conditions for now, but how long would that last? And Mahdi Tahini says, what's the role of Amazon workers in making Amazon pay? Would unionization of Amazon workers in different regions under the goal of ultimately breaking Amazon into pieces be a viable strategy? Daniel, would you like to weigh in on these questions? Sure, I think for the first question, probably Yanis would have a much more eloquent answer than me, which is just, you know, you organize this once and then you organize it twice and then you organize it three times. And every time it gets bigger and every time it gets more powerful. So I think, you know, we need to test and try strategies essentially and we haven't tested that strategy yet. So let's just try it and see what happens. To the second question, I think, you know, unionization of Amazon workers, which, you know, in many sectors and in many countries and many companies is kind of a given, is still first big step and would be major success. But I think the goal ultimately for all of us, socialists and comrades, wouldn't be to break up Amazon into pieces, but to socialize it, right? I mean, as such, Amazon is a great infrastructure. I mean, we saw this notably during the pandemic, how it provided essential services to everyone who couldn't go to stores and notably vulnerable groups. So I think, you know, we would, the goal would be to have a public utility called Amazon probably would rename it, but you know, a public utility that is able to provide goods and services to people. But I think we're still at the early stages of that struggle. Amazon in Germany, actually, the Amazon struggle in Germany will have its anniversary next year. It's gonna be 10 years in the fight for union and we need to win that union first and that's what we should focus on right now. Thank you for that, Daniel. I love that spirit. Try it and see what happens. Throw things in the wall and see what sticks. I think this is something that often holds activists back. The idea that, well, what if it doesn't succeed? Screw it, experiment, see what happens and then take it further. So wonderful. One last comment here from the chat and more of a recommendation really from Marky Mark. Ethical consumer magazine in the UK has been boycotting Amazon for years apparently and they offer alternatives so it's easy to support small businesses while boycotting Amazon. Okay, we are at the top of the hour so I think we will wrap it up there. I would like to thank all of you on the panel. I'd like to thank you guys out there in cyberspace for your comments and thoughts and feedback. The address to get involved in the Make Amazon Pay campaign is makeamazonpay.com. The address to get involved with DM25, that's us and to join in a couple of seconds is dm25.org slash join and the conversation will continue in the comments. Thank you again for your time and attention. Let's make Amazon Pay and we'll see you back here at the same time, same place, two weeks from now for another.