By: Mitja Iršič
After Petrol announced that, following yet another artificial increase in the minimum wage, it would move part of its functions to Croatia, Martina Vuk, former state secretary at the Ministry of Education, Science and Sport in the Marjan Šarec government, spoke up and wrote on social media: “Poor things. In the first nine months of last year, their net profit reached 135.8 million euros, which is ten percent more than in the same period the year before. PR whining.”
In the past four years, left‑wing politics has radicalised to such an extent that it often demonises any profit generated by private companies. Making a profit has become immoral. Any company that reports a profit at the end of the fiscal year is immediately met with the wrath of the revolutionaries, even if the profit is catastrophically low compared to the industry average.
Her deduction is a classic logical leap that goes something like this: “You have a profit, therefore you have no legitimate cost problems, therefore any optimisation you undertake is greed.” It is based on the assumption that profit itself cancels out all other economic realities a company faces. The logical leap is roughly this: if a company has a large profit, then it must not have legitimate cost pressures, and any search for efficiency is automatically a sign of greed or PR manipulation. This, of course, does not withstand serious scrutiny.
A large part of the misunderstanding lies in the mistaken notion, held by economic illiterates, of what profit actually is. Profit is not a giant pile of cash in bags marked with a dollar sign, waiting to be handed out to wealthy capitalists. It is an accounting figure for a given period, from which investments, development, debt repayment, and reserves for future downturns are financed. A company that would say, “We are profitable this year, therefore labour costs do not concern us,” would not survive long in the market.
But these are just holes in accounting knowledge. Vuk’s statement hides something much more fundamentally dark. It reflects a way of thinking that treats a company as some kind of shapeless monolith, separate from society. In reality, profit does not end up in the pocket of an abstract “Petrol,” but with very real people. Among the owners are pension and mutual funds, people saving for retirement, small shareholders, and indirectly pensioners. Profit also represents job stability, taxes for the state, and the possibility for the company to exist in the long term. And because Petrol is a state‑owned company, the state directly gains capital when the share price rises. When profit is morally discredited, in practice all investors are discredited, including domestic savers and foreign capital. What is the former state secretary saying to a father who buys Petrol shares for a better future for his children? That he should not be greedy: collectivism matters, not his children. Even if the company – and his savings with it – collapses.
Martina Vuk is merely repeating things she has subconsciously absorbed from other moralisers. Other politicians who place themselves in the centre‑left say the same. This is a widespread societal problem of a distorted perception of reality. A society that systematically treats profit as suspicious and illegitimate will, in the long run, end up without strong domestic companies and without foreign investment. Domestic companies get sold, move abroad, or become foreign‑owned, and profits and taxes flow elsewhere; foreign investors, of course, will not move to a place where local revolutionaries threaten that the only acceptable profit is 0 euros.
Just ten years ago, such arguments were reserved for “every‑day‑at‑the‑same‑bar” Yugonostalgics in local pubs and for hallucinating revolutionaries on Metelkova. Today, such nonsense comes from the mouths and keyboards of politicians in power. The radicalisation grows worse with every mandate. The demonisation of profit is a key indicator that the project of reanimating the communist regime is in full swing. In March, we have an important opportunity to stop it.
