01-30-2017, 01:06 AM
Galen -- Capitalism did not solve the injustice that African-Americans well knew. The slave system of the old South was based upon profits and losses, and the best way to get the greatest profits was to make slavery as exploitative as possible. After the Civil War, blacks did try capitalism -- only for white people of the South restoring all of the oppression of slavery except formal ownership.
I am fully satisfied that had Dr. King had to choose between capitalism with ethnic justice and a racist socialism he would have chosen the capitalist alternative.
Social democracy may be what we end up with after we see the failure of the capitalist order that we now know, and an even more spectacular failure of an attempt to return to the norms of early capitalism (the sort of capitalism in which workers are sweated for maximal profits). There might not be the opportunity for the common man to get filthy rich under social democracy as there is in the law-of-the-jungle capitalism that we know... but who wants to live in a jungle wither as the deer that the tiger dines upon or the tiger that if injured starves?
I am fully satisfied that had Dr. King had to choose between capitalism with ethnic justice and a racist socialism he would have chosen the capitalist alternative.
Social democracy may be what we end up with after we see the failure of the capitalist order that we now know, and an even more spectacular failure of an attempt to return to the norms of early capitalism (the sort of capitalism in which workers are sweated for maximal profits). There might not be the opportunity for the common man to get filthy rich under social democracy as there is in the law-of-the-jungle capitalism that we know... but who wants to live in a jungle wither as the deer that the tiger dines upon or the tiger that if injured starves?
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated Communist but instead the people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists -- Hannah Arendt.