09-09-2018, 10:31 AM
(09-09-2018, 12:02 AM)TheNomad Wrote: You speak of the slaveship of fascism as if in a possible future. You said
We are at or near peak manufacturing in the First World because we need little new stuff. It's down to replacement (mostly of obsolete stuff). How many televisions, sofas, refrigerators, and cars do any of us really need?
I referred not so much to the political order as to the end of the economic paradigm in which we have been in since about 1900 in which people are motivated to work because they need or are convinced that they need new, costly manufactured stuff. When few people still have that stuff, capitalism can thrive by producing it and selling it to the proletariat. Capitalism saved itself at the time of the Bolshevik Revolution by turning destitute toilers into reliable consumers. In essence, Henry Ford expected those who made his cars to buy cars that Ford Motor Company made. OK, buy household furniture, refrigerators, stoves, good clothes, the electronic marvels of the time, and the power and other services necessary for working them. Above all -- nicer housing than the rural hovel or the firetrap slum. Such was expected of other workers -- that those who worked for General Electric to supply washing machines and phonographs or radios would themselves buy the sorts of things that Ford wanted his employees to buy. Consumerism saved capitalism from what Marxism-Leninism saw as the inevitable revolution. The technology and the objects have improved; a Model-T Ford would not be suitable for driving on current roads because it is unsafe and under-powered, and we have computers and not the wind-up gramophone with horn.
Now what happens? The plutocrats seems to solve their problem by cutting real wages. Get people to pay more for what they have, and all is well for the elites. It could be that as much as 50% of income goes to property rents in some places, rents that someone like Donald Trump exacts from people supposedly fortunate to live in high-cost places because that is where they must live just to be in the places where pay is really good. Nut that is not progress. Most people recognize an innovative entrepreneur as a sort of hero, but not a monopolistic gouger who simply gets as much out of a customer as possible for as little as possible. Capitalism itself is going into a crisis.
Work harder, pay more, and get less while rentier elites live like feudal lords. That is a raw deal, and it will destabilize a political order that recently operated on principles more humane.
Quote:Since the last Turning, America has been being groomed for the fascist slaveship... CONSUMPTION is the type of fascist we have become. CONSUMERS. As you say, when it runs out, when we can't reasonable consumer anything really further to RAMP an economy, we can't continue.
The proletariat remains, but its good times seem to be over. It is finding fewer jobs in manufacturing that, physically demanding as it was, at least paid well. What remains is largely jobs in which the ownership cracks the whi9p and provides employees with the means at most of bare sustenance for full-time work. Sure, most of these jobs used to employ young and little-skilled workers buying their first car, insurance, and motor fuels, buying some nice clothes for dating, or perhaps paying some costs of college. But what if one is an adult with adult economic responsibilities and gets stuck in them? No I speak not of a transitory time in which one has job applications out for something similar to what paid well in the recent past -- I speak of people now in their 50s and 60s who work in fast-food restaurants and convenience stores.
Most people will find the economic system casting them off before they are ready to be cast off. If one;s specialized skills are no longer of value, then that could be what one gets.
I have heard someone who works in such a place tell me how great Donald Trump is and how horrible Obama was... she fell for the slogan "Make America Great Again" and, unlike I, failed to ask such a question as what it means for America to be 'greater' or 'for whom'. If it means for monopolistic gougers, crony capitalists, or employers who treat their employees like livestock... no thanks. Of course the person who has such a job might have never done anything else, and this is the sort of work one gets if one has limited education and has no willingness to risk injury from heavy lifting.
Quote:It began with the TV and the suburban automobile, children's toys, kitchen gadgets........ all of those things are from the 1950s origin. The FRUIT of the last Turning reforms. I say we have been living fascism for quite some time now. Only, it is stopping to work. We are slowing because we can no longer consume reasonable. The cellphone may have been the very last large consumer product to which we could be sold never-ending upgrades, etc. The IDEA of the phone. Yes, electronics will always be that. But the gadget-in-hand was the last. Everything is changing now.
But -- those things allowed people to establish individuality, something inconsistent with fascism. The right sorts of toys can stimulate curiosity and lead one into doing some real thinking; fascism requires mindless obedience out of ignorance and fear. Kitchen gadgets reduced the drudgery of the housewife and may have caused her to want to get some sort of work. If she had a choice, she eventually got wrapped up in some independent consumerism. Automobiles give people mobility so that workers can say "take this job and shove it/ I ain't workin' here no more" when situations become inhuman or insufferable. Don't forget that the consumer society made cheap books available. Sure, most are schlock, but lots of people have gotten to read Orwell, Arendt, Shirer, Solzhenitsyn, Wiesel, and the like. It is safe to assume that many high-school students who heard about how horrible Communism is found a way to read Marx' Communist Manifesto.
You can fault the television as the "boob tube" as an anodyne for a working mind. If one is stupid enough one can choose to watch televised sports, music videos, infotainment, and witless sitcoms. Cable TV broadens the availability of mind-rotting trash. Even so one can watch material more informative... or motion pictures that are the definitive art-form of the last century, combining literature and graphic art. Depending on what news one watches, one can stay informed as well as if one had a newspaper.
Quote:THE WORLD is actually within this fascist plot. The whole world is a piece of the fascism. Where are the consumers? The manufacturers? The sellers? The distributors, etc. I think any reasonable person understands such a system cannot last. It simply cannot for the reason you said. But we go into it. I wonder if next turning will be isolation in response to previous attempts at high globalization ideas. I hope so. Those who speak as if things have no borders, boundaries or edges, they scare me.
That may be an exaggeration. Of course our economic system is in trouble because it can no longer deliver what it once promised. The proletariat, which now includes most clerks as well as industrial toilers, today as in Marx' day, has nothing to sell but its labor. People who used to have good lives have been cast into it for no obvious fault of their own. It is easy to see why the plutocrats of our time would turn to fascism in America as did their counterparts in Germany did in the 1930s. The plutocrats would love to further immiserate the working classes as the Nazis did by taking away a worker's right to change jobs and giving an employer the right to send an under-performing or disgruntled worker to some labor camp in which he works even harder under the lash for starvation rations and either dies or comes to recognize how wonderful it is to get a little sleep and maybe a little sugar and coffee as well as a few more potatoes. Fascism relies more upon the threat that things can be much worse than upon the hope for a better life. Do our shareholders and executives want basically Nazi Germany without the racist murders, the street violence, and the destructive wars? If so they gamble big for some incremental gains against workers.
OK, I have hope in that Donald Trump is widely unpopular even without an economic meltdown or large numbers of young Americans coming back in body bags from Wars for Profit. It could be that people believe that Trump could bring about such through his cruelty and madness. So at best we have a wave election in November like that of 2006 in which Democrats make huge gains in the House and adequate gains in the Senate to gut the President's authority to do really-crazy things; polling for the President (approval ratings) is so abysmal that he seems more likely to get defeated like Carter or Hoover in a bid for re-election while the Senate gives the Democrats a majority by reversing the 2014 Reactionary wave. It will take until 2022 to reverse the Tea Party wave... but by then I expect the Hard Right to finance mindless politics through such fronts as Club for Growth, Freedom Works!, Citizens United, and Americans for Prosperity to fall for reactionary politicians in unlikely places and bring back the pure plutocracy that now bedevils us. Then we are back to where we are now, except that we are all six years older.
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.