07-03-2016, 10:44 AM
(07-02-2016, 09:01 PM)Bob Butler 54 Wrote:(07-02-2016, 03:19 PM)pbrower2a Wrote: Communism is in part a promise to get even faster economic growth than capitalism can offer because the Communists will invest more because they will cut out the profit of entrepreneurs and big land owners. Nazism promised work and (allegedly) the pay top go with it.
That's the promise. That's the theory.
In practice, the communist party is just another set of ruling elites, no better and in some ways worse than the capitalists. The Nazis in practice weren't that different. They did what they felt like doing and didn't stop short of the Allies wiping them off the map. No checks and balances. You want checks on the power of the ruling elites, which Communism and Fascism do not provide except for violence. Democracies have the ballot box, bills or rights, independent judiciaries and such like, which are better than nothing but quite arguably not truly effective.
The basic principle is that without firm and functional checks on the ruling elites, they will siphon off far too much of the wealth and power, crippling their own culture. It's easy, I would think, to see this in Communists and Nazis. I see much the same thing happening with the Reagan Unraveling memes. If the elites dominate a culture, no matter what style, philosophy or excuses that they spew, they will exploit the culture to death.
It's remarkable that the Stalin Constitution is heavily a plagiarism of the Constitution of the USA, even to the point of having a weak formal government. The Soviet Union is often understood as the epitome of big, bad government to the extreme -- but of course it was the Party and its boss that held all the power. The Soviet Constitution had its bill of rights, but gutted all those rights with such clauses as that speech contrary to Socialist progress was to be excluded. Just imagine how little freedom of speech or expression we would have if we had clauses prohibiting people from exercising speech, assembly, or protest that might prove contrary to "capitalist progress".
Marx saw ownership as the basis of power, ignoring the power of bureaucracies when those bureaucracies have no capitalists to contest them or when those bureaucracies are fully in collusion with the financiers and industrialists (as in America). I see a big problem in the growth of power of unelected lobbyists over the legislative process at both federal and state levels. Government by lobbyists is potentially a new form of tyranny; indeed I see our system having gone from representing constituents of districts to representing economic interests. The latter is the theoretical basis of Mussolini's stato corporativo, something quickly recognized as grossly undemocratic but not before Mussolini established his own absolute power.
Can a military elite be the oppressors despite not owning the assets? Sure. Chile under Pinochet, a political order nearly as repressive as the Soviet Union at the time. Can an intellectual elite? Sure -- shamans and witchdoctors were like that in the hunter-gatherer era; that is how Iran is undemocratic with clerics collectively holding complete veto power over anything. Can bureaucrats in charge of the functioning of the economy? Just look at the Soviet nomenklatura and the executive elite in the USA. The fellow who owns a small shop often has less power over me than does a supervisor in a giant business.
Even if they adopt the style of the Founding Fathers, America's economic elite can make the concept of "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness" a farce for all but themselves. Workers can live at the whim of ownership and management, getting to survive only through unqualified submission to the elites. That is no 'life'. If the only happiness that we are allowed to pursue is the enrichment and indulgence of elites, then freedom is a fraud as a concept.
I love my country and I admire the Founding Fathers (except mostly on slavery). I can never love exploiters and oppressors just because they are American.
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.