(12-09-2020, 07:01 PM)Einzige Wrote: What is the objective relationship of these "elites" to the means of production?
Elites of ownership (the tycoons) and managerial bureaucracies are able to take a huge chunk of GDP... and this reflects not so much an inherent vice of capitalism as of power over people.
America has these classic economic elites:
1. estate-style agricultural magnates
2. large-scale urban landlords
3. tycoons
4. the bureaucratic elites of giant enterprises
5. political hucksters
6. organized crime (OK, much in disdain, but they certainly have wealth, power, and connections!)
Even the non-profit sector (churches, universities, hospitals, and foundations) are themselves becoming bureaucratic behemoths. Bureaucratic elites are extremely adept at taking all the loose money that there is while keeping others out of the bureaucracy to the favor of family members and cronies and, of course, treating workers badly with brutal management and keeping people overworked and underpaid. Bureaucracies create no wealth, and a corporation deep into bureaucratic ways is terribly inefficient... and inequitable.
I had a thread on the life-cycle of business, and the final stage of a corporation doomed to failure is bureaucracy. The business compels outsiders to adapt to its ways instead of innovating. It cannot attract good workers because anyone working for such a company (Sears was a prime example: is it fully gone now?). It typically got identified as one of the worst companies for which to work, as it had the following characteristics of a dying firn:
1. losses
2. low wages for employees
3. a steady sell-off of assets to cover losses
4. no innovation
5. no opportunity
It's easy to figure what sorts of employees that Sears ended up with. What was once a pioneer in retailing became a company reeking of death. The corporate bureaucrats took care of themselves first with lucrative buyouts.
It is not capitalism; it is power that exploits people while degrading them.
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.
