12-10-2020, 07:16 PM
(12-10-2020, 10:04 AM)David Horn Wrote:(12-09-2020, 10:59 PM)Classic-Xer Wrote:(12-09-2020, 07:01 PM)Einzige Wrote: What is the objective relationship of these "elites" to the means of production?
Dude, there is no such thing as an "objective" relationship when the money and power of elites are either in play or on the line (at risk) these days.
A rare case of agreement! Objective? No! Punitive? Maybe. The means of production are not the same today as they were, and are moving away from that archaic model at an accelerating pace. Eventually, if nothing is done to stop it, capital will be the means of production, using AI and smart factories to create literally everything. The last to die will be the direct service work that you do and that done by cops, restaurant staff and medical people (among others). Eventually, that will go away as well, and there will be no power of labor, because there will be no labor ... only serfs.
Much of the wealth created these days is intellectual property. Some artist creates a highly-desirable painting, and it sells for $50,000, which is a huge return on talent. But this is Picasso or one of his successors. It's not someone who paints images of Elvis on velvet, which is practically factory-style production complete with effective standardization for veritable mass production.
On most objects, as the cost of production diminishes on something mass-produced and mass-marketed, so does the cost to the consumer. The relationship between profit and selling cost typically remains, but if commodities get cheap enough then there isn't quite the profit in dealing in the commodity as there once was. It was once possible to make a good living selling consumer electronics such as stereos, televisions, and VCR's. That is over. The people 'selling' those at retail are now clerks at box stores, and they simply scan the object against a detector. As the stuff that a store sells becomes less expensive, then so does the amount of profit on the sale. (This partially explains the demise of some venerable retail chains)...
Technology is one of the drivers of changes in personal behavior (just think of what telephones and automobiles did for dating) and economic realities. Amazon.com can give people choices that their local retailer ignored because its customers have specific purchases intended in contrast to the Sears store that used to be a big part of the activity at a shopping mall. Sears relied heavily upon customers' impulse purchases... and its middle-class shoppers were less willing to buy stuff for which they had no place. (That people are living in smaller dwellings and even sharing apartments to accommodate a reality that landlords can still profiteer from makes people less willing to buy space-eating stuff). Sears ended up competing with Wal*Mart and Target (it did merge with K-Mart, and if I were the boss of that combination I would simply add Sears' signature merchandise into box stores that would reflect the merger by becoming "SMART stores... get it? K-Mart becomes S-Mart" while abandoning Sears' old way of doing business.
Oddly I see rot in the recent darling of retailing in Wal*Mart. Wal*Mart has a clientele that does much impulse shopping, and it thrives in rural areas in which people can buy consumer schlock and keep it for a few years. What happens when people at the economic low end, including people brought up in the American middle class, start getting fussy about what they buy?
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.
