Trump hits new low in approval poll

[pbrower2a]

(01-28-2021, 10:25 AM)Einzige Wrote: Biden and Trump are both controlled by Capital. They act in the interest of whatever faction of Capital they represent - even with the most "radical" proposed Democratic policies, e.g. the GND, the interests of Capital take precedence (the GND is an elaborate systems of subsidies and tariffs, not a program of nationalization and requisition, which might make a slight difference).

Capitalism is not going away in America. First of all, any social order will need capital to build anything from factories to roads to schools to hospitals to concert halls to military bases. No enterprise, public or private, can exist without it. Such is so whether the ideology is 'socialist' or aristocratic.  It took capital in Roman times to build the amphitheaters and aqueducts. The question between Marxist and bourgeois investment is who manages the capital. 

The acquisitive impulse is not all evil. Its antithesis is not so much socialism as it is laziness and apathy. Profits of the elite as the objective of the whole of Humanity or else death (whether quickly on the gallows or slowly through hunger and cold)... well, that is totalitarian as anything that Stalin or Mao could come up with. At the worst capitalist elites act as if no human suffering can ever be in excess so long as that suffering serves the privilege, indulgence, gain, or safety of the elites. 

It is possible that capitalism acted best when it had a real dread of a proletarian revolution and chose to entice workers with some level of comfort and delight with hope for improvement in their lives. Rewards for higher levels of performance, skill, and effort have a real pay back. Big Business is going to get it back as consumer purchases, so production simply increases. Hope for the future? The smart kid from a proletarian background might become a well-paid accountant, engineer, or research scientist because a good educational system does not waste talent. It is better that this sort of kid gets a chance to attend a first-rate college than that some callow rake (I think of Donald Trump as a prime example of someone who would have never made it into college had he not been from a very rich family... and it is best that someone like he ends up selling used cars) waste the opportunity that some talented kid might appreciate. (Trump is one of the last of the 'legacy' students, the sorts who gets admitted because his parents made big donations to the college. Great colleges want to spread their influence into more of the world, which indicates that some promising kid from the barrio or the Rez  might learn the ways of Harvard and bring those back to the barrio or the Rez and shake things up there -- for the better. Something like the late John Lewis' "Good Trouble"). 

Let's knock profit unduly. In a mom-and-pop business, profit is the family's income, and it is a reward for toil, skill, time-value of money in an investment, and wise stewardship of resources. Profit ensures that one can put money aside for retirement with a modest return instead of having to stash cash to keep it from being devoured by some  fee-taker. If one has little imagination on how to invest money (and if one has a job that keeps one busy, such is so) then stocks and bonds are reasonable investments because those can beat inflation. The opposite of profits are losses, and losses go to those entities that either misbehave (like Enrob or Lehman Brothers) or fail to adapt to the times (like Penn Central in its day and Sears more recently). 

The fault with capitalism is rarely that someone makes a profit off some innovation in objects or service. I used to buy lots of stuff at Sears and rarely at Wal*Mart. That is now inverted. Wal*Mart came into existence in the 1960's, when Sears was going strong. Now Sears is dying. Wal*Mart did some things well, although it is far from a perfect market for me. Its demographic listens to country music, which isn't my intellectual zone. (I confess; I am an intellectual snob. My music for a cross-country road trip would be something like this:

 

That is not the Wal*Mart demographic. 

The problem with capitalism is not the profit motive. It is social stratification, and social stratification promotes an empty-headed figure like Donald Trump as a culture-creator (The Apprentice? Yuck! I fired that TV show quickly with my remote control!), "thinker" (anyone who pushes demonstrable falsehood is worse than worthless), or politician. (We saw the result over four of the dreariest years in American history that one cannot blame on some foreigner or a natural disaster. Social stratification ensures that talents will be wasted because such either don't transform quickly and fully into lucre for the Master Class or imply rewards to the 'wrong' people. The celebrity circus that Howe and Strauss deride in a 3T at least has a few superstar actors, pop musicians, and sports stars spending as lavishly as they earn, so they are good for churning loose income into a movie studio, record company, or sports franchise.     

Marx himself stated that capitalists who challenged the stratified order of the middle ages were initially agents of social, economic, and even moral progress. As time passed, less-talented, astute people became owners and managers who got to live off the legacy of innovation. Revenue goes increasingly into bureaucracy full at first of cronies of the original tycoon and in turn the offspring of such cronies instead of into research and development or investment in productive infrastructure. The biggest firm becomes adept only at squeezing competitors our and deterring new competition... and there can be no social consequence other than the social stratification that left-leaning people find loathsome about capitalism at its worst. 

If anyone thinks that Marxism-Leninism offers a viable alternative through government ownership and operation of productive enterprise because it overtly opposes the inequality of capitalism as organization of productive industry he can think again. Bureaucracy flourished even more rapidly under the Stalinist perversion of the Marxist-Leninist ideal than it did under capitalism. 'Socialist' hagiography may have flattered the proletariat, but the bureaucratic structure of socialist enterprise ossified even faster. Figure that a Henry Ford (who really was an awful person), Sam Walton, or Ross Perot did everything possible to thwart bureaucratic bloat while active participants in their businesses; State boards that micromanaged all productivity of factory and farm filled with people more adept at controlling processes and assets... and the people who managed them were the revolutionaries of the Revolution followed by the usual heirs of any elite of ownership: their kids. People who praised the proletariat in whose name the system operated ended up lording it over the proles. Such is human nature with power.    

....Yes, Biden is just as much pro-capital as Trump. The difference is that Biden wants capitalism to work for people other than capitalists and Trump wants it to serve some nightmare in which a few people get everything other than the bare means of existence for people necessary to do the productive work  and maintain a well-oiled machine of vice and graft.