01-31-2021, 11:53 AM
(01-31-2021, 10:13 AM)Einzige Wrote: It's always a generational tipping point - 2008 and 2012 and 2016 and 2021....
At some point you concede that, even if generational cliodynamics is a real social dynamic, so many other things take precedence (like social class) that its effect is minimal.
The class struggle is real, and in the recent (are we sure that it is over?) neoliberal era of "profits, profits, over everything" in which the power, indulgence, and gain of economics are the only purposes that those elites allow in the rest of us and which rationalizes itself in "trickle-down theory" is important -- but not everything. Ethnic and religious divides are real as those relate to culture.
The class struggle can define itself as at the safest for all a quest for dignity among working people and at its riskiest a proletarian revolution that ends with either the elimination of existing elites or the decimation of the working class. Proletarian revolutions like the anti-Baath revolution in Iraq can fail with the gangsters prevailing and killing whatever the top gangster wants killed. In the aftermath of a failed proletarian revolution, the elites can turn workers into outright slaves in concentration camps or replace one set of workers with another set (immigrants who have no political rights).
There is not and there has never been a true classless society. One reality is the hierarchy of skill; another is the potential for the abuse of power. I have no problem with the top cardiac surgeon making far more than a hospital orderly. Abuse of power? America is becoming an aristocratic society without titles of nobility, reflecting to some extent the pattern of Southern planters. But even with that, most elites become not only hierarchical but hereditary. I remember when business executives were often former workers who demonstrated that they had much more talent than was necessary for repetitive work on an assembly line. That is over, or it has at least been over for forty or so years. The Soviet nomenklatura and the executive elite of Corporate America may have been on opposite sides of an ideological divide, but they were much more like each other than they were willing to let people think. They get to live like aristocrats while pretending to stand either for "socialism leading to Communism" or "free enterprise", the latter having an Orwellian twist in which it is enterprise that is free -- to do nasty things to people.
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.