02-12-2021, 04:22 AM
(02-11-2021, 11:58 PM)Einzige Wrote:(02-11-2021, 07:46 PM)random3 Wrote: Americans say that the reason the elites want to kill off the 99% is to save the environment, but maybe the globalists are just evil, insane, and greedy.
They don't want to kill them off, at least not in your lifetime. What they want is to further erode living standards, to make up for the declining rate of profit. Global warming can be simultaneously true and play into the hands of the big capitalists.
Global warming will make things even more precarious for the economic elites. Hungry people who have lost their livelihoods (this will be especially true among peasant farmers), their hope for survival, and overall dignity will have good cause to turn against the worst capitalists of the time, those that offer survival in return for slavery or serfdom.
As I have suggested, the declining rate of profit that Marx saw in capitalism reflected the tendency from highly-inefficient artisan production to more efficient and increasingly mechanized production. He did not catch onto that. Such is not his fault; he has been dead for nearly 140 years, and faulting him for not seeing that would be like faulting Darwin for not recognizing genetics as the language of biological inheritance.
Human nature is less changeable than you recognize. Appetites, curiosity, the sex drive, acquisitiveness, hedonistic tendencies, and the quest for self esteem and recognition are as true today as they were in classical times. Grimm's fairy tales date to antiquity to the extent that the same tales are told in all peoples who speak a language descended from Proto-Indo-European.... but different ones are told in countries that do not have such a linguistic heritage. They are told alike in Iceland and Bengal, but not among Finns, Hungarians, Arabs, Turks, Georgians, or Burmese. Classical Greek drama still relates to us, and the ethical teachings of one culture barely out of the hunter-gatherer stage of social and economic development have influenced much of the world.
What does change is technology, language, the collection or loss of cultural achievements, and new forms of social organization. Technology dictates what we can have. Language remains the structure of expression of thought. We are in a different world from what we lived in before Darwin, Freud -- and, yes, Marx. Indeed we are in a richer world in culture since the 'rediscovery' of J S Bach, which itself came in a time of great achievements of music and after the time of some composers (Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven) who still secretly derived a few tricks from a composer that was basically lost. Can you imagine the overture to Die Meistersinger without the influence of the Baroque upon a composer who was in no way Baroque? As for Freud, his influence upon modern literature precludes credible fiction without its influence. Modern cinema is about as far from putting a camera in front of something and seeing what one gets as it could be. Putting a camera in front of something and seeing what one gets is the banal home movie; it requires control of acting at a refined (if artificial) level not permissible on stage but necessary on a screen, careful scouting of locations or the creation of fantastical stages, coherent story-telling, and attention to angles of filming.
This is not Karl Marx' world, but it is still the world of Shakespeare, Goya, Jefferson, Chopin, Chekhov, and Kurosawa. Marx at most discusses a special case of capitalism at its worst, one devoid of any human virtue -- even the caution to recognize that a pathological order is vulnerable to a proletarian revolution.
I look at it this way: if one already has class privilege, one has good cause to protect it. Two ways offer themselves: one is brutal repression, as is fascism with its torture chambers and concentration camps, and the other is ensuring that the proletariat has a stake in the system. The first allows more complete indulgence by the economic elites in a realm of mass suffering of the type that fits a Marxist stereotype of capitalism at its worst, and it usually results in suicide of that society as it ends up facing enemies whose victory is liberation (think of how the Italian people received the British and Americans in the latter two years of World War II) or collapsing in revolution as the system runs out of food and fuel as farm laborers become cannon fodder. The other ensures that people have a chance to own cars, ovens, sofas, books, and the like -- and gives people something to lose other than the chains that Marx says that they have as toilers.
Yes, there are plenty of people enamored of the quick-buck ethos of the neoliberal era in which economic inequality, mass-market superstition and bigotry, politicians and executives acting without conscience because the tycoons themselves have no conscience, and economic insecurity prevail. Many of us recognize that that brings about the worst in human nature and debases everything. Such is ultimately unsafe as well as un-sage, and people are catching on. Maybe not enough people catch on as fast as I might like, but later than optimal is better than too late to avoid calamity.
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.