02-20-2021, 08:51 PM
(02-20-2021, 05:01 AM)Einzige Wrote: The Democrats aren't eager to do shit except to continue to extend the rule of Capital - not "the rich" but Capital, which is a system ordering and governing all human capacity on Earth today.
Capital cannot rule us. Capital-owners can. At the worst was chattel slavery. But that is over.
I'm not going to discuss every aspect of capital, but I can start with assuming that a device that can make human effort meaningful in producing desirable objects on a repetitive basis is capital. In the hydraulic societies of antiquity in modern-day Egypt, Iraq, Iran, and Pakistan, a little plot of desert was worthless unless it could get water to irrigate the crops . Irrigation and drainage canals, pumps (typically driven by livestock), tools for clearing the canals, and of course plows... and the livestock for driving the pumps or pulling the plow are capital. The land is worthless without irrigation.
You tell me: what part of the capital could oppress people? Oppression, when it came, originated in some ruler who got whatever he wanted. That is the oppressor -- the Pharaoh in Egypt, and whatever his title was in those other countries. Capital did not oppress, but the person who could tax a farmer into poverty could.
Fast forward to Marx' time. The capital in a factory included fixed property (land and building), equipment including productive machinery. Was it the fixed property or equipment that oppressed and exploited workers therein, or the ownership and management? (OK, someone who fully endorses capitalism at its harshest might argue that workers were exploiting the capitalists, but that is one twisted story).
Capital might make life easier than what preceded. The question is who commands the capital.
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.