04-17-2021, 04:59 PM
(04-16-2021, 05:08 PM)Einzige Wrote: It's time for working-class revolution.
First of all, once one successfully leads a working-class revolution one is no longer working-class. No matter how sympathetic one is to the worker one is no longer a worker once one leads a government, an army, or a business enterprise. Lenin and Mao were intellectuals -- not proles. Castro might have been a politician in the mainstream had he gotten to exercise the role of a legislator in the Cuban political system had Batista not negated an election... Castro ranm on something called the Orhodox Party of Cuba, which was hard to identify as a Communist Party. (Cuban Commies were typically known as the Popular Socialist Party, as the Communist Party was outlawed).
What good Castro did was typical of a Social Democrat. The bad -- the censorship, the repression, the confiscation of property -- was Communist.
The real revolution is social change having nothing to do with a change in political affiliation. Yes, Donald Trump was an unmitigated disaster, someone that the Far Left might find useful for gutting democracy and debasing capitalism as Batista did. More significant is that as scarcity becomes surfeit, the necessity of deprivation as a means of control vanishes. Maintenance of deprivation as a control on workers may be possible on behalf of an arrogant and rapacious elite that demands and gets everything. An elite can operate that way in a time of super-prosperity only if it has absolute power that it has the will to abuse people. Such is of course reactionary in the extreme.
What would such an elite be like? First, it would have the markers of sociopathy or extreme narcissism. Sociopaths can thrive in business organizations so long as they see rules worth heeding for the sake of preserving the system from which they extract privilege and indulgence. The sociopaths who don't get away with it are the criminals who have little stake in the system but instead perverse desires and the desire to get more than one can get through one's talents with predatory behavior. Second, it would pass power down through inheritance in all but name because it could not tolerate competition by startup businesses that might outcompete them in price and service. Profit margins would margins can be kept high through monopoly that has a government in its thrall, willing to suppress new technologies and stifle competition. Third, it would keep wages artificially low and all costs of living freakishly high.
That isn't capitalism; it is socialism for the rich, or economic fascism.
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.