10-09-2021, 05:56 PM
(10-09-2021, 03:19 PM)nguyenivy Wrote: I'm wondering if we really were in a 4T at all before 2020. What if we were just in a long 3T until 2020? Maybe the 2008/9 economic crash seemed milder than what I've seen in documentaries about the Great Depression, so now in the COVID-19 world 2008/9 doesn't seem like nearly as big a disruption to life as COVID is. Or is it that 2008/9 is analogous to 1929 & 2020/1 is analogous to 1939/40 where each were different phases of the Crisis?
We had powerful people preserving the nastiness of a 3T as long as possible even if it was no longer popular. The neoliberal era was one of underpaying workers and treating them badly, promoting monopolies and cartels, sponsorship of lucrative scams, and the creation of mindless mass slow culture as the 1980-2010 equivalent of Karl Marx' opiate of the masses. For people not in the economic elite, the secret of happiness was stupidity that allowed one to believe that the rip-offs were wise. Workers were sweated to keep prices down for people who went into the 3T with something or could rely upon inherited income in a trust fund. It was a raw deal.
If one had a brain, it was a maddening time. Often worked at jobs far too small for their spirits (let us say the history major with a BA degree who toiled for a decade or so in a fast-food place for a near-minimum wage), workers were expected to suffer with a smile despite hating their lives. Propagandists of the Right told people that such was creating prosperity and capital that would create opportunities for advancement. I went through that and I frequently contemplated suicide, stopping only out of fear of Hell. The twentieth century offered some of the most realistic images of Hell ever known such as concentration camps and Gulags. It was a merciless order, but much as was so with slave-owning planters in the ante-bellum South the exploiters expected everyone to think of their exploitation and dehumanization as great benefice.
There were exceptions, as in high technology, but even that had as its purpose the reduction in the need for labor, with workers compelled to compete with their co-workers for the jobs that they had. The 3T was rotten, and the only good thing to say of it was that we did not quite descend into the nightmare of despotism, torture chambers, and concentration camps. Such progress as there was was the enrichment of elites at the expense of everyone else. People were obliged to hustle so that they could work sixty to seventy hours a week just to meet the rent.
This cannot be maintained. It entrenches itself in unspeakable horror or it implodes.
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.