(02-12-2022, 08:45 AM)David Horn Wrote:(02-11-2022, 10:07 PM)beechnut79 Wrote:(02-11-2022, 11:39 AM)Skabungus Wrote: I've always been accused of being an optimist, but there are worse things. I've also had the satisfaction of saying "I told you so" more times than I could count. These days I remain an optimist, but I frankly have no idea what to expect as we come up on 2024 and beyond. I take heart in the spread of Lean Process Improvement throughout government and industry, and the rapid blooming of cooperatives ranging from internet and utility providers to more traditional coops all my hippy friends remember.
But we have been in a new Gilded Age ever since Reagan busted the unions four decades ago. Lower and middle classes have never really recovered, even during the two Democratic administrations. Clinton was for all intents and purposes was a DINO, and despite his initial promises Obama also turned out to be a major disappointment. And who knows if Biden will really be that much of a real improvement.
The moneyed elite aren't giving up control willingly, and they've managed to enlist resentful whites to fight their battles. If this comes to a good resolution, it won' be due to some thoughtful process. It will be messy. The plutocrats like the idea of contention, because two groups opposing each other leaves them free to do as they please.
The moneyed elites have been as a rule the worst a$$holes in history (aside from outright criminals), deviating from such when absorbed in some creative or intellectual pursuit or even defense against some enemy that is as unwilling to preserve its own class privilege (for the peasantry and the proletariat, wars of conquest by similar rulers is little more than replacing one elite over another with no meaningful change of relationship, as the a$$hole characteristic of aristocratic elites has no connection to nationality. With few exceptions they stand for little more than class privilege irrespective of time and place. Before the Bolshevik Revolution the question in most of eastern Europe was whether the ruling elite would be German or Russian a$$holes. Add to this, modern industrial societies have tended to develop administrative bureaucracies, whether a Soviet-style nomenklatura or an American-style executive elite. The difference between the two ostensibly-inimical elites is slight. That the Soviet nomenklatura morphed into an elite morphed into an American-style executive elite should little surprise us. Both are a nearly-closed elite that allows little entry from outside except perhaps to snarf up smart people of limited skill so that those never become dangerous revolutionaries.
The class struggle remains, but the villains have changed. Bureaucratic elites need not own the means of production (which Marx thought essential!), but they can certainly stifle competition and dominate political life. Public policy in America is often little more than ensuring that we have enough welfare to avoid the unsettling spectacle of people starving in the streets, that tax policies largely reward people for already being rich, and that small business be stifled. Ruling elites hate competition, and as one of the starkest expressions of such the aristocratic elites of Germany were quick to adopt antisemitism. German Jews were, as small businessmen, potential competitors to aristocratic financiers and industrialists and thus threats to the cartels that dominated German economic life. Hitler won some of his earliest support upon such elites, and he consistently promised to marginalize the Jews. That marginalization would intensify once Hitler was in power -- all the way to the murder camps.
The model for the American elite may be something more like sharecropping, if not chattel slavery... but the trend under the neoliberal ideology has been toward enrichment of elites of ownership and management, tax codes that favor elites and doom most small businesses, destruction of liberal arts in education, increasing vulgarity in culture, and the promotion of a debt-driven commerce. Workers become little more than conduits of money between economic elites, such as between such a mass employer as Wal*Mart and one's rapacious landlord. People must work longer and harder in the performance of dubious services so that they can pay off those who create and exploit scarcity as the model of profit maximization.
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.