07-20-2022, 06:20 AM
(07-19-2022, 01:56 PM)JasonBlack Wrote:(07-19-2022, 12:26 PM)Eric the Green Wrote: A lot of these are headquartered here in Silicon Valley and the Bay Area, which has been a center for progressive, liberal and counter-cultural trends for decades. People who work here are not exempt from the trends. If not here, then also a few up in another liberal bastion, Seattle.
They are headquartered in Silicon Valley and the Bay Area because...the founders of these companies were progressives too. I think there is a false dichotomy with regards to "caring about resources vs caring about people", when in practice it's more "people who care about controlling resources vs people who care about controlling people". Capitalists such as Mark Zuckerberg or Bill Gates can fall into the latter category, as can communists like Mao Zedong and Che Guevara, as can religious fundamentalists of all creeds.
A big divide exists between high-tech businesses that have a low ratio between material resources used or extracted and corporate profits (as in computer chips or intellectual property) and low-tech businesses that have a high ratio of material resources used or extracted and corporate profits. The material in silicon chips is slight, but the technology is fiendishly costly to develop. Such requires huge inputs of highly-talented engineers and programmers. In contrast, low-tech businesses that have a narrower margin between material inputs and consumer prices generally require labor not so skilled. Someone like Mark Zuckerberg, whose business is the selling of data or Bill Gates, whose business is the sale of computer software, requires huge numbers of people of technological sophistication (and usually formal education) who are more likely to be "woke" than the Koch family, whose Koch Industries involves unglamorous, low-tech activities as fuel, paper, household chemicals, building materials, and cattle ranching. The Koch billionaires have been infamously reactionary, but this may reflect that their business model fits the classic plutocrat-and-proletarian model. Their businesses are environmentally dirty, and keeping the profits that they want is best done with a command-and-control system in which (ideally for the plutocrat) is fully non-union.
Never mind, of course, that people who are in high-tech businesses use huge amounts of low-tech stuff as paper and vehicular fuels. Never mind also that low-tech activities such as oil extraction and vehicle manufacturing rely heavily upon high technology for finding resources or making their vehicles comfortable. Ranch hands, assembly-line workers, and oil-field roustabouts are not hired for intellectual sophistication, and the optimal workers in such activities are those who don't think much about environmental issues as having food on the table.
It would be extremely insulting to associate the Koch brothers with fascists like Agosto Pinochet and David DuKKKe; American plutocrats know that they can't get away with that and that fascists ultimately put their nations at risk of wars that can result in the destruction or confiscation of their assets as the result of war itself or of postwar judgments. Fascism typically reduces workers to near-serfs, which might be ideal for maximal profits whose basis is mass suffering (Nazi Germany was a workers' Hell as well as a zone of genocide and Gestapo terror in a system that brought about the most destructive war in history). I associate the values of most plutocrats and executives with the John Birch Society and not with the KKK or neo-Nazis. They want to give America a mirror-image Marxism in which the Marxist caricature of capitalism of extreme inequality that degrades the toilers into near-serfs always in fear of hunger and cold is the norm. That does not require genocide or religious persecutions; they believe in treating workers equally among themselves -- equally badly -- irrespective of ethnicity or creed. It does imply brutal management characteristic of a slave-based plantation, which however dreadful, is much less horrible than KZ-lager such as Mauthausen. Plantation slaves at least knew that their lives were valuable, and slaves at Mauthausen knew that their masters were indifferent to their survival. This said, one sort of slavery is a slow and inhuman death of a long period of exploitation and the other is more likely a quick and gruesome death.
(Both sorts of slaves deserved emancipation, and in both cases the US Army was the most effective means to that end).
Of course I do not want the John Birch Society or its backers -- mostly plutocrats who want super-cheap labor under harsh discipline under conditions approaching serfdom setting the policies of labor-management relations. Is the Birch Society fascist? No. It does not support military expansionism (Mussolini) or even shtick (Pinochet). If you think I have an undue concern about Birchers -- they are strongly authoritarian and nuts, but they haven't changed since the 1960's and the mainstream of the Republican Party held them in contempt. Today the mainstream of the GOP has become practically identically identical with the Birch Society.
Quote:A lot of rich progressives are very money motivated. Not as a means of elevating their lifestyle, but because they have a savior complex, want to paint themselves as the good guy and believe these traits give them the right to tell other people how to live their lives.
Practically everyone is money-motivated. It's just that the rewards are far lower for the maid than for her rich employer.
It's more a matter of attracting the high-level talent of creativity and scientific mastery that requires that they not emulate Gilded-Era plutocrats. Contrast many other employers: one needs workers who know enough to read and right, understand instructions, obey orders, kiss up to customers, and rely only upon their meager paychecks (and perhaps some welfare assistance) instead of filching cash from the till or merchandise from the supply room for bare sustenance. People like that, even if nearly destitute, are likely to believe the employer's position that nothing matters other than the power, indulgence, and gain of the economic elites, and that everybody is expendable for such. Then again, the ideal level of sophistication for a totalitarian regime is bare literacy that makes one competent at a menial job and undemanding in personal life while unable to criticize the political leadership. Microsoft needs a person far different from what dollar stores need, and the sorts of people that Microsoft needs would fare badly in a dollar store.
Quote:Tying all this back to my main point, many corporate officials are a lot more like politicians than businessmen, so it's not surprising that just as many (if not more) are Democrat than Republican, because political animals are at their best when power is most centralized.
On the whole they are decidedly reactionary in political and economic beliefs, and they would be perfectly happy if workers believed that they had no purpose in life except to earn Pie In the Sky When They Die as a reward for submissive suffering on behalf of rapacious elites who underpay them, fleece them in retail places, and overcharge them for rent in the slums in which they dwell. Know well that the MBA school that is practically necessary for entry into corporate management teaches a model for getting maximal toil for minimal pay. There may be exceptions in which some highly-visible company treats its workers well out of necessity, but in most cases it has been a race to the bottom in pay, working conditions, and repression. On the whole, Big Business supports freedom from high taxes, government regulation (except to enforce debts and prevent businesses from stealing from each other), environmental controls, and above all labor unions. Most of Corporate America is little more moral than slave-owning planters of the Old South and cavil at Nazi-style fascism only because they don't want their precious assets destroyed in bombing raids, let alone thermonuclear war -- or seized after the war by either domestic revolutionaries who seek to overthrow recent oppressors or exploiters or foreign conquerors who use the pretext of owners and executives being war criminals.
It is great woe to the People that the economic elites who can get whatever they want from pliant or incompetent government differ from Marxists only in their praise of the vices of capitalism at its worst as great virtues in contrast to Marxist condemnation of such vices.
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.