10-24-2016, 05:24 AM
(07-29-2016, 09:39 PM)MillsT_98 Wrote:(07-29-2016, 04:18 AM)pbrower2a Wrote: We approach the economic crisis of the End of Scarcity, when overproduction threatens to become the norm.
Contemporary elites have been using it, paradoxically, to cut pay, worsen working conditions, and raise economic rents; as such they establish their own class privilege as the sole objective of us all. All the fruits of technological change, human toil not necessary for a level of survival suitable for livestock, and old investment still workable end up going to the economic elites. We are expected to exult in the sultan-like indulgence of those elites.
Let me suggest a group that does not fit that pattern: the Old Order Amish. I doubt that many of us would like to live as they do with their rejection of even the most wholesome of entertainment, their limited education (they keep repeating eighth grade until the school-leaving age of 16), and their limited opportunities in life (practically no white-collar or professional jobs). They are good businessmen, practically re-creating the Gilded Age without the ostentatious display of Gilded elites. Male chauvinism is the norm; women simply work like men. But they don't have an economy that better serves legalized loan-sharks than working people. Nobody gets rich among the Amish.
They have given up any prospect of living in the post-industrial age by maintaining technology (except for productivity of farm goods and their marketability -- refrigerators and even solar power are OK, but even a transistor radio is prohibited).
But how great is economic modernity if it comes with gross exploitation characteristic of a plantation society or a fascist regime? I question whether our economic elites have any virtues. What is so great about a loan-shark economy?
Maybe we'll overcome that during the 4T—maybe it's what the 4T is all about.
Of course. A 4T is the time when the big philosophical issues of the time are sorted out. Is the common man to have a stake in the system or is he to be debased as he was in the Marxist stereotype of capitalist exploitation? The capitalist class of the early twentieth century found the consumer society the means of ensuring that working people had no cause to see capitalists as the new equivalent of slave-masters on a plantation. Turning the proletariat into a market for the productivity of capitalism saved capitalism from the possibility of a Marxist revolution. When capitalism allows the common man to have a car, a decent flat, a refrigerator, schooling for his kids, and medical care, it can keep the masses quiet about overthrowing capitalist exploiters. But stick the worker with early-capitalist conditions that imply that he must suffer for the enrichment and pampering of elites, that he must send his kids off to work when he gets crippled in an industrial accident, and that his living quarters are pestilential fire-traps like the slums of Moscow in 1917... then a crop failure or a military debacle might bring out the red flags with hammer-and-sickle emblems.
Will we tax the super-productivity of human-free manufacturing to allow a welfare-driven economy? Maybe. That's one solution. Will we have an economy best described as having plantation-style inequality due to mass unemployment? That's also possible.
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.