09-01-2019, 03:13 AM
(09-01-2019, 12:55 AM)Hintergrund Wrote:(08-28-2019, 08:46 AM)Anthony Wrote: Prabhat Sarkar's theory, superimposed on S&H's, strongly militates against any attempt to "save" capitalism: Where the last Crisis knocked the acquisitive age down, this Crisis will knock it out - just as where the American Revolution Crisis knocked the intellectual age down, the Civil War Crisis knocked it out - and before that, where the Armada Crisis knocked the warrior age down, the Glorious Revolution Crisis knocked it out.
That's a revolutionary idea if true - but why is it like that?
It is also possible that the warrior elite would seek to have the formality of private ownership but with
(1) high taxes on egregious consumption that interferes with the objectives of the warrior elite
(2) less mass admiration for capitalists
(3) the power of capitalists greatly reduced in politics
(4) the norm of barracks-style equality in economic result, and
(5) less production and consumption of frills and fluff, but more economic discipline -- and equality of result
The warrior elite is usually drawn (at least initially) from the working class which sees more opportunity in military service than in servitude toward entrenched capitalist elites. But note well the old saying: the ancestor of every king is a soldier.
It could be that the real losers of the warrior era are the bureaucratic elites of the monopolistic, vertically-integrated entities. The chaos of the collapse of the plutocratic order can look much like the Great Depression of the 1930's. Thus capitalism may recover -- but as smaller-scale capitalism with more capitalists competing on a smaller, more localized scale. Individual capitalists will not make enough profit with which to support huge (and really parasitic) bureaucracies. let alone pay lobbyists and bribe politicians. So what happens to the bureaucratic elites of the last stage of plutocratic dominion? Many will find that they must become capitalists (which they are not).
A soldier society puts much value into physical fitness, which means that children are to be spared the stunting effects of hunger that the plutocrats of capitalism in the latter stage use as a threat. Capitalism need not be transformed into a Bolshevik nightmare, but it can be more competitive and equitable.
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.