(09-12-2017, 11:59 PM)Bob Butler 54 Wrote:(09-12-2017, 09:08 PM)pbrower2a Wrote: I have my neo-Marxist theory. We Americans have the original elite of big rural landowners, basically planters without the slaves; the financiers and industrialists that Marx saw as the arch-fiends of capitalism; the managerial elite that Milovan Djilas saw in his The New Class; big urban landlords (Donald Trump is the archetype), and organized crime. A few people make the money, much of it as economic rent, and the rest of us are expected to put on theatrical smiles as we sweat.
With the possible exception of the mobsters, whose politics are murky, the other elites are reactiona4ry in their political and economic agendas. They want as productive system in which they exact every bit of profit possible. We have been collecting elites devoid of responsibility but demanding of us all. In no way are they in competition; they are in concert. But the concert isn't something like Mendelssohn's Violin Concerto and Brahms' Fourth Symphony. It is a cacophony of cruelty.
Some of Piketty's followers are calling this the second Gilded Age. A focus on elites, division of wealth and a government that isn't really helping might make link up possible. I won't argue too much against your basic view from the past.
The question is how to break up the alliance between the elites and the government that allows the division of wealth.
This is a second Gilded Age in which the enrichment and pampering is the program of the Establishment, and that anything that gets in the way is ethically suspect, as those elites (which include the televangelists who fleece and brainwash their followers are a part) define what is good and evil. I've got mine -- $crew you!
The non-elites are the schmucks who have been born to do the work because they are born into disadvantage. For the economic elites one has obnoxious traits of all prior and current elites... and those elites unite in the promotion of their vices at the expense of all else and everyone else.
Good times come for people not in the elites as those elites turn against each other. American democracy worked best when the Southern agrarian elites and organized labor (always a non-elite) shared a common enemy in the owners of industrial sweatshops. Today the Southern agrarian elites are in alliance with the sweatshop owners.
Quote:The focus is on the urban - rural divide. If you get obsessed on that, the division of wealth issue gets lost. This doesn't mean some of the supposed culture war divides aren't real. I'm guessing that you feel the gun policy question and women's rights shouldn't get shrugged off and forgotten. However, while people get emotional on issues that would attempt to change cultures, the basic question of whose side are people on somehow gets lost. Some people will get so enthralled with protecting their culture that they lose track of what is being asked for in exchange.
But rural America has its feminists. It has minorities -- like black families deciding that their kids have better chances in school in rural districts that provide better K-12 education less expensively, and like Latino workers in food production and processing. Fairies and slaughterhouses operate much like the old factories with their proletariat.
Quote:Then there is a false impression of where the wealth divide is. There was a sense of many that they are on the wealthy side now, and should vote with the wealthy. Still, who is getting richer, and who poorer?
Then there is the racist element, Nixon's Southern Strategy and Reagan's pregnant welfare queen. Part of the notion that people should help each other was lost to the notion that it would be good to hurt people. The notion that one should cut domestic spending had a strong influence from the Democrats desire for the black vote making certain low riding fruit available to the Republicans. This quiet link in becoming more obvious now.
The idea is that if you own and operate a small business, then you are as much a capitalist as the Koch or Mercer families and have a stake in a pure plutocracy. Small business owners have no such interest. They can fail because they have customers unwilling to buy enough despite the desires of potential customers. Mass poverty is not a good friend of small business. Indeed small business most flourished when the working class (with the aid of strong, militant unions) had disposable income.
For American elites, mass poverty is as much of a control on people as was the lash on a plantation.
Quote:It is hard to spend big on the military and domestic services at the same time. The parties have recently been each pushing their own favorite. In the US at least, less is getting done for those at home. We spend heavily abroad compared to most in a time where it is hard to get the obvious financial return on investment. What are we trying to do? Are we seeking to force financial reward, containing or opposing ways of thought, or attempting to make lives better? Too much is said about how much each party wishes to do, not enough about what they wish to do.
But the military needs troops, and if the social spending is inadequate it can find itself paying to upgrade the "Sad Sack" types that it gets stuck with as troops -- people that it must train to read, write, and do basic arithmetic. Infrastructure? I look at the first country to lose in World War I because of economic collapses, and it was Russia (which had other problems, like mass illiteracy) -- bad roads gave Russia poor mobility and created bottlenecks for a primitive industrialism.
So far as I can tell, the elites of America would be perfectly happy if workers became destitute. Seventy-hour workweeks and forty-year lifespans for people not in the economic elites? If that is what the elites consider American 'greatness', then I want no part of it.
Quote:A lot of this comes back to Eric's notion of defeating Republicans who are unspeakably evil. Are the Democrats much better? Are they any less elite and wealthy? In the tax and spend period, there was a notion that one party favored Main Street while the other represented Wall Street and Easy Street. Is that true enough today? During the national malaise, both parties came to the conclusion that seeking campaign contributions from elites and serving them behind the scenes was more the key to victory than serving the people. That has to be turned around big time, and it won't happen until the voters become much more aware and reactive about who is giving money to who.
The political process has become fiendishly expensive. It may be possible for someone of modest means to get ahead in the American political system, but today that person must become a stooge of the elites, someone who sells out the common man to the elites for some fame and fortune. Those elites need examples of people risen from nowhere to 'greatness' as a reflection of American opportunity. When corporate lobbyists dictate what is possible in the legislature, we do not have a democracy. We have a Republic in Name Only.
I have my idea of what a better America will look like -- the 1950s with better roads, better technology, and better social attitudes, basically the progress that we have not thrown away in the name of making things great for economic elites. A Crisis Era that goes well for us will lead us in that direction. But we have a very serious problem in this Crisis, and part of it is Donald Trump. Another part is Paul Ryan. To have a Crisis go well, we need leadership more like FDR than like Donald Trump.
Quote:You could wait for old Marx's supposedly inevitable revolution. I'm not that patient. While the see saw gives the delusion of major change every few years, the basics are seemingly not effected. The system is rigged to favor those who can buy the best lawyers, lobbyists, media and politicians. Both parties are buying, both selling.
Marx thought that the great transformations were the result of political revolution. In that he was very wrong. Technology plays much more of a role, and the End of Scarcity as a consequence of advanced technology is more likely to force a great transformation of economic and political life than is any proletarian revolution. I can see an End of Scarcity making the status symbols and old methods of command and control irrelevant. It could be that the current elites are using fascistic methods (including right-wing demagoguery) to prevent an era in which people can reject their sweatshops and recognize their status symbols as frauds. When people get wise they will reject the appeals of elites who believe that the sole reason for the existence of anyone not in their elite is to suffer for that elite.
Quote:Will using Marxist language help folks see the obvious? If it did, I'd be thrilled to use Marxist language. He did see some very real problems early, but his fixes prolonged the values of autocratic tyranny. Given the unpopularity discrediting what fell from him, does using his words help? This doesn't make part of what he said into lies, but winning ought to mean something. Does it make a difference if one sets up against the capitalist owners of the means of production, the military industrial complex, or anybody over 30, if they are close to one and the same? Lots of folks have had to reinvent Marx, to use a slightly different angle to establish plausible denial.
I used the term neo-Marxist, which indicates that I have adopted an essential part of my theory from Marx. But I am not a Marxist in the sense of believing that there is nothing wrong with capitalist society that a revolution like the Bolshevik Revolution or the Chinese Civil War can't solve. If one accepts that Marx' ideal of communism (which 'socialism' of the Marxist-Leninist manner hastens by cutting out the capitalists from managing the economic development of a nation) is the post-scarcity society, then it is possible to make the transition from capitalism to Marx' ideal without government taking command of the economy. Government controlling the productive activity of the economy has shown itself a failure; social democracy, which America has never tried, needs a productive capitalist system but humanizes it.
At the least let us have capitalism with a human face!
Quote:Anyway, I like the basic direction you are heading if not some of the details of how you are getting there. At the moment, identifying the real enemy is important. Focusing on the division of wealth seems a decent approach.
The point is not an imitation of a Bolshevik revolution, something far more likely when the capitalists fail morally. To be sure, Nicholas II was the biggest landowner in Russia and thus even more a feudal lord than a capitalist; much of the anger of the revolutionaries of Russia was against the feudal elements still intact in Russia.
I see in Donald Trump behavior characteristic of a bad feudal lord. That is much of the problem.
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.