We Need Militant Nationalism

[pbrower2a]

(07-25-2017, 03:33 PM)David Horn Wrote:

(07-24-2017, 02:15 PM)Bob Butler 54 Wrote: When I put on the scarcity filter, a lot of the above seems really skewed.  We don't have enough jobs to go around, so we push those that have jobs to work harder and increase productivity?  We're letting business interests dominate rather than the government balancing the economy overall.

Too true, and unlikely to change.  The only voices calling for real change are the few soldiering on in the left wing of the Democratic Party, or outright anarchists of the left.  We need a real crisis to trigger a real response, and the power brokers of both parties aren't listening to anything other than the money.  Mike Alexander is looking at the potential of a huge recession -- bigger than the Great Recession.  He may be right. 

I don't see any other crisis situation that that the moneyed elite haven't been able to manage. After all, we've been in war mode since 9/11/2001 with no exit plan in sight, yet the volunteer military is more than happy to go off and fight if the money is right.  There was a poll of active duty military personnel, and they are happy as clams because their funding went up.

Big economic downturns can result from a gross failures of the social order in connecting rewards to efforts, people to their abilities, and economic elites to conscience. Maybe such failures do not invariably lead to so nasty a correction of the mores of economic policy, but it is hard to see how such failures lead either to spectacular growth or social concord.

If it takes another Great Depression to wring the cruelty, selfishness, and corruption out of our economic and political elites, then so be it. Elites with such vices can debase any economic reality. The successful transition to a post-scarcity society will be neither swift, uniformly satisfying, nor easy. Just think of how difficult the transition from semi-feudal agriculture to early industrial life was in Russia, China, and the former Indochina and how badly the leaders of the capitalist regimes botched that transition. Just think of how hard the transition was even when the political leaders were wise, competent, and humane.

Unpleasant as it may be for many, the post-scarcity society sounds much like the Communist end of history that Karl Marx predicted (as opposed to the "socialist" order established under Communist Parties). Maybe capitalist societies can achieve Marx' prophecy without undergoing the horrors of the nightmarish Marxist-Leninist orders that rival fascism for dehumanizing tyranny. But American capitalism still relies upon a harsh system of command and control just to maintain the elite status of the owners and bosses.

Just think of what happens when scarcity disappears as a control. Status symbols will lose the meaning that they once had. Virtual reality can ensure that someone living in an apartment that has a delightful view (irony intended) of a stockyard or slag heaps. if any at all (we could see giant apartment complexes in which apartment buildings inside might have no outside view whatsoever), will be able to select some other view (let us say, Lake Como? the Champs-Elysees? the Grand Canyon? The Golden Gate Bridge? Mount Kilimanjaro? Sleeping Bear Dunes? The sky as seen from the Hubble Space Telescope?) Maybe an inside apartment that looks onto nothing would be particularly desirable in a place like Camden, New Jersey. Command-and-control systems work best if they can inflict at the least shame (as in, "You're fired!" or "Life imprisonment, ADX Supermax"), pain (torture and beatings), or the consummate fear (death, especially in a particularly gruesome and painful way). 

I see Donald Trump as an attempt to return to the harsh command-and-control order of early industrialization. Life could be very good for anyone who had a good living without doing genuine toil for people who had no concern for the happiness of a worker. But for most people, life was long hours of pure drudgery under brutal management for the barest level of survival. Of course it wasn't for as many years -- even with the early start at it by the kiddie sof the working class, life for the industrial toiler was nasty, short, and brutish. He will fail. His ideology is nearly a century past its prime.