03-23-2021, 06:00 AM
Einzige --
The only way in which capital can ever be abolished is for the reversion of Humanity to the hunter-gatherer (I almost posted "hunger-gatherer") level of development. The question of capital is who owns it, how people use it, and how people derive benefits from it. Most of those are questions of morality, and Karl Marx was as much a moralizer as anyone on economic matters.
I have no idea of where you live, but unless you live in a place without a real winter (like Hawaii or coastal California, maybe Puerto Rico or some parts of Florida) you require capital for establishing the energy system that keeps you from freezing. Surely you get your food mostly from a grocery store unless you are a subsistence farmer... and that requires capital. You manifestly use the Internet, and establishing and maintaining that requires capital.
This is not to say that American capitalism cannot create a nightmare. The neoliberal era is arguably the worst perversion of capitalism since the near-reversion to serfdom that was the Third Reich. The idea that those who lack the capital must suffer for those who have it, who owe everything to a small cadre of plutocrats and corporate bureaucrats who control not only access to employment but (if they could get away with it) would dictate how we spend our wages -- it would be vice -- is capitalism at its worst. The idea that the poor are to be worked as hard for as little as possible is the veritable definition of exploitation.
Whatever achievements that "Socialist" states did in hastening the development of industry and technology (and that is often suspect) and in promoting social equity have come at the expense of liberty and human dignity that such bourgeois achievements as human rights and free elections that keep societies from spiraling into tyranny in many forms. In theory it is possible for the government to own the productive resources over which an elected body is ultimately responsible. What one gets instead is central planning by a bureaucracy responsible only to a monopoly Party. Central planning does not work.
I have no illusion about any magnanimity of economic elites. They are just as swinish as anyone, and may get away with more personal arrogance than the most debased mobster could get away with. The worst exploiters insist upon seeing themselves -- and others seeing them that way! -- as benefactors to those that they exploit, as I once gleaned from an article on slave-owning planters of the pre-Civil War South.
Capital is not the problem. Capital is mostly inanimate assets (unless you refer to livestock, race horses, of capitalized contracts for such employees as film stars and pro athletes, and personal investment in skills that evaporate when the person holding those skills dies or becomes unable to work) devoid of any feeling or political power. The power plant of an electric utility is capital. That power plant can demand nothing. Owners of the power plant can demand that you pay the electric bill. The owners are not capital; they simply own it. The plant and machinery of a box store is capital, but it cannot even dictate what a customer purchases while there.
The only way in which capital can ever be abolished is for the reversion of Humanity to the hunter-gatherer (I almost posted "hunger-gatherer") level of development. The question of capital is who owns it, how people use it, and how people derive benefits from it. Most of those are questions of morality, and Karl Marx was as much a moralizer as anyone on economic matters.
I have no idea of where you live, but unless you live in a place without a real winter (like Hawaii or coastal California, maybe Puerto Rico or some parts of Florida) you require capital for establishing the energy system that keeps you from freezing. Surely you get your food mostly from a grocery store unless you are a subsistence farmer... and that requires capital. You manifestly use the Internet, and establishing and maintaining that requires capital.
This is not to say that American capitalism cannot create a nightmare. The neoliberal era is arguably the worst perversion of capitalism since the near-reversion to serfdom that was the Third Reich. The idea that those who lack the capital must suffer for those who have it, who owe everything to a small cadre of plutocrats and corporate bureaucrats who control not only access to employment but (if they could get away with it) would dictate how we spend our wages -- it would be vice -- is capitalism at its worst. The idea that the poor are to be worked as hard for as little as possible is the veritable definition of exploitation.
Whatever achievements that "Socialist" states did in hastening the development of industry and technology (and that is often suspect) and in promoting social equity have come at the expense of liberty and human dignity that such bourgeois achievements as human rights and free elections that keep societies from spiraling into tyranny in many forms. In theory it is possible for the government to own the productive resources over which an elected body is ultimately responsible. What one gets instead is central planning by a bureaucracy responsible only to a monopoly Party. Central planning does not work.
I have no illusion about any magnanimity of economic elites. They are just as swinish as anyone, and may get away with more personal arrogance than the most debased mobster could get away with. The worst exploiters insist upon seeing themselves -- and others seeing them that way! -- as benefactors to those that they exploit, as I once gleaned from an article on slave-owning planters of the pre-Civil War South.
Capital is not the problem. Capital is mostly inanimate assets (unless you refer to livestock, race horses, of capitalized contracts for such employees as film stars and pro athletes, and personal investment in skills that evaporate when the person holding those skills dies or becomes unable to work) devoid of any feeling or political power. The power plant of an electric utility is capital. That power plant can demand nothing. Owners of the power plant can demand that you pay the electric bill. The owners are not capital; they simply own it. The plant and machinery of a box store is capital, but it cannot even dictate what a customer purchases while there.
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.