(11-30-2020, 09:54 PM)pbrower2a Wrote: Einzige:
The point. Abuse of power arises inevitably from its concentration in self-proclaimed priests, generalissimos, experts, owners, and administrators.
You are using nebulous terms - "abuse of power", "the elite", etc. Liberals prefer nebulous terms.
The specific harm of capitalism is that it perpetuates labor. Labor itself can and must be abolished in the lifetime of the human species. The essence of Marxism is antiwork. From The German Ideology:
Quote:In all the previous revolutions the mode of activity always remained unchanged and it was only a question of a different distribution of this activity, a new distribution of labour to other persons, whilst the communist revolution is directed against the hitherto existing mode of activity, does away with labour (die Arbeit beseitigt)....[8] (last emphasis added)
In a following passage Marx expresses the same idea in a somewhat different form:
Quote:
Quote:While the fleeing serfs only wished to freely develop and fully realise the conditions of existence, which were already at sight, and hence, in the end, only arrived at free labour, the proletarians, if they are to fulfill themselves as individuals, must abolish the very condition of their existence hitherto, which has also been the condition of existence of all society up to the present, that is, they must abolish labour (die Arbeit aufheben).[9] (emphases added)
In another passage in the same work we read:
Quote:
Quote:Labour is free in all civilized countries [that is, it has become wage labour — labour that can be freely sold by its owner]; [in the communist society] it is not a matter of freeing labour but rather of abolishing it.[10] (last emphasis added)
From this perspective, whether labor is done for a major firm or a small local concern is virtually irrelevant from the perspective of the individual laborer except with respect to the rate of exploitation.
Quote:Concentration in ownership or command results in the potential of abuse at any time, and in view of the tendency of people holding power of life and death, or even enrichment or impoverishment to become abusers of power (this is quite possibly even more true of those who inherit power than of those who take it in some Crisis or foundation) it is the concentration of wealth and power that creates the monstrosity.
Communists prefer concentration precisely because concentration makes the means of production easier to lay hold of and operate. And this concentration is at any rate endemic to capitalism
Quote:Big Business needs Big Government as an enforcer of corporate power over employees and customers. This may not be the sort of government that many want in enforcement of monopoly control of the economy and of such horrors as peonage contracts, but for whoever experiences the enforcement of such it is at the least the wrong sort of (repressive) government. Just think of Apartheid. Abusive, corrupt government always has its pampered constituency, so we can all assume that when something is thoroughly rotten and in need of pervasive reform to make it human... there are powerful people who like things that way.
The State had as much a role historically in creating corporations as corporations have had in creating the State. The earliest corporations were chartered organizations in early modern Europe designed to undermine the nobility and to expand the State's domain through imperialism (e.g. the British West India Company).
The petit-bourgeois preference for small is mostly an expression of self-interest.
Quote:Slavery in the United States did not fall because slave-owning planters started to feel guilt about mistreating property described as '3/5 of a person'. Slave-owning planters typically saw themselves as unqualified benefactors to each '3/5 of a person'
Slavery in the United States fell because cotton from Egypt and India became more profitable and the northern bourgeoisie no longer needed to tolerate the planters. That's it.
Quote:You see small business as no better than giant enterprises such as Exxon-Mobil, Wal*Mart, General Motors, Krupp-Thyssen, Sony, Disney/ABC, Comcast, Bank of America, MacDonnell-Douglas, MacDonald's, IBM, Kraft-Heinz, Tyson, Apple, Hewlett-Packard, Warner Brothers, Koch Industries, Nestle, Daewoo, AT&T, PG&E, Unilever, or Royal Dutch Shell. Giant businesses that have monopolistic or oligopolistic power over an industry have the funds with which to corrupt the electoral process and use them
All those businesses can and should be sized and their holdings should be controlled socially until their functioning could be automated. Wanting to break them up "for the purposes of competition" would be inane.
Quote:Small business can't. Small-scale operators are often family businesses that may earn what looks like an impressive family income, but the Vietnamese-immigrant family who owns and operates a "Chinese" buffet often earns altogether a little more than what Daddy could earn as an auto mechanic, what Mommy might get if she were a registered nurse, and the kids what they would get working in a chain restaurant or a store. Because small business owner-operators do much of the work that proles would do, they are obviously not capitalists in the sense that someone who owns 100,000 shares of Wal*Mart stock is a capitalist.
Yes, I know. And this is precisely why working for a small business is so often worse than working for a mega corporation- the corporation can use its economy of scale to exploit society more intensely, lessening the rate of exploitation which insures to any single employee.
Quote:If you want to see an economic order that works, then just look at the Old Order Amish. They are unabashedly capitalist; they own the farm, and they often sell produce on the side.. or they make furniture far better than what is available at Wal*Mart. You might find it unsettling that their world has little use for white-collar bureaucrats.
Yeah, I am aware of the Amish and the Mennonites.
Quote:In America it is often the corporate bureaucrats, an executive class similar in practice to a Soviet-style nomenklatura, that is paid very well for treating workers badly. Does a sane social order really need that?
Does a sane social order really need small business owners with delusions of grandeur either? No. A sane social order doesn't require capitalists at all.
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