The Partisan Divide on Issues

[pbrower2a]

(01-01-2021, 02:33 AM)Einzige Wrote: Pbrower talks a lot baout MUH MASTER CLASS etc., but he can't name them - capitalists.

When I speak of Master Classes in America I speak in the plural number.  

Every social system has had some class that begins its dominion by doing something necessary and important, perhaps even bringing genuine material improvement or major restructuring. No ruling elite starts with the intention of being evil, but most Master Classes begin with great promise only to quickly establish a hereditary hierarchy through inheritance or impenetrable ceilings that the common man can never breach. The Master Class uses its monopoly of access to the means of power to the fullest, using those means for enhancing their profit, indulgence, and gain. So it was with shamans; so it has been at times with the military leaders (remember the old saying: every king has a soldier as the progenitor of his dynasty), feudal lords, monopoly capitalists, and bureaucratic elites. 

America has multiple Master Classes:

1. tycoons (there -- the Marxist stereotype of a big, bad capitalist)
2. corporate farmers as they squeeze out small farmers
3. urban landlords who get to squeeze all the disposable income of urban workers that they can get away with squeezing out
4. the Soviet-style nomenklatura that has become the norm in for-profit enterprises and is establishing a similar role in non-profit entities such as universities, churches (especially those of televangelists), state and local governments, hospitals, and research facilities
5. corporate lawyers
6. syndicates of organized crime 

Not only capitalists. Even at that, the smallest-scale capitalists are not in a position in which to exploit people as badly as giant enterprises which may wield monopoly power and dominate a community as a job source. The family who owns a small restaurant might earn $150 K a year on the labor (and at that level the owner is often doing real work so the distinction between proletariat and capitalist blurs. The craftsman who makes and purveys custom furniture is, strictly speaking, a capitalist. As with the restaurateur the line between worker and capitalist isn't so obvious. I live in an area in which many Old Order Amish live, and one thing that I notice about them is that they have no bureaucracy. If one does not go beyond eighth grade or age 16 in education, one is never trained to be a bureaucrat. Graduate with a liberal arts degree. and the last things that one wants to do is heavy physical work or repetitive assembly-line work. Unless one wants a specific career as a teacher, medical professional, attorney, accountant, cop (police work is becoming increasingly attractive to college grads), salesman, librarian, or researcher, most  college grads want to be bureaucrats.    

Thomas Piketty is far more up-to-date than Karl Marx... which is about like saying that the typical geneticist doesn't turn to Charles Darwin for inspiration. If Darwin is in the fossil record for biology, Marx should be so on politics. Marx did not anticipate technological change, the role of psychology (especially Freudian) in explaining much of political and economic life, the increasing proclivity of capitalists (so long at least as Marxism was a menace) to prefer staving off a proletarian revolution by giving the worker more of a stake in the system than in trying to take everything possible (that may be over, especially if Donald Trump is a typical capitalist), and above all the tendency of power to become as oppressive as ownership. Yes, it is easy to see corporate plutocrats as oppressors and exploiters; they simply aren't alone in the sick game. Of the six categories of exploiters in America, the first five are clearly in lockstep in politics. The sixth is murky about its political values, but I wouldn't trust drug kingpins to promote the social optimum -- would you?