02-02-2018, 12:03 PM
(02-02-2018, 07:05 AM)John J. Xenakis Wrote:(02-01-2018, 02:01 PM)John J. Xenakis Wrote: > So what would be an example of a capitalist society where the
> laborers built a city, and then the government came in and evicted
> 10% of the population and threw them out into the streets in a
> period of a few months?
> Or is your point that you want to claim that China is in "early
> capitalism"?
(02-01-2018, 05:42 PM)pbrower2a Wrote: > It is treating workers much as early capitalism did.
The problem is that I don't understand what you mean by "early
capitalism." Capitalism doesn't really exist, except as the absence
of something else, in the same sense that cold doesn't exist except as
the absence of heat.
So "capitalism" is the default, and has been for millennia, and a lot
of capitalist societies are pretty horrific. For example, Syria today
is a capitalist society, even though Bashar al-Assad uses horrific
"industrial strength" torture that's sickened everyone, attacks women
and children in schools, hospitals and marketplaces with Sarin gas,
and with barrel bombs laden with metal, chlorine, ammonia and
phosphorous, with no military purpose other than to kill as many
innocent people as possible.
So it's horrific, but it's still capitalism. So I don't know what
"early capitalism" means.
It's the capitalist order that Karl Marx knew and thought capitalism would never abandon -- the sort of capitalism existed before capitalists decided that to save themselves from proletarian revolutions they would have to turn workers into avid consumers. Workers who have cars, refrigerators, good clothes, electronic gadgets, and non-slum housing have more to lose than 'their chains', as in Marx' appeal
"Workers of the world unite! You have nothing to lose but your chains!"
Syrian workers definitely have some chains to lose, and little else to lose.
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.