11-17-2020, 02:55 PM
(11-17-2020, 02:15 PM)Einzige Wrote: As an actual Marxist, I see very little difference between the platforms of the Democratic Party and the Republicans. Both are ultra-capitalist, ultranationalist parties of the bourgeois and their bootlickers among the privileged sectors of the working class (the"middle-class", whose own relationship to the means of production is identical to the lowliest Third World laborer). Bill Clinton created the Imigration And Customs Enforcement agency weaponized by Trump with the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act of 1996; Barack Obama was the Deporter-in-Chief. These parties are structurally and functionally identical.
As a practical matter, I reject the concept of proletarian revolution because it has never worked well. The dictatorial regimes that replace the predecessors (exclusion: Nazi Germany) prove just as dictatorial and despotic as the nasty regimes that they replaces. Marxist socialism is simply the imposition of state ownership of the productive capital, and that proves simply a newfangled form of feudalism. Markets are much more rational than is central planning because markets take the human part out of decision-making of what gets made and what gets offered. The human part in central planning is often simply foolishness, making a surfeit of what is obsolete or substandard because such is easier than responding to consumer demand. "Socialist" economies have proved backward in technological innovation (think of the old East German version of 'high tech') except in military equipment (the Drug Enforcement Agency bought some MIGs for surveillance aircraft, and after overthrowing Saddam Hussein the US bought plenty of AK-47's of Soviet design for the new Iraq).
In the wake of a revolution that overthrows a thoroughly-nasty, corrupt, non-market system (despots of the Right and Left are equally hostile to free markets, at the least free markets in ideas), it is best to go full-bore free market. After that we need capitalism with a human face. American capitalism has been trending toward monopolization (destruction of competition), vertical integration (denial of small-business opportunity) and bureaucratic elites within corporate behemoths. The worst trend in America is that toward a capitalist version of a Soviet-style nomenklatura in an executive class that gets well rewarded for treating people badly.
Quote:Welfare programs, for example, are simply designed to facilitate the increased circulation of money. That's all. They are the products of a particular bourgeois economic theory which holds that economic crises are the product of under consumption (ironically, the same theory underpinning Republican supply side economics), which can be overcome endogenously without changes to the mode of production. "Crony capitalism" is simply capitalism which prioritizes the circulation of money to competition; it isn't some radically new mode of production.
I concur on the effect of strengthening the flow of transactions. People who use food aid (SNAP, earlier food stamps) typically spend the aid in entities such as Wal*Mart, Safeway, Kroger, Meijer, Publix, Spartan-Nash, Aldi, Family Dollar, and Dollar General. I can easily imagine worse either as starvation or poor people such as the handicapped either starving or becoming great burdens on people who have better things to do. One pays one way or the other. Medicaid and Medicate go through medical providers. But this is not crony capitalism in which a select few capitalists, often real estate developers who quickly become rentier landlords making a killing (this is where Donald Trump made his only reliable income), get the aid of the Government in deciding who gets to build what and where. Government deciding which capitalists make the money is crony capitalism, which is not a market-based economy.
Quote:The Green New Deal on the socdem Left is another example. It's nothing more than an attempt to solve a capitalist problem capitalistically- to heal Marx's "metabolic rift" with nature and perhaps to induce a Keynesian knock on effect in the process. There is absolutely nothing revolutionary, or even radical, in any of AOC's proposals towards this end. Green capitalism is garbage.
We have all seen Donald Trump in action, and the only mitigation of his proposed nastiness is his incompetence as a political leader. The democratic elements within our political culture align with humanist tendencies (and when all is said and done, humanism is the only viable ideology) favor a more humane social order and one that better accommodates environmental reality.
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.