11-17-2020, 04:46 PM
(11-17-2020, 04:30 PM)pbrower2a Wrote: Only if you confuse "totalitarian" with "inhuman" or "anti-human". A capitalist system with a leader at all dictatorial (as in Pinochet or Trump) will be inhuman to the extent that it holds that that those who own and administer the assets have no responsibility to the common man, but instead that the common man knows no restraints on the responsibility to the economic elites. Pinochet is often suggested as an exemplar of market forces but he was the head of an order of extreme concentration of wealth and economic power. He destroyed democracy and stifled freedom of expression to protect the elites from all challenge. Trump is more neurotic and less organized, and the American economy has a larger small-business sector.
Capitalist systems do not have leaders. It is Capital itself which is a totalitarian social system, not this clique of bourgeois politicians or that. Just as we can imagine a revanchist, reactionary interwar Germany bot led by Hitler and the NSDAP but doing substantially the same things - perhaps with Hugenberg at the helm - so too can we imagine the system governed by different actors functioning near-identically (e.g. Herbert Hoover inaugurating the New Deal, or Jimmy Carter deregulating airlines, trucking etc. before Reagan).
Capital is the system; politics is its obfuscation
Quote:Engels as an authority
The point is that you are wrong to say that "Marxist socialism is simply the imposition of state ownership of the productive capital". That is rather (State) capitalism.