11-27-2020, 09:05 PM
(11-17-2020, 04:46 PM)Einzige Wrote:(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.
Which is the utopian idea of libertarianism in which the State fades out. In essence the capitalist system becomes an irresponsible behemoth acting without responsibility toward anyone and anything other than its own existence.
Quote: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).
I can't speak for Hugenberg, but I see him as the sort who wanted no elections and no institutions to interfere with the whims of big landowners, tycoons, and executives. A vacuum of power formed, and Hitler took over the Weimar Republic, an unstable entity as basically the German Empire without the Kaiser.
I can imagine many scenarios of alternative history, and the scariest that I can think of is a Klan-dominated America. For that to not end badly as the annihilation of all good in Western Christian civilization I must force Germany and Japan into the roles of victors as Good Guys who preserve (Germany) or develop (Japan) democracy. To make it coherent I need analogues to history, even to the point of having a city divided like Berlin (that would be Chicago) and a cold war (maybe Japan isn't so democratic as it presents itself).
Quote:Capital is the system; politics is its obfuscation
No, it is a moral culture alone that can mitigate the power of capital. Capitalism works well enough when shareholders and executives act with conscience. Powerful people devoid of conscience and without legal constraints steal, enslave, peonize, and murder at will; their worst murder is a war for profit -- as in Nazi Germany, war for the profit of weapons-manufacturers, capture of markets for the exploitation of German monopolists, plunder of property on behalf of German profiteers, and the enslavement of the defeated. If you wonder about the Jews -- many of the Jews were small-business owners who got in the way of further monopolization of the German economy.
The worst war criminals who got away with it were German tycoons, executives, and big rural landowners (who often exploited slave labor on plantations that would have been as vile as those of the pre-Civil War South), and the only ones who felt real consequences were the big rural landowners if their pre-war property ended up behind the Iron Curtain -- whose land was confiscated by Polish, Czech, Soviet, or East German Communists.
I can say this of many of our MBA students: it would be a good thing if they had taken a few courses in philosophy that offer some challenge to the idea that the sole purpose of life for the common man is to suffer for the rich and powerful and that the sole legitimate objectives of the owners and the bureaucratic elites of Big Business are their own power, indulgence, and greed.
Quote: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.
So how does the State gain power through its ownership of production capital without becoming an even more repressive behemoth? Democracy cannot assure social equity, but its absence ensures an inhuman monstrosity. Socialism without democracy is a sham.
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.