The Coronavirus

[pbrower2a]

(03-31-2020, 10:36 AM)beechnut79 Wrote:

(03-31-2020, 04:53 AM)pbrower2a Wrote: We are handling COVID-19 very badly.



All in all, we have a top leadership that has put profit above life.

Not only life but damn near everything as well.

But every business regardless of size has to turn a profit in order to survive. With this in mind, a good question to ask would be how then were the big companies of the immediate postwar years able to all but guarantee their workers lifetime security?

1. America was 1T and not 3T in its ideology. Conformity in behavior requires some conformity in economic results. There might be class distinctions of occupation, but it is probably best if both factory workers and factory managers are alike driving into the same workplace and using the same parking lot.

2. Americans believed in technological progress, and such was incompatible with an aristocratic or feudal hierarchy. Many Americans still had memories of the last gasps of societies still living under traces of feudal ways in economics or politics. 

3. Labor unions were powerful, and they had become part of the Establishment. Labor unions had earned that role the hard way in the 1930's, and they had been good at limiting wildcat strikes in return for solid pay and union work rules. Working people got a stake in the political system as never before and kept it. 

4. The Second World War had pitted America against enemies that had racism as the cornerstone of their international agendas. Americans got a hard lesson on the potential consequences of virulent racism as they got closer to the Nazi cesspool. Nazi-style antisemitism was much more systematic than Jim Crow garbage, but parallels could be made. Japanese mistreatment of conquered peoples and especially of American POW's demonstrated what racist attitudes could do. American white soldiers came to the recognition that black and Hispanic soldiers could fight just as well as they could. Institutional racism was not good for labor peace, and the Negro (then the polite word) civil rights movement and labor unions were able to concur that equal pay for the same work was a good idea. To be sure the Negro civil rights movement of the time may not have been as loud and militant as it would become, but it was starting to assert itself on practical matters. 

5. Big Business found that if workers got good pay that workers were going to buy stuff such as cars, appliances, furniture, insurance, clothes, toys, and consumer electronics (especially television, the perfect pacifier for proles*) that are profitable to manufacture and sell. Big Business was going to either take everything in a traditional economy such as that of the agrarian South and have resentful workers who don't work particularly well or they were going to have well-paid workers who turn solid pay into a consumer economy. Big Business made the right choice.    

6. The owners and managers of industrial America (Republicans) were on the opposite side of the people connected to the agrarian elites of the largely-rural South (Democrats).    

7. America's economic elites were scared of Communism which would dispossess and even exterminate them. Communists have their strongest appeal among working people -- laborers of field and factory -- when the owners and managers fit Marxist stereotypes of the rich-and-powerful. The best way to defend capitalism from socialist insurrection likely in the event of military debacles and economic breakdowns is to ensure that this image



is not the reality. It is best for all concerned that workers' lives not fit Hobbes' depiction of the state of nature as "nasty, short, and brutish". Life for workers under early industrialism and the latter times of the agrarian order was typically "nasty, short, and brutish". 

Maybe the bosses and owners cannot stop alienated intellectuals on the cultural avant-garde toying with Marxism as with any other exotic set of beliefs (OK, Buddhism is harmless) unless they are to stop all intellectual inquiry at all (as in Franco's Spain)... but if the working class has a stake in the system it won't heed the soapbox ranter who shouts "Workers of the world unite! You have nothing to lose but your chains!" 




....................................

OK -- so what is wrong now? The American economic order is as plutocratic and as hierarchical as it was in the Gilded Age. Economic elites have established themselves as closed circles to which entry is invitation-only by members of the elite. Those elites have found innovations in sybaritic indulgence and have adopted aristocratic ways of life. Entry into those elites is now largely hereditary, and being born into the right family means more than does talent or hard work. Big Business has found ways to marginalize small business, and even in agriculture a process of farm consolidation has transformed the old norm of small-scale family farming into the latifundia typical of a feudal order. Executive elites in America have acted much like the nomenklatura in the allegedly "classless societies" in which bureaucratic power instead of ownership becomes the measure of social position.  Small business that at the least required owner-operators to work like proles and be able to deal with proles and thus dispersed economic power has given way to industrial behemoths -- vertically-integrated monopolies and cartels with top-down power and, worse, the ability to buy politicians and to fund front groups.  As a subtle effect of a political change, Corporate America and rural elites that either maintain or have developed feudal relations with their workers are both part of the Republican coalition, and that coalition is reactionary in the extreme. It has reverted to the usual ethos of exploitative elites -- that no human suffering can ever be in excess so long as it enriches and pampers those elites and consolidates the power of those elites over the masses.

But note well my advice to any capitalists who want to maintain their economic reality: act like those in the 1911 poster, and expect to be overthrown and lose everything. Note well that Lenin's revolution succeeded once Lenin's Bolsheviki started paying the cops and the soldiers out of assets that fleeing aristocrats, clergy, and businessmen could not take with them.