The Coronavirus

[pbrower2a]

(07-21-2021, 10:44 AM)beechnut79 Wrote:

(07-20-2021, 06:15 PM)pbrower2a Wrote: I already see a huge difference in the economy: Big Business seems to be seeking industrial labor again, offering pay much higher than I recently remember. Super-cheap labor, a pattern of the neoliberal era, may be at an end.

If anyone thinks that people get treated better because they are overworked and underpaid -- think again. Economic exploitation entrenches itself with the exploiters finding ways to make it sting all the more and make it harder to escape. The workers recruited are, I presume, young ones. Maybe we will see some of America's best and brightest do this before matriculating in college.  Someone who has done real work before attending college may think differently about the proletariat if he has ever been part of it. Those who have never done such work might see proles as expendable people whose happiness is never a legitimate objective in life and may see anyone who has ever endured hardship to be flawed for such.. and untrustworthy.

The exploitation you mention has made it difficult for many folks just to carve out some time to play. Spending time with friends, engaging in meaningful hobbies. Celebration, love, joy--it all takes a back seat because the need to constantly be working leaves little or no time to bask in it. Have pointed out many times that the need for so many to work two or even three jobs just to get by made liars out of so many futurists who once heralded the coming of a leisure oriented world. In one piece I read it was said that there is a holding pattern in these folks' lives that make their only hope of escape a huge stroke of luck, such as a big lottery win. In the story they were referred to as Generation LIMBO. In caps because I was able to create the perfect acronym for the situation: Lower Income Mostly Beyond Overhaul.

That exploitation is a conscious choice of elites: to sacrifice efficiency through monopolization and bureaucratization. A once-generous welfare state became a system of enforcing the will of legalized loan-sharks. Just contrast the American system of paying for college education to the norm of the 1970's in which much college education went from being a heavy subsidy  to one in which one had to work at menial jobs to keep the loan balance low (which ensured an abundant supply of unusually-good, cheap, pliable labor).  Employment would often be transitory and under despotic management. The disappearance of well-paying factory jobs ravaged large numbers of communities, many of those small towns and cities. Such prosperity as existed was concentrated in a few urban areas in which property rents would be exorbitant. Young workers would be burned four ways: they needed post-secondary education to get a job that could offer a sort-of-middle income, that education would be extremely expensive  and usually have a low and highly-uncertain rate of return. Urban landlords in the "right places" would be gouging slumlords. Big Business consolidated markets to monopolize almost everything. They farmed out manufacturing to super-cheap labor in the Third World.

If you want to see how pathological capitalism could get without the restoration of outright serfdom, then just look at what we just endured. Because life became precarious, the exploiters could foist adherence to its ideology as a survival strategy. 

COVID-19 exposed a festering wound in our economy, with food processing in which early-industrial norms of crowding, despotic management, high danger from industrial accidents, and in which any contagion could spread rapidly could cause mass infection. Respiratory infections, we all came to recognize, did not ravage healthy people in advanced industrial societies. Then came COVID-19. COVID-19 demonstrates much of the failure of our economic order. 

The futurists did not fail; they may have gotten the time wrong because economic elites were able to thwart the post-scarcity era by taking everything possible themselves. Futurists of 1900 might have been unable to foresee the rise of the murderous, dehumanized, exploitative ideologies lumped as "fascist" in supposedly-sophisticated societies. Even the USA had the Ku Klux Klan of 1915; I look at its ideology and I see people who might have rounded people up for extermination in death camps and restored slavery to multitudes. In one nightmare scenario that I can think of the infamous yellow badges read "JEW" and not "JUDE", and the difference in language does not differ in significance. For that scenario to not become Nineteen Eighty-Four with a racist, slave-owning society (as an aside, the language defending antebellum slavery could have been a partial precedent for Orwell if he had looked to that), I need to have the Nazis fail to seize power in Germany and japan to become a democracy. A hint on what would differ but be much the same: Germany and Japan both have their equivalents of the New Deal, and such appears in America as the "Rommel-Plan". 

Model minorities maybe extremely valuable to a society... and what could be a more definitive example of a model minority than German... or American! -- Jews? Take away the prudery, and Christian ethics are Jewish ethics. 

Donald Trump is a lazy and unsophisticated version of a would-be fascist tyrant. It is only the mercy of Providence that Trump did not fully understand what he was doing. Hitler knew his history well, and studied what he needed to know in the arts of persuasion and administration while ignoring the significance of morality and humanitarianism. Hitler turned to brutality after destroying democracy and freedom quickly. Brutality is effective until it destroys the initiative and resourcefulness of the exploited people. Trump did not move as rapidly as Hitler or Pinochet in smashing all semblance of freedom, and that makes all the difference in the world this time. COVID-19 made Trump an electoral failure in his bid for a second term.