Mary and Ron
Americans believe that the normal state of things is not-violence, and that is why they are shocked and appalled when they see violent acts. The health care debate has revealed that violence is normal. Look at our own Mary and Ron McCurrin: forced into an unnecessary divorce to survive financially. Look at this study (.pdf), which tells us that being uninsured dramatically increases the risk of death, primarily from lack of treatment for chronic diseases. This isn’t an abstraction: recently a young woman died because, lacking insurance, she refused to go to the doctor when she had swine flu and pneumonia. This kind of systemic violence is normal in our system; it is killing people, and no one is accountable.
The financial crash reveals another side of normal capitalist violence. Millions of Americans lost jobs and millions more lost their savings either through direct theft or through the collapse of the stock market, and no one is held accountable.
Health care and the financial system are closer than they may seem. I recently went to the sentencing hearing for a man convicted of stealing millions from retirement plans. One by one the victims came to the podium to tell the Judge how they were affected by the loss. “I worked 35 years on the factory floor, and that was my retirement. I don’t know when I can retire, and I’m tired.” These people have lost years of their lives, just like many of our sick people.
Somehow we perceive this as shocking, not as the normal state of things. In fact, these examples are the direct consequences of the way we organize our society. Statutes and rules, court decisions, executive branch decisions, all interlock to create a system, and the outcomes are predictable results of the rational operation of that system. Slavoj Zizek discusses this in his book Violence. We think of the real economy as the system in which real people make real things for sale, and we think of financial speculation as a non-real abstraction, a parasite on the real system. In fact, the inexorable logic of speculation drives the productive sector. It is not an abstraction. It has rules, logic, and money, and people to operate with them, and it has real world impact. When the financial system fails, the productive sector suffers.
Therein resides the fundamental systemic violence of capitalism, much more uncanny than any direct pre-capitalist socio-ideological violence: this violence is no longer attributable to concrete individuals and their “evil” intentions, but is purely “objective,” systemic, anonymous.
Zizek expounds on this in a new book, First as Tragedy, Then as Farce, excerpted in the October Harper’s. For Zizek, the financial crisis reveals that the left has no real alternative to capitalism. That is a dire problem.
Recall the cruel joke from Ernst Lubitsch’s To Be or Not to Be: when asked about the German concentration camps in occupied Poland, the Nazi officer known as Concentration Camp Erhardt snaps back: “We do the concentrating, and the Poles do the camping.” Does the same not hold for the Enron bankruptcy scandal of November 2001, which can be interpreted as a kind of ironic commentary on the notion of the risk society? Thousands of employees who lost their jobs and savings were certainly exposed to risk, but without having had any real choice in the matter—the risk appeared to them as blind fate. On the contrary, those who did have some insight into the risks involved, as well as the power to intervene in the situation (namely, the top managers), minimized their risks by cashing in their stocks and options before the bankruptcy. We do indeed live in a society of risky choices but one in which some do the choosing while others do the risking.
This succinctly states the history of American capitalism. The Ludlow mine workers do the camping, and the Rockefellers do the concentrating. Railroad workers do the camping, and George Pullman does the concentrating. American GIs do the camping, and Henry Kissinger and and the coward Dick Cheney do the concentrating. Sick people do the camping, and Aetna does the concentrating. Investors do the camping, and Goldman Sachs does $18.8bn worth of concentrating so far this year.
I agree with Zizek that the left in the US has failed to come to grips with the nature of capitalism, and has little to offer in the way of solutions to a system that is driven by speculation. The solutions proposed by the administration are ameliorative, but they don’t represent real change in the anonymous forces of violence in our society.
As a first step, perhaps we could recognize that violence is normal. As a second step, we can take Zizek’s advice:
When we are transfixed by something like the bailout, we should bear in mind that since it is actually a form of blackmail, we must resist the populist temptation to act out our anger and thus wound ourselves. Instead of such impotent acting-out, we should control our fury and transform it into an icy determination to think—to think things through in a really radical way, and to ask what kind of a society renders such blackmail possible.
Indeed. What kind of society is this?
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This is a tremendously insightful and illuminating take on our culture. Thanks.
WOW!
Thank you for stating it in such an understandable way.
Yet it is a system designed and promoted by man. It can also be undone by man.
Great post ! We need to call things what they really are and blackmail is a good place to start. We should also talk about bribery in the Congress.
Reading the excerpt from the Zizek piece, I was reminded of the line from the movie Patton:
Q: What do you call health care insurers who cut off your coverage when you get sick?
A: Thieves.
For me, the success or failure of the Obama administration will come down to one thing: what did it do to alleviate the obscene inequality between rich and poor that exists in this country?
The answer is shaping up to be: nothing.
There have been efforts to set limits on corporate executives’ compensation packages, even if only among corporations that get $ from the government.
The administration is also working to restore taxation levels to what they were during Clinton’s presidency.
I’ve also been happy seeing more and more on various media about efforts to find and use renewable and cleaner sources of energy, about seeing Ford trying to make new kinds of cars, etc.
The Ludlow Massacre took place in 1914. At least 100 strikers and their families died, and many more died over the entire strike. Some were killed by the Colorado National Guard, others by a militia paid by the coal companies.
It is indeed a sharp contrast to the Prairie Humanism Glenn described this morning.
There has been great brutality and waste in our financial system. Money is thrown at problems with no planning. In the seventies and early eightees money was thrown at the oil patch without rhyhm or reason. It was incredible to see the mercedes with mudflaps running across pastures. The result hundreds of bank failures. I have seen shopping centers with multiple screen movie theatres anchoring them go up within blocks of each other. Result – both going belly up. It is starting again with a rush to windmill farms.
great piece masaccio!
FDL has a great range of writing, and deep structural analysis like this is a vital counterpart to the vagaries of sausage making on capitol hill and the simple pleasures of idiot bashing when a (R) says something stupid.
the inimitable Arthur Silber calls this system corporate authoritarianism, and points out in long, exhaustively researched and carefully phrased essays, that it is a fully bipartisan project.
so as you say
please also ponder that simply voting Democratic, no matter what, as if there were no other options, has a thoroughly predictable outcome of perpetuating, expanding, and deepening this cruel economic, systemic violence you so sensitively depict.
It’s systemic. Just giving attention to the particular whether executive pay or dead uninsured is at best as CalGeorge characterizes, “ameliorative” and temporary. No offense intended to those who hold still to the notion that “Capitalism” is sacred dogma. I know no other way to say it. better than the RandNut Greenspan “principles I have believed in for 40 years are proven wrong.” (quotation may not be word perfect.)
So called free market capitalism when or if it works does so because it is resting on a culture of personal morality that recognizes human rights. When you have one such as now that rests on the principle that self-interest is the highest virtue a redesign is called for;. one that will assume the operators of the system are criminals and devise protections for their potential prey.
Mary and Ron I wish you the best.
I hope everything works out well for you , my thoughts are with you
Not sure in our political system that there is any practical alternative to voting Democratic. At best, I think we can only try to shape the Democratic Party from within. Barack Obama proved that Democrats can win with support from the left, i.e. that they don’t have to start from positions of compromise as they negotiate policies. I’d rather rather write letters to Democratic politicians than vote for Ralph Nader!
In an era of globalized business, tax havens, and bizarre accounting practices, we’re in the land of make-believe. Truly, the Dems have a ton of work to do on financial and regulatory issues; however, these are in some respects global issues and need global solutions.
I think that it was Merkel who proposed far more stringent corporate and exec pay rules prior to the G-20; the other nations sunk her hopes. For now. With economies still faltering and ‘jobless recoveries’ (ie, bullshit based on speculation and moving large pots of euros, yuan, dollars, rubles, and other currency around in hopes the shell game disguises the underlying problems) this will be coming back.
FWIW, I’ve found the Financial Times and Guardian (UK) better sources of info for this level of economic updates. But that does not excuse US Congressional responsibility to make fundamental changes.
Thanks. We just got some work! I think we will be fine for several months. This is huge for us.
In 1910, the idea that we would tolerate tens of thousands of our friends and neighbors dying each year so that we could travel faster would have been deemed morally corrupt. Now no one thinks about the tens of thousands who die each year in automobile accidents.
That seems to be true of our attitude toward unregulated capitalism, which harms orders of magnitude more people each year than do planes, trains and automobiles. Time to step back and look at what we’ve wrought, or allowed others to build, and what its costs are.
The selling point of capitalism is often “jobs” and “tax revenue”. It now produces fewer jobs and less tax revenue as a percentage of income than at any time since the Great Depression. Time to rethink the value of not regulating the engine of capitalism. Even the best engine, with no speed governor or tied to the wrong transmission or power take-off, burns out or blows up.
Mary, that’s great. I think of you often. Hope all goes well in the future.
While the
realpretend estate boom was going on I read somewhere that 25% of California’s economy was due to the loan transactions and people using their equity to live on. Then when the bust happened some are saying that the real unemployment figure is around 20%/25%. Interesting.I believe this is brilliant, masaccio.
Nowhere in Adam Smith’s concepts of economic behavior did he discuss the role of speculation, yet he was writing in 1776 while the Hudson’s Bay Co. (chartered by the British Parliament around 1610) was moving across US and Canada competing with the French for furs. From that early, predatory competition for natural resources, we’ve evolved into today’s Enron, Global Crossing, ExxonMobil…
And so many of our federal laws come out of the resource-extraction era of the 1800s and early 1900s that made ‘inside information’ and market manipulation the keys to immense wealth, along with a political system designed to **enforce contracts** (no matter how spurious: see ‘CDOs’), and we have a very destructive system at this point.
I agree that the Dems have not yet come to grips with the fact that the form of capitalism we now suffer under is based on speculation.
Not only that — the most highly paid were those who created the greatest amounts of debt, via CDOs and other ‘financial debt instruments’ the past 15 years or so.
Until more people better understand that ‘the systemic issues’ are related to incentives that fuel speculation and debt creation, we (and the Obama administration) are doomed to continue sliding downward financially.
And in a system as complex (and opaque) as the one we have now, it’s a system that favors criminal conduct in the sense that it has no regard for the larger social systems and infrastructure. It’s a system in which people who play by the rules are going to lose out to those who cut corners, time, after time, after time.
This is not sustainable.
The challenges lie in being as bold and honest as you are here, and then imagining a more sane set of economic activities, incentives, guidelines, and implementing strategies.
see the great essay cited by Silber, in which a regretful German muses from the ruin of his country:
“
these are the words you paraphrase, that of a ‘good german’.
http://powerofnarrative.blogsp…..-lost.html
I was just trying to respond to the notion that the Obama administration doesn’t appear to be showing any interest in alleviating obscene inequalities.
The solutions, I’m sure, are extremely complicated.
The thing I dislike the most about the Obama administration is not knowing what they are doing. Or hoping that they are doing something. We get no concrete information about health care or the wars or the financial sector. It is all mushy.
Nonsense.
Why nonsense? You’re comparing the Democratic Party as it currently exists in the United States to the Nazi Party of Germany in the late 1930s.
Nonsense.
If we were talking about the Nazi Party of Germany, I’d be holding a gun right now as I speak in opposition to Nazi leaders.
HUGE difference.
Thanks, sporkovat. I agree that blindly voting for the Ds is not going to change things. Project Accountability is funding primaries for the worst of them, and that will help.
The left in the US has always accepted capitalism, and has only offered mild regulation and weak consumer protection, focused on relieving individuals from the worst excesses of the system. Even that collapsed in the last 30 years of Republican shrieking about the evils of government. Now we have no alternative to offer to unfettered free marketism. When the inevitable crash came, we had no credibility.
The financial elites have no respect for law. Their greed is so great that tax evasion is a sport for these people:
Until we formulate some alternative, we are going to get rolled by the rich.
Well, I sympathize with your frustration about the ability of the current administration to solve such complex problems.
However, I think that masaccio makes a profound and important point here: half-measures and responses to specific problems won’t cut it. These are deep, systemic issues.
The ‘left’ and Dems have obsessed on specific fixes for specific problems; that’s mostly re-arranging deck chairs on the Titanic.
I also agree with him that health care and finance reform are deeply linked; the fact that we live in a huge, anonymous system where it is so easy to perpetrate ‘evil’ (meaning, ’social and individual harm’) without any accountability is simply dangerous.
But it’s also, IMHO, linked to productivity rates, to health rates, and even… I could argue… to the kind of ‘personal crisis’ that Max Blumenthal is now writing about, as is Jeff Sharlet. This dehumanizing effect of organizing economic activity to incentivize speculation is dangerous socially, and individually.
Yet, to date, the Dems have remained in their ’safety box’ crowing about the wonders of capitalism, rather than unpacking the logic to show the destructiveness of speculation.
That’s what’s needed now.
Michael Moore shouldn’t have to do it all singlehandly (!).
Great post and comments. Good wishes to you mary mcc.
And my original point @ 13 still stands:
Voting for Ralph Nader or whomever for President is either a wasted vote or an effort to say something to Democratic Party leaders about doing a better job of representing our interests.
Anyone who thinks when they vote for a Ralph Nader in our current political system that they’re going to get that third party candidate elected to the presidency is delusional.
I’d rather work within the Democratic Party and change it than waste my vote.
Had the people of Florida in 2000 who voted for Nader supported Gore instead, we would have not had Bush. Big difference between Gore and Bush (I cite the evidence of the Family Guy episode, when Peter relived a night in the past and changed the present into one in which Gore were President – AND THAT PRESENT WAS VERY DIFFERENT!).
Now we have former Democratic Governor Wilder refusing to endorse Creigh Deeds in Virginia, and so maybe helping McDonnell into the governor’s office.
I learned last year when I strongly supported Hillary Clinton that it’s not the right way to go.
The article by Masaccio is great.
And Zizek’s ideas are thought-provoking.
But…
It seems to me that violence as Zizek broadly defines it has been with us at least since societies first became complex around 5,000 years ago. The systems that enable complex societies have become much more complex, but speculation-driven economies aren’t new. Nor is the reality that the consequences of the bad decisions of powerful people tend to fall hardest on the least powerful members of society.
His dichotomy between a “fundamental systemic violence of capitalism” and a “direct pre-capitalist socio-ideological violence” doesn’t seem valid to me, as the violence he calls inherent in capitalism existed before capitalism and the violence that he calls pre-capitalist and direct still exists, too.
If that dichotomy doesn’t work, then neither does the dichotomy between attributing violence to the appearance of purely “objective,” systemic, anonymous causes (what he calls “fundamental systemic violence of capitalism”) versus attributing violence to “evil” intentions (what he calls “direct pre-capitalist socio-ideological violence”).
Maybe the right answer for the left isn’t to come to grips with the nature of capitalism, or to find an alternative to capitalism (which will just give rise to new kinds of similar violence), or to create a new morality (which will theoretically call out the “evil” doers).
Sorry to sound like I’m defending the G-20’s efforts to regulate better the world economy and the actors who try to abuse the system, but I suppose I am.
Repetition is good in politics. Since Reagan and deregulation, the FIRE sector, Finance, Insurance and Real Estate, have been at the forefront of producing asset bubbles and generally inserting themselves into every major transaction people must enter into. This has been because their rate of profit has approached 40% with hyper leveraging and has sucked capital from more productive firms in the real economy. The Wall Street meltdown and extortion is directly connected to the Health Insurance effort to rig a captive customer base through an individual mandate with no robust public option.
Its time to put out the FIRE.
Great comment, although I’m not certain of the source of your figure for 40%, it’s certainly over 30% from sources that I’ve read — and sometimes larger. So I assume 40% is someone’s average? But whose?
More to the point, some of this capital has been ‘created’ to feed a speculative system. But at bottom, capital has flowed to finance, leaving other more productive firms without the money they need to develop.
The problem is: in Feb 2008, this happened to one company I knew of with a several-year-long production process almost ready to move the prototype out the door. Then: no more venture capital. And guess who showed up to clean up at bargain basement costs? NOT the former employees, for starters.
A more rational system would have ensured that an almost-finished prototype moved out the door. Instead, quite possibly someone acting as a front for competing interests cleaned up at bottomed-out prices.
And several hundred engineers, all of whom have years and tens of thousands of dollars invested in their education to work there… all on the job market in one fell swoop. And theirs wasn’t the only company that had to shut it doors on sudden notice.
Appalling.
Thank you for this post–you’ve nicely stated the economic problem in understandable terms. My response to your question about what kind of society is this would be: a corporatized one. In a related vein, I’ve just started reading Life, Inc. by Douglas Rushkoff, and he discusses how corporations have gone ” . . . from being convenient legal fictions to being the dominant fact of contemporary life.” Maybe a step in finding a solution would be to localize our economy as much as possible, perhaps regionally. Near the end of his book, Rushkoff offers an idea: ” . . . we can look to those who are reclaiming territory, creating value and reconnecting with others in ways that we might actually be able to try ourselves. Small is the new big, and the surest path to global change in a highly networked world is to make an extremely local impact that works so well it spreads” (233).
What do you think?
My examples were meant to illustrate the point that capitalists ignore the interests of the workers. I see a difference between deaths caused by the insurance companies and the deaths caused by slavers. There is at least the possibility of accountability for the latter. No one is responsible or accountable for the former.
Even Michal Moore admitted that he will be allowed to do what he is doing only as long as he is making “them” money. I have tremendous respect for him, but he is correct. As soon as he is not making money, they will not print his books, nor show his films. Interestingly, the present situation has caught some people unawares of reality. My exhusband sold his father’s businesses as soon as he inherited them, as he believed he had a foolproof system for investing in the stock market, not content with the 5 or 6 million or so he had inherited. To his surprise he realized that he is not actually one of the uberrich in this country, and as he started losing money, he withdrew from the stock market, presently content with a much smaller return on his investment. While most of us would be content with a few dollars, perhaps to pay off the mortgage, take a vacation, whatever, these people are not content with any amount of money, but always want more. And I’m talking billions, and trillions. I mean who is content to be a mere millionaire any more.
great post from awhile back by Chris Floyd – your writing reminds me of his today, which is meant as a compliment.
Sorry I don’t have more time for the back-n-forthing with Knoxville, so I gotta keep it simple.
I don’t cast a vote for war criminals, even if they have a (D) after their name.
Obama pledged to escalate in Afghanistan, and he never claimed he would withdraw US forces from Iraq, though many deluded themselves into believing this.
You, and those like you, have no trouble supporting such candidates, and believe the path to positive change leads through “‘boring from within’ as the Good German cited.
If you, and those like you ever “think things through in a really radical way” about our political system, you may conclude that voting for war criminals is not the way to rid the system of war criminals.
You, and those like you, are the audience for passages like this – though your ability to engage with tough subtle points like this is in question if you still cling to simplistic scapegoating like blaming Nader for the debacle of Florida 2000.
from They thought they were Free
so I am referring to Knoxville, and others here who are “perfect example of the kind of person who, with all his advantages in birth, in education, and in position, rules (or might easily rule) in any country.”
right? FDL commenters are educated intelligent, passionate etc, good people. If you would truly resist evil, instead of passively ratifying it every 2 years, then truly great things could be achieved.
and of course, few would think that the election of Barack Obama proves what you think it proves.
from today: though your Leader provides affronts to what you claim to believe in almost every day.
He’ll keep gitmo open – this is what you support by tendering your loyalty to such leaders.
Thanks again, masaccio. As we’ve observed many times over the past ten years, something’s rotten in the state of Denmark.
The American socio-economic contract between capital, management, labor, consumers and government is so profoundly broken that productive enterprise now is dwarfed by mega-leveraged, virtually unaccountable financial speculation, which is completely divorced from the arena of human concerns. The resultant collateral damage can’t be obscured or ignored indefinitely. This is how empires fall.
It is a society where we are so puritan that we campaign against legalized gambling casinos in all but a few areas while we hold up an entire financial system based on gambling as our greatest national treasure.
Both extremes are counterproductive as assumptions for an economic or political system. Human beings are neither uniformly greedy nor uniformly humanitarian. That is why both unfettered free market capitalism and communism have failed dramatically. Actually our current system has the worst of both assumptions. We have assumed that people are self-centeredly greedy and have made that the basis for all economic growth. The greedier and more sociopathically callous you are, the better you do in the corporate world. We have also assumed that people are humanitarian and have deliberately put humans further and further away from other humans that might be suffering. Doctors can’t easily look a dying person in the eye and tell them to go to hell just because they aren’t rich, so you set up insurance companies and corporate hospitals and pharmaceutical companies with layers of bureaucracy so that the system can’t be “corrupted” by any potential humanitarian impulses. We could just as easily have a system that takes the best of both worlds if we had the guts to make it happen. It’s not a utopia, just plain understanding of human nature and motivation.
This is why it really gets to me when the 9/12 crowd wants to stop health care reform, lower taxes on corporations and the rich, etc. because they are scared to death of socialism. It doesn’t take genius to look back at the fact that the communist, socialist and fascist movements were fueled by such favoritism to the rich at the expense of the poor that the masses were convinced they and their families were simply living on a death row without physical prison walls and they had nothing to lose and everything to gain by fighting for a break they would never be handed without a fight. Anyone who is really worried about a socialist state should be fighting for class equality. Push for heavy regulation of the insurance companies if you really want to save them and avoid a public option. Push for corporations and the rich to have to share at least enough of the wealth that people can pretend they have a chance. The fact that Wall Street didn’t learn to back off a bit after the bailout actually gives me hope. If they had made things livable and given some hope that they would behave a bit better, they would be able to keep fleecing us without enough outrage to make it actually stop. As it is, there is more of a chance that Congress will have to do some serious regulating at some point because nobody with half a brain believes they can or will regulate themselves. If they can’t even slow down their bonuses when there have been death threats against AIG execs, they’re hopeless and we’ll have to act. Once you’re in for the fight, we’ll be more likely to fight to win, not just to barely survive. I hope.
I think that “economic decadence” is a pretty descriptive term.
Thank you massaccio. It is always a very good day when you post.
Thanks for the kind words!
It is kind of amazing that Wall Street didn’t even try to hide it’s true nature. Their arrogance can only mean they really didn’t worry about increases in regulation from the administration. I hope they were wrong.
Thank you for this informaton. I look forward to watch the Michael Moore movie on the 2nd of October, “Capitalism – A Love story”.
PaulaT
“The greedier and more sociopathically callous you are, the better you do in the corporate world.”
What the German engineer is espousing is what the great German philosopher Immanual Kant espoused in his work on the Critique of Practical Reason calling it the “categorical imperative.” One should act as if the entire world should act the same way. That’s my interpretation anyway. As an approach to ethics, it has a lot to commend it.
But it’s easy to look back and say I ought to have done such and such and if other people in the same position had done such and such what a wonderful world this would be. Ethical decisions and moral choices have to be made in the context of uncertain outcomes. We can’t know in advance whether our choice will have a better or worse outcome than any other choice. That’s why it’s better in ethics to choose an outcome where at least you know you’ll have a better chance at doing some good than a choice where doing a greater good has a lesser chance of succeeding.
I’m not sure that is the only explanation for their arrogance, although it certainly is a likely one. I worked for a nonprofit whose CEO was making a huge amount of money while being totally incompetent and cutting jobs of people who actually did the work under the contracts that brought in money. She also spent a ton of money on the company credit card while nickel and diming mileage reimbursement and supply and training requests. She was not actually all that sure that the Board wouldn’t boot her and went through a huge stress attack, which she spread out to the whole organization, every time there was going to be a board meeting. But she also really believed that she was the most important person in the organization, that she was the one who kept it running and made it what it was and that she was only getting average compensation (no doubt she was comparing her salary to the best of what she could imagine her cohorts rather than incompetents in a small nonprofit).
I was struck by some of the interviews of Wall Street types after the bust and saw my old boss in their reactions. I think many of them were genuinely confused as to why they would get death threats or picketing or threats to reduce their salaries and bonuses. They have convinced themselves, and everyone around them since birth has convinced them, that they really are that important and valuable. People who do the work are replaceable widgets while they are at the top because they deserve it and make the company what it is. I never could convince my boss that we (I was middle mgmt) would be better off protecting the jobs and salaries of the front line people than management. As I put it, the people whose contracts I ran were obviously very happy with the way I ran my department and appreciated that I did a good job, and certainly I was worth a lot to them and to the company. But when it comes right down to it, what they really care about is how well the people who show up at their sites and perform the direct services do their jobs day in and day out, whether there are enough of them, they are trained enough, have the right supplies, are happy enough to work hard, etc. Seems like a no-brainer to me, but completely foreign to her. They lost all their contracts in my department in the downturn and laid us all off while she kept her salary and laid off office staff so if someone called in sick there was literally no one to answer the phone or greet people at the front. I heard she was let go after about a year, never having come to terms with the idea that she was killing the enterprise by hanging on to her notion of her own importance to the enterprise. A Wall St banker stuck in a Main Street life, poor thing.
“The left in the US has always accepted capitalism”
The US did have a strong anti-industrial, anti-capitalist movement that included the early unions, socialists like Debs and anarchists like Goldman. They didn’t accept the wage system and felt that workers could and should manage capital themselves.
But a century later, we cannot articulate an alternative not because those ideas don’t exist but because anything smacking of socialism/communism/anarchism has been systematically and relentlessly attacked and suppressed.
I think this is why the only solution offered, in the face of massive and unmerciful class warfare is a tepid “lets primary some Democrats”.
thanks for that reply. these things are murky, there is no hard and fast answer.
such a skill to express this thought as you do.
Stories like that are why I know I will never be filthy rich. I just don’t have what it takes to do things like that to people and I can’t seem to forget that those numbers on spreadsheets have people behind them. Sure are a lot of people who manage it, though, unfortunately.