Thursday, September 15, 2016

The End(s) of Capitalism

 

THE DUOPOLY WATCH | Steven Jonas, MD, MPH
 
This is the first of a three-part series related to the upcoming U.S. elections.  The second installment will be entitled “Do You Want Your Fascism Sooner, or Later?” and the third, “The ‘Lesser of the Evils’ Argument from the Class-Analysis Perspective.”

Western civilization “would be a good idea,” Gandhi once observed.  It’s depraved and uncivilized, harming the many for the privileged few, responsible for death, destruction and human misery on an unprecedented scale while pretending respect for democratic values it deplores. America is the leading force of evil in a world increasingly unfit and unsafe to live in, ruled by its privileged class serving its own interests exclusively, exploiting others for profit and dominance.

In 1848, in The Communist Manifesto, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels proclaimed that capitalism contained the “seeds of its own destruction.”  They saw the principal seed as the creation by capitalism of the laboring class, the workers who provided the labor power that made the increasing number of machines that the capitalists were creating, that is “the proletariat.”  They saw that the class conflict between the owners and the workers over what would happen to the surplus value produced by the work on the capitalists’ machines by the proletariat would eventually lead to the takeover of these “means of production” by the workers and the establishment of a socialist state.  That would be one in which the means of production would be owned collectively and managed for the benefit of all the people, not just the former owners.

Well, it hasn’t exactly happened that way.  With few exceptions, the international owning (ruling) class has proved itself to be marvelously adept at turning the workers away from active class struggle.   In fact, in numbers of industrialized countries over time since the end of the First World War and the virtually simultaneous occurrence of the Russian Revolution on Nov. 7 (new calendar), 1917, which helped lead to that ending, the ruling classes of various capitalist countries have managed to enlist large numbers of workers to support their efforts to maintain control of the state apparatus.  Thus they brilliantly have been able to maintain their exploitation of those very workers whose support they enlist, as well as of those workers who they don’t.  This pattern has been observed for almost a century since Mussolini created the first fascist mass base, the “Black Shirts” in Italy, to the present time in the United States where Donald Trump is in the process of creating a mass base for his own form of fascism.  In the present time, in most of the advanced (and not-so-advanced) European capitalist countries, this is observed in the growth of the Right-wing parties, anti-immigrant to begin with, just like the Turmpistas.

Click here for the full article.

Source: The Greanville Post

No comments: