CAPITALISM v. SOCIALISM
- Corporate Marginalism
And in the USA this marginalization is insidious, generated economically through hard capitalism that monopolizes markets, while claiming a free market economy.
And the growth of this hard capitalism is so monolithic, skirting their tax burden and litigating against monopoly laws, it feeds of the need to make sure profit and resources are not regulated.
As a result, it lobbies those who do and must regulate corporate excess in the name of protecting the public. When this monolith corporatism spearheads subsidizing how politicians get elected, the government ceases serving and protecting the public good and instead serves private gain because that’s how and where campaigns are financed.
Most citizens who are marginalized cannot follow this ball and instead lash out and scapegoat those who will take the fall—easy targets like immigrants, people who benefit from social programs because of our low wage culture in the service industry, and others who participate in professionally serving the public but have experienced wage suppression while the wealthy enjoy unearned wealth inflation.
When a political party institutionalizes scapegoating, like many in the GOP, and when you have legally licensed broadcast monolithic media company like FOX, Sinclair, and others cheerleading scapegoating, demonizing liberals, and labeling with lies what their corporate masters demand, you find this is where we are—divided, pointing fingers, and ramping up outrage.
- Nexus Vomitus: Meta What?: A Strategy
America’s principle religion is selling. The Zuckerbergian and Bezosian tenets of selling are rooted in meta-consumer surveillance.
Meta has many meanings, but as a prefix it means “beyond” or “change.” The fear of change is Metaphobia. Often the cure for any phobia is a deliberate exposure to that thing which is feared in order to build up an acceptance or resistance to it.
For some time I’ve been a practitioner of Extreme Consumer Metaphobianism (ECM), and it’s cute—the act of deliberately seeking things you’d never buy or use, (i.e., products “beyond” use). I search for things like distressed or rotting planks of wood, early 20th century rat traps, brass marionette puppet arm swivel flanges, refurbished Betamax recorders, and so on. The algorithms of Amazon and Facebook engage in my fake consumer desires and voila—I’m bombarded with ads for things I’ll never buy.
Sooner or later, advertisers will realize that metaphobics like me are poor targets for material consumption, and that any source of online revenue for Amazon and Facebook from ECM derelicts like me will never materialize. But I’m just one person. Imagine if legions of consumers engaged in this Metaphobianism! We could bring down this nauseating surveillance state of useless corporatism, which makes me want to vomit. (BTW: “emetaphobia” is fear of vomiting.)
So, join me in searching for things you’d never buy so we may together expel the consumer surveillance state from our national intestinal tracts of dialectical material addiction and constipation. (By Whothen Whatulax)
- Loneliness of the Low Wage Earner
There has always been a fissure between America’s constitutional principles and the exercise of its economy through capitalism.
Slave labor (free labor) built the economies of the South; indentured labor (substandard wages) built the manufacturing sectors in urban areas, and migrant and immigrant workers (squatter’s wages) built the railroads and the farm belts across the country.
Today we have low-wage earners sustaining all of the above, or what remains of it.
Capitalism has always feared prevailing and commensurate wage growth. From the Robber Barons to today’s corporate oligarchies, collective bargaining through unionism remains their greatest nightmare. The commie baiting of the 50’s had more to do with dismantling FDR’s democratic socialism, which saved the country, than foreign communist conceits, which were never really practiced in theory.
The Republican and Democratic parties are both victimized by the special interests of these economic engines. The Republican party lost its soul with its racist Southern Strategy, and the Democratic Party found it with Kennedy and the civil rights movement. Big money infects both, but Republicans invite the infection; Democrats often regret it. With Trump it has metastasized into full blown dereliction of moral and political purpose.
- Socialism, Extremism & The Left–Oh My!
What is extremism? What is the left? What is Socialism? Is extremism socialism of the left?
Extremism is anything out of the ordinary. Who decides what is ordinary is the tougher question. It’s ordinary and civilized to institute laws to organize society.
When the Confederate South lost the American Civil War, plantation owners were bitter about losing free labor, so with the help of a militia (KU KLUX KLAN) they instituted and enforced Jim Crow Laws, which led to the brutal oppression and hangings of Blacks in the South.
When Hitler instituted the Nuremberg Laws, these laws were modeled after the Jim Crow Laws. We all know what happened.
In both instances these were laws, which is the normal way a society organizes itself. We know that these laws are extremist.
This extremism still exists today with the killing of Black men and women by police, with red lining, and with the mass incarceration of African American men.
Some accuse Black Lives Matter as extremist in that they respond to one extremism (killing, oppression, etc) with protests that may damage buildings and disrupt society. We measure our own values system by determining what’s worse—killing people or wrecking property because those who are supposed to protect us are killing us. I condemn the oppression and killing of Blacks. That’s extremism to me. Buildings can always be rebuilt; human beings cannot.
Another example: Eco Terrorists are considered extremists because they sabotage the technologies and machinery that logging companies use to chop down forests for wasteful use. Eco Terrorists also sabotage companies that chop the tops of mountains off to mine dirty coal, which destroy habitats, poison rivers, and eliminate the natural irrigation of mountains, creating erosion and mudslides. They are condemned as extremist, but they are protecting nature from commercial extremists. Both those same companies destroy the ecology that cleans our air and protects animal species that are disappearing in unprecedented amounts. Amazon forests and jungles are essential to our own survival. This is done in the name of BIG FARM that steals land in South America and Africa from indigenous populations who live there. All xthis damage is done to create more grazing land to feed livestock to sell burgers. Eco Terrorists are the only ones who stand in their way. Extremist? Yes. Necessary to fight a more deadly extreme? Yes.
Dumping tea in the Boston Harbor to protest England? Extremist? Yes. Necessary? Absolutely (or you and I would not be here).
These so-called extremists acts are associated with the LEFT. What does the Left stand for? Social equality (personal) and egalitarian equality (political). Many Americans get mixed up regarding what is Left and what is Right.
Since the Robber Barons, many wealthy industrialists who were still using a form of low-wage slave labor, financed violence against those protesting low wages and terrible working conditions. To demonize them, they called these protesters Communists, more so because these protests were associated with the Bolshevik Revolution—a workers’ rights revolution. When Czarist Russia fell, democracies around the world applauded. Capitalists and industrialists did not, because it gave workers throughout the world ideas. Workers were then labeled communists.
There is not communism. Communism is a political theory that cannot work on a national level. It always deteriorates into Oligarchy and Tyranny (Russia, China, North Korea). (The Jewish Kibbutz is the only sustained practice of Marxist Communism.)
Still, Americans love simple explanations, so associating labor with Communism in the USSR and RED China was a powerful incentive to hate Communists, and therefore a mistrust of unions (even though unions created the 40 hour work week, minimum wage, child labor laws, collective bargaining, work safety laws, and is responsible for raising the standard of living of ordinary people for the first time in history. No wonder why everybody wants to come here!).
As you know, Sen. Joseph McCarthy institutionalized this hatred and was later condemned by the US Army (pretty conservative) for being extremist, for ruining many lives, and for distorting the efforts of many to make better lives for themselves.
Summary: Most on the Left are not extremists; they merely react to extremism on the Right.
- American Socialism: The Evidence
Our freedoms and privileges here in America are protected by the US Military–the largest socialist expenditure in the history of history. Add to that Social Security, Medicare, the US Highway System, the Clean Water Act, the Superfund, the subsidizing of university research (which accounts for the largest percentage of social and scientific progress), and any program where our taxes are invested in the public good and are already a socialist country. It’s too bad that the hard capitalist component of our republic subtracts from that and has purchased the democratic side of socialism–that is the representation that serves citizens and not just the wealthy and the corporate. If by socialism you mean communism, a cursory look into those nations that have allegedly embraced communism actually embrace a nationalist revisionism, bordering on either fascism or totalitarianism, or bits of both. The closest we’ve ever come to embracing any tenet of Marxist Communism is with the labor movement unionizing and, as a result, adding and creating workers’ rights, health benefits, prevailing wages, time off, and the end of substandard working conditions and the forty hour work week–all aspects that the Ribber barns and so many corporations today despise and want to repeal.
- Nationalism Minus Socialism = Conservative Extremism: A Real Plague
This is a moment to reflect upon what has become the plague of Right Wing Nationalism: a state that is literally dying because of its party, and a state that is valiantly swimming again the tide of nation stupidly and ethical derangement. How did we get here? The Republican Party brought us here. What hath this Party wrought?
The legacy of the Republican Party since Reagan has been the gaming of the tax system to favor corporations and the wealthy, the waging of war for the sake of corporate adventurism, the neglect of urban infrastructure, the marginalization of people of color, the systematic erosion of reproductive rights, the unchecked growth of hate groups and white supremacy, the increasing incompetence of state and federal legislators, the rolling back of environmental protections, the extremism of religious fundamentalism and blurring of lines between church and state, the near collapse of the public good, the politicization of education and health care, the pursuit of monopoly in the false name of the free market, the suppression of wages and of collective bargaining, and the overall deceit that masquerades as a party that cares about average Americans.
The folly of comparing the Democratic Party in any way, shape, or form to the GOP is an excuse to look away from the calumny and corruption of Republicanism. Those who defend the GOP do so without merit, context, with propaganda, and worst of all, a constitutional treachery that betrays moral and ethical principles of democracy. The bloodstream of conservatism that courses through Republicanism has its roots in religious extremism, the oppression of ethnic minorities and women, historical revisionism, the denial of science, and the cultivation of excess. The history of history is drenched in the blood of extremist conservatism.
We are now at another chilling point where the pandemic will crest into a subsequent wave of devastation. It will further exhaust our health care professionals, teachers, and first line workers who deal with the public; it will land on the innocent, those vaccinated, and on those who cannot distinguish the difference between caution, empathy, and the preservation of self and others—virtues absent in any conversation promulgated by Republicanism. It is, quite simply, the party of surrender. This party has wrought death.