WHO WILL BE THE FIRST TO MAKE CAPITALISM SERVE THE MANY NOT THE FEW? THE LEFT OR THE RIGHT? AND JUST WHAT WILL HAPPEN IF THEY DON’T? THE BLACK HOLE – AFTER FARAGE IN THE UK, WHAT? THE RE-EMERGENCE OF NATIONAL SOCIALISM, FASCISM?
TED: Ideas Worth Spreading – Unofficial in Linkedin
ISN’T IT HIGH TIME DEMOCRATIC CAPITALISM REPLACED CORPORATIST CAPITALISM AND CHALLENGED STALINIST SOCIAL PSEUDO-DEMOCRACY?
It is a cliche to say that the world does not stand still, that its changing seems to gather speed. But this is something from which there is no escape.
It is not part of this discussion but part of the problem today is that some people are still anchored in yesteryear, notably in the Middle East. Hence the clash of cultures and the asymmetrical war now being fought there.
In this context the class war was yesterday too. Slavery, children working in factories, manual workers exploited by greedy bosses. Trade Union solidarity redressed the balance in wage negotiation and in new laws on working conditions, health and safety, minimum wages, health provision &c.
This didn’t stop the pendulum swinging violently across Europe from suppression to revolution and to national socialism – from the Terror to the Gulag and then to Concentration Camps and the Holocaust. The UK and the USA avoided this, but they fought wars instead, and they adapted to change, they did not fight it.
Now the world is global, it is technological, it is extraordinarily complex. People, whether they like it or not, are interdependent.
There is now a different kind of war. There is a corporatist society where those in control in politics, in the executive, in administration, in banking, in academic and religious establishments, in the media, collude together to defend what they have and they have been joined by trade union bosses.
In Death of a Nightingale I call them “Termites – they build and defend their own nests, that’s all they do, that’s all the have ever done.“
Nineteenth Century thought didn’t anticipate this. On the Left much of its thinking has been discredited. Koestler saw through it in Darkness at Noon. Orwell in 1984 and Animal Farm. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn in The Gulag Archipelago, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, August 1914 and Cancer Ward; and the people in Eastern Europe when they ended 72 years of agony and brought down the Berlin Wall. Isaiah Berlin refused to see himself as a Socialist. Beveridge, who inspired the State to help the less fortunate in society, regarded himself as a Liberal not a socialist.
Late Twentieth Century Socialism triggered the Credit Crunch by encouraging the banks to provide toxic mortgage debt to poor blacks and Hispanics in USA, with Northern Rock and other banks in UK on Labour’s watch copying them. Perilously close to a Black Hole! http://goo.gl/mlcuOz
And it now does the same for students with $1 trillion debt in USA alone.
Now Read Owen Jones in the Guardian http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/sep/21/miliband-memo-britain-social-order-bankrupt
Marxism is now seen as seriously flawed; its collectivism, its subordination of diversity to some notional equality, its self-abuse, its failure to recognise that the greed for power could be just as corrupting as the greed for money, and sometimes worse. And it worked things out in the libraries of the mind, not in the classrooms of the real world.
Don’t just quarantine all this, enslaved by dogma.
Thinking has to move on. Respect has to be seen as a two way street and all religions have something to learn here, not just Islam. And power and wealth have to be used for public benefit.
How then do you deal with a corporatist society? The corporatist state controls people by making them dependent; feeding out money to get the feel-good factor, but feeding it out in loans so that people are enslaved by debt, most notably today university students but everywhere else as well. Yes, they talk of Equality, Inclusion, Social Mobility, but it is now difficult for young people to get a degree without debt, to aspire to own their own homes, put money by for old age, and mediocrity not excellence is the norm. Excellence is a threat.
I urge you to read The Master & his Emissary by Iain McGilchrist. Here is an introduction.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SbUHxC4wiWk You will see why for some the big picture today is invisible.
And how do you deal with the new problem – the corporatist society? You empower the individual. You make authority accountable. You share out – but don’t confiscate – some of the growing wealth in the world. http://www.deathofanightingale.com/blog/2014/03/buried-treasure-in-the-digital-age-a-journey-from-austerity-to-prosperity/
A one-off 5% levy on commercial land values would be a start, only a start to …
WHO WILL BE THE FIRST TO MAKE CAPITALISM SERVE THE MANY NOT THE FEW? THE LEFT OR THE RIGHT? AND JUST WHAT WILL HAPPEN IF THEY DON’T? THE BLACK HOLE – THE RE-EMERGENCE OF NATIONAL SOCIALISM, FASCISM
_______________________________________________________________________________ Buy the 2014 version of Death of a Nightingale with Buried Treasure in the Digital Age – A Journey from Austerity to Prosperity? from Amazon http://goo.gl/3NVJYU @ £7.66 and Kindle @ £2.06 or, in the USA, from the publishers CreateSpace createspace.com/4707799 @$12.50 . And please copy link to friends and colleagues.
WHEN FEAR TRUMPS HOPE AND HATE TRUMPS LOVE – AN INTERESTING DIALOGUE IN TED – IDEAS WORTH SPREADING
George Stradtman Numerous positions at Pennsylvania Department of Corrections “The basic premise of this discussion reminds me of the argument that fascism couldn’t have been all bad if it made the trains run on time. It is unfortunate that the survivors of Hitler’s and Franco’s concentration camps, and of Nazi atrocities throughout Europe, are largely gone and not available to confront the increased tendency to place “economic efficiency” above simple compassion and cooperation with one’s fellow human beings.”
Alan Share “George, where does compassion end and concern for the underdog begin? Where does co-operation end and competition begin? Where does the pursuit of excellence end and the pursuit of “economic efficiency” begin? Fascism is way outside these questions. It is when the individual is sacrificed to the State and State power is all. It is when the corporatist state is rumbled and revolutionary forces take hold. It is when fear trumps hope, and when hate trumps love.”
George Stradtman “Alan, I think that your last words about fear trumping hope, and hate trumping love are the keys to what is going on. Instead of giving a hand *up*, too many neoliberal Democrats are more concerned with giving a hand *out* to pacify the hundreds of thousands of chronically unemployed people in our society. Instead of inspiring the sort of can-do cooperation and team building in which Dwight David Eisenhower specialized, those on the other side of the aisle are content to blame the growing underclass for problems that began on Wall Street and in the board rooms of multinational corporations which have now been designated super “citizens”. One side is always interested in quick fixes to troubled consciences rather than systemic reform that would threaten the special interests who’re part of the “inner guard”; the other side apparently only cares about maintaining comfortability far away from those who slipped off the ladder of success and are now at the bottom.”
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