Economics and the Contradictions of Capitalist Democracy
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What do you do when you find out that due to technological advances, only a portion of our labor force is needed to meet all hard consumer needs, and that our economy runs on the filling of very soft needs, and so many are being permanently pushed out of the work force?
Plan 1, Addressing the Problem, Saving Capitalism From Itself:
Establish high progressive income tax and spend the money to stabilize business cycles and transfer wealth downward to expand the economy. Worked for 40 years, until alienated Christian Fundamentalists entered the political sphere and voted a reactionary, Ronald Reagan, into office.
Plan 2, Destroying Our Society To Cover Up The Problem:
Step 1, Throw large numbers of jobless and otherwise poor into prisons, mental health system, and recovery, rehabilitation, and salvation programs. Spend money on these things, but never just on addressing actual economic need. Must always perpetuate work ethic.
Step 2, Invent doctrines to justify poverty as a problem of the poor themselves: Social Darwinism, Moral Reform.
Step 3, Invent even sexier doctrine to justify poverty as a problem of the poor themselves: Libertarianism.
Step 4, Gut the money from our public school system: Charter Schools Hoax.
Step 5, To perpetuate the system, let the system eat itself, gut environmental and worker protections, labor laws, and progressive taxation, pass anti-union laws: Rick Perry Red State Policies
Step 6, Make alliances with Christian Evangelicals: Paul Weyrich
Step 7, Use wedge issues like abortion and racism: Nixon Southern Strategy
Step 8, Wars on Drugs and on Terrorism: Geroge H. W. Bush
SJG
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last commentRacism, still the core of the real estate industry:
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Studies in a Dying Culture
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Excellent 6 part series, from 1980's
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The US, Britain, and France really blew it on that one.
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Hand of Fate
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Describing Libertarians
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Marx's Theory of Economic Crisis
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How Authoritarians Take Over Democracies Part Three Solutions
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Marxism 101
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Young Karl Marx, movie clip
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Capitalism continues today by virtue of stigmatizing and pathologizing the poor those suffering distress, basically those who have already had to survive abuses:
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TJ Street
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People say that socialism depends on altruism. This is completely untrue.
That a democracy does not go to socialism is only because doctrines stigmatizing and pathologizing the poor and those having survived abuses are being promoted.
Capitalism preys on the poor.
SJG
Nicki Minaj
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It is those at the bottom which keep this society going, even though they get very little for their efforts.
"Marx's main categorization was that people are either part of the class of bourgeoisie or the proletariat. The bourgeoisie are those who control the means of production in society, which gives them the power to then control the proletariat."
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marxist.com
While millions are compelled to eke out a miserable existence of enforced inactivity, millions of others are forced to have two or even three jobs, and often work 60 hours or more per week with no overtime pay benefits. 85.8 percent of males and 66.5 percent of females work more than 40 hours per week. According to the International Labour Organisation, “Americans work 137 more hours per year than Japanese workers, 260 more hours per year than British workers, and 499 more hours per year than French workers.”
Marx and Engels explained in the Communist Manifesto that a constant factor in all of recorded history is that social development takes place through the class struggle. Under capitalism this has been greatly simplified with the polarisation of society into two great antagonistic classes, the bourgeoisie and the proletariat. The tremendous development of industry and technology over the last 200 years has led to the increasing the concentration of economic power in a few hands.
At the base, all this depended on the labour of the peasant masses. The state needed a large number of peasants to pay taxes and provide corvée labour—the two pillars upon which society rested. Whoever controls this system of production controls power and the state. The origins of state power are rooted in relations of production, not personal qualities. The state power in such societies was necessarily centralised and bureaucratic. Originally, it had a religious character and was mixed up with the power of the priest caste. At its apex stood the God-king, and under him an army of officials, the Mandarins, the scribes, overseers etc. Writing itself was held in awe as a mysterious art known only to these few.
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The System (tm)
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House rejects hard-right immigration bill, baring GOP divide
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