1. This site uses cookies. By continuing to use this site, you are agreeing to our use of cookies. Learn More.
  2. We've had very few donations over the year. I'm going to be short soon as some personal things are keeping me from putting up the money. If you have something small to contribute it's greatly appreciated. Please put your screen name as well so that I can give you credit. Click here: Donations
    Dismiss Notice

Of course you realize, this means class war!

Discussion in 'Tilted Philosophy, Politics, and Economics' started by Baraka_Guru, Sep 20, 2011.

  1. Joniemack

    Joniemack Beta brainwaves in session

    Location:
    Reading, UK
    Ace, I'm a bit reluctant to dip my toes into these waters but I've been reading the back and forth here and am totally confused as to how you believe companies and businesses can create demand in an overall economy where consumers are financially ill-equipped to consume? And why businesses would choose the uphill climb over the level road? Seems to me that the more sensible and lucrative approach, would be to put more effort into bringing the consumer up to par financially. Any business is much happier when demand exceeds supply - or so I've always believed. Yet these entities continue to pare down their workforce (while maintaining or exceeding productivity levels) and hoard their profits like greedy squirrels refusing to reinvest any of it in their own future growth. It's an idiotic way to do business, if you ask me. Of course, I've got that silly employee mentality so it's quite possible that what appears to me to be foot shooting may actually be brilliant capitalist strategy that will eventually sort itself and everything else out.
     
    • Like Like x 1
  2. roachboy

    roachboy Very Tilted

    the key to the fordist period of american capitalism--from about 1945-through the 1970s---was (a) a geographically compact manufacturing sector (b) strongly unionized with (c) collective bargaining arrangements that enabled predictable wage increases predicated on (d) a generalization of henry ford's 10-dollar day idea, so relatively high wages. collective bargaining was (e) a reflection of (and contributor to) a *political* context (which will escape the idiocy of markety-market metaphysics) in which relatively high wages were expected and so disappeared as a factor because they were a shared condition, something on the order of a fixed cost which enabled (f) a revolution in consumer banking, the extension of consumer credit to working people---mortgages in particular that (g) integrated working people into patterns of consumption now associated with that empty category "middle class" (which everyone belongs to, seemingly) and which, by doing that (h) drove demand.

    there's more to fordism as a model, but that's the outline.
    there were obvious interactions between federal and state policies and the centrality of collective bargaining. the distinction market/state is functionally meaningless and has been since world war 2. there is an interpenetration of the two---as there is in every advanced capitalist country---the united states, driven more by hysterical fear of "socialism" and other pinko words, chose de facto to impose no planning on the economy---instead it act(ed) as a kind of governor on the motor.

    conservative economic policy, beginning with the nixon period, and in the context of technological changes, particularly in telecommunications and computing, drove a wholesale abandonment of everything that made american capitalism as a social system functional.

    asking someone who buys into that economic ideology to make coherent statements about the socio-economic considerations is a losing proposition. one of the characteristics of conservative economic "thinking" is the separation of the economy from all other areas of human activity. so the believers, like ace, can't think about social outcomes because their Important Doctrinal Sources tell them not to. so they don't. this isn't particular to ace, either---it's a political characteristic of the entire neo-liberal lunacy that's resulted---by various modalities---in a fundamental crisis of the structure of contemporary capitalism---which neo-liberal believers would poo-poo, saying that in the end everything always works out because, well, it just does work out just think like some narcissistic petit bourgeois and god will take care of the rest.
     
  3. Joniemack

    Joniemack Beta brainwaves in session

    Location:
    Reading, UK
    My significant other and I were discussing this very topic recently. The question arose about whether or not there has been some grand, ongoing conspiracy with a "plan" that has brought us all here with no options but to moan and gnash our teeth as we survey the damage and they reap the rewards. An entity that has it all figured out and rests well at night knowing this is just a bump in the road.

    The consensus between us was - no. No grand design, no Illuminati think tank weighing the middle against the ends (or is it the ends against the middle?), no one considering the socio-economic impact of faulty decision making. If only there were. The entire debacle is the result of greed on a very individual basis, too many Aces all focused on their own dreams of wealth, too many top management types looking no further than the upcoming shareholder meeting and their bonus packages. Given the choice, I don't believe the Aces of the world would choose a stable economy and "good times" for the majority, over their own financial interests. Capitalism has no soul or moral compass. I can accept that. What is so troubling is the reminder that most of it's closest friends have none either.

    What the ignorant masses fail to realize is the fact that capitalism is a train operated by drunks. A machine ever inclined to runaway or derail itself. The only solution is to make sure that someone sober is in the car keeping an eye out for the passengers and pedestrians on the track.

    Of course, the drunks hate the interference, never realizing that it's really for their own good, as well.
     
  4. roachboy

    roachboy Very Tilted

    i don't think there was a design either. not an overall one anyway. more a peculiar convergence of limited actions (nixon administration, for example), chance (the rise of thatcherite style conservatism by the late 1970s), ideological offensive (the shift away from thinking in terms of production to thinking in terms of capital flows to gauge economic health---so from gdp indices to the dow-----neo-liberal dogma assimilated into the lingua franca of the dominant press), technological developments (the explosions in computing and telecommunications related to it) and broader political changes (what they call the race to the bottom in terms of wages for example)....this just a quick list, neither complete in itself nor comprehensive--what i can think of while listening to house music on a set of headphones while pretending to work.

    so lots of things.

    but the driver for much of the socio-economic damage has been conservative economic ideology both directly (as a policy logic) and indirectly (in facilitating the erasing of the socio-economic consequences of that policy logic).

    people seem to be waking up, though. it's a mystery how they slept so long. some are still dreaming.
     
  5. Alistair Eurotrash

    Location:
    Reading, UK
    Aye.

    I think the rot started when the right fell in love with "monetarism" .. and nobody ever changed course.
     
  6. Joniemack

    Joniemack Beta brainwaves in session

    Location:
    Reading, UK
    Had to do some research on the term "neo-liberalism". Though the doctrine is all too familiar, it's not a term I'd heard before. Not surprising as it appears to be as vulgar an expression in the US as screaming out the word "fu<k" in a Baptist church.

    People do seem to be waking up and finally paying attention to what's been happening while they were asleep. For the ones still sleeping, we can only hope the Ambien wears off in time.
    --- merged: Sep 29, 2011 6:34 PM ---
    Right around the same time they realized that the Christian sin market was an untapped voter resource.
     
  7. Alistair Eurotrash

    Location:
    Reading, UK
    I think that only worked in the USA
     
  8. mixedmedia

    mixedmedia ...

    Location:
    Florida
    I'm just sayin'...

    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/10/us/10iht-letter10.html?_r=3

    --- merged: Sep 29, 2011 7:28 PM ---
    Why worry about the struggling, strifing amorphous 'merican masses when there's big money to be made in India, China, Singapore, Taiwan...
     
  9. roachboy

    roachboy Very Tilted

    yeah, well, there we are. a new ineluctable machine of profit. fuck the american working and middle classes--they're no longer necessary. strangely, this phenomenon explains the rise of things like the tea party---and their wholesale displacements onto reality-optional non-explanations for what they're afraid of and their surreal political demands based on those displacements shows the hold of exactly the ideology that enabled this in the first place---exclusive focus on the movements of capital, on profit extraction to the entire exclusion of any sense of obligation to any social context beyond shareholders---all this made even more radical than in any dickens novel by the tendency of computing to exclude any necessary reference to social situation for capital or capital flows or anything else---the world is your monitor, your monitor the world--places are just words---people only matter as sources of trade orders. everything else is just the workings of the magickal machinery of markets. who gives a fuck what happens to people who aren't Players?
     
  10. Baraka_Guru

    Baraka_Guru Möderätor Staff Member

    Location:
    Toronto
    Jesus, folks. It's just business. Don't take it personal.
     
  11. roachboy

    roachboy Very Tilted

    the central obstacle to a serious political challenge to this entire form of capital accumulation is the culture of debt. the central advantage that folk who see the obvious---that they and their futures have been sold out---have is the already shaky legitimation of the existing order as a result of its inability to do anything meaningful to address the crisis neo-liberalism has created for most people. what's clear is that the plutocratic hold on the state and the overwhelming power of the class interests of the folk who have and will continue to benefit from the present arrangement of capital flows makes of addressing this crisis a management problem. nothing is being done because (a) the actions of the right to prevent it for purposes that i think they imagine are continuous with some fantasy of getting back into power---which indicates that in their imaginary world, there reallyi is only one alternative to the present administration and they are it---this despite the obvious fact that opting for the right would be social, economic and political suicide and (b) there's no imperative amongst the class fraction that dominates the plutocracy--that is it---to do anything. hell, from that viewpoint they'd take a haircut for doing anything like investing heavily in a different kind of manufacturing base in the united states. so nothing happens. but what i think it starting to dawn on people is that if they persist in this direction, they risk a kind of political unrest that will place the legitimacy of their game itself in jeopardy--and they won't be able to contain that by force.

    there may well be a kind of class war, but it wont look like the cretins on the right imagine it will. and most of the populist conservatives are basically exactly as marx said they were long ago---elements of the lumpenproletariat, the sack of potatoes that goes whichever way they're told to go. a significant ideological crisis would neutralize them.

    i'm looking forward to the united states beginning to catch up with egypt.
     
  12. dippin Getting Tilted

    I am not talking about your personal business or whatever diversion you want to bring up this time. I am talking about your assertion of taxes leading people to invest in bonds and not stocks. You claimed there was a difference in taxes, when there wasn't.

    So if it is not taxes that are driving bonds interest rates lower, the only real explanation is that the private side is so messed up that the market would rather pay the government to hold it, in the form of bonds, than to invest it. Once one accepts that idea, the logical conclusion is also clear: the markets are telling the government that the only real way out of this recession is through fiscal stimulus.
     
  13. Baraka_Guru

    Baraka_Guru Möderätor Staff Member

    Location:
    Toronto
    Because pictures sometimes help:

    [​IMG]

    So what you see here is a marked shift in post-war America. The American Dream seemed in full swing through the '50s, '60s, and '70s. I think many got used to the idea that, generally, life was pretty good even when it was a bit trying.

    Come the '80s and such things as free trade, Reaganomics, globalism, and the like, and look what happens.

    It could be argued that, hey, growth is growth, and 15% to 33% ain't too shabby. Yeah, well, but when things get bad these days, it's a struggle if you can't keep up. (That, and this data is pre-2008 meltdown.) And when you look to those exerting the most leverage and power in society and see that their wealth seems to increase exponentially, it causes a bit of discord, I'm sure.

    So these recent cries of Obama's class war are laughable, because the class war had already heated up starting back with Reagan. The other thing laughable about the situation is how it took so long for a president to at least indirectly acknowledge what's going on.
     
  14. Joniemack

    Joniemack Beta brainwaves in session

    Location:
    Reading, UK
    Some say (and I'm not one of them) that the top 1% have merely been picking off what the bottom 99% have been too stupid or lazy to go after.

    And they won't willingly free any of it up so others can pursue some modicum of wealth either. It's theirs, gosh darnit, and they earned it. So for those of us who don't already have it but believe we can Scott Trade our way there by gambling our kid's college fund.....well, it will only happen for a very few lucky ones, maybe. The rest of us need to either support measures that pry the locks back open or get used to things getting a whole lot worse.

    I wonder what this graph will look like in 10 - 20 years.
     
  15. Baraka_Guru

    Baraka_Guru Möderätor Staff Member

    Location:
    Toronto
    Is Obama more like Reagan than his Republican counterparts?



    http://thinkprogress.org/economy/2011/10/03/333912/reagan-tax-loopholes-crazy/
     
    • Like Like x 1
  16. Bodkin van Horn

    Bodkin van Horn One of the Four Horsewomyn of the Fempocalypse

    Baraka, don't you know that once Obama embraces an idea it becomes a horrible idea, regardless of how orthodox it was before he embraced it?
     
    • Like Like x 2
  17. Baraka_Guru

    Baraka_Guru Möderätor Staff Member

    Location:
    Toronto
    I suppose it's bound to happen when you're a centre-right socialist.
     
  18. Joniemack

    Joniemack Beta brainwaves in session

    Location:
    Reading, UK

    So does this mean we no longer need to regard the US stock markets as an indicator of US economic health? Hallelujah!