Horrors of late capitalism

[charliels531]

Originally Posted by diamelsx

Wages and investment fall after Trump tax cut
New evidence is emerging that the Trump company tax cuts have produce none of the benefits claimed by advocates, with wages growth in the US falling and investment and shares underperforming.
SOURCE

That was a secret only to Trump cultists. The week before the tax cut was passed the Treasury Secretary of the moment was interviewed on public radio in front of a gathering of about 250 CEOs. He threw a question out to the floor that the interviewer had asked him: How many CEOs plan to invest the tax reduction in expansion and wage hikes?

Not a single hand went up. His response was, "We'll do it anyway."

Thus far only one major company, a mass-merchandise food store, Costco, has used the savings to raise wages for employees making less than $100K. The rest have used it for stock buy-backs and executive bonuses.

If anyone knows of any other U.S. corporation that has used the savings for either expansion or wage hikes for non-executives, I would be grateful to be corrected.

[Roubignol]

Originally Posted by deepsepia

You need to read further then. Stalin's letters to his mother, Keke Geladze, came out when the Soviet archives were opened. Only quite recent works have access to these resources.

See "Stalin" by Edvard Radzinsky [1997]
http://www.radzinski.ru/books/pyessa.php?id=28

Sorry to insist, but my sources are Radzinski himself following your link and telling it was not a written letter but a reported speech.

That's very important to be precise.

Here is the googletranslation from Russian to English language about this Radzinski's writting (available on your own link)

He continues to call his mother to Moscow. And still she does not come. In one of his last letters his wife writes hopelessly: "But summer is just around the corner, maybe we'll see each other." Do you come to us somehow? .. Yes, it's very embarrassing that you always pamper us with parcels ... "
So: indulged in parcels, but did not come. However, he did not come to see her either. He is resting quite near in the Caucasus, but he is not going ... Or is he afraid to go? In any case, only in 1935, knowing that she was very sick and, evidently, he could not see her any more, he came to see her. Their meeting was turned propaganda into a holy story. But two episodes of truth slipped:
"Why did you beat me so hard?" he asked his mother.
"Because you came out so good," Kake replied.
And further:
"Joseph, who are you now?" asks the mother.
It's hard not to know who her son became, whose portraits are hung on every street. She just wanted to let him fret.
And he lamented:
"Do you remember the Tsar?" Well, I'm kind of a king.
Here she said a phrase, over naivety which then the good was laughed at by the country:
"You'd better be a priest."
These words pleased Stalin and became widely known at that time: the intelligentsia told them about them, they were preserved in the memoirs of the doctor Nikolai Kipshidze, who was treating old Kake.

Trust me, I do not try to defend Stalin, but reported speech is not a letter, nor a recorded interview.

[Estreeter]

Originally Posted by xyzde69

Here too the supermarkets are destroying all the small businesses.

Finally, we agree on one thing, that I do hate, same happens here.

If I could, I'd have a law passed that somehow would protect a supermarket opening with x distance from an already established long time smaller business.

Always hated big boys picking on the little guy in business

[deepsepia]

Originally Posted by Brecht

What can be concluded from that conversation between Stalin and Eisenstein is that 1. Stalin was an educated mofo and 2. that he emphasized Ivan the Terrible's progressive role at that stage in Russian history. This is not the same as comparing oneself with an ancient ruler. I don't know how much Marxism was left in Stalin during his reign but Marxists do not idealize or condemn events or persons from centuries or millennia ago.

Reading Stalin -- and Mao-- you see that both are simultaneously Marxists and they identify with tyrannical Emperors of the past.

Remember, for a Marxist the historical period before there's an industrial working class is a kind of "pre-history"; communism isn't possible because there's no possibility of "class consciousness". So when a Marxist looks a pre-industrial ruler, they identify with the totalitarian and coercive statism, even while regarding the social order it serves as obsolete.

What both Stalin and Mao identify with is the necessity and utility of brutality and state coercion, under the direction of one man -- themselves.

Here's Mao

Originally Posted by Chairman Mao, "Speeches At The Second Session Of The Eighth Party Congress [1958

"]

I was happy to read a recent article by Comrade Fan Wen-lan. It was straight talk. Many facts cited in the article prove that respecting the modern and belittling the ancient is a Chinese tradition. He quoted Ssu-ma Ch’ien, Ssu-ma Kuang . . . but it is regrettable that he did not quote Ch’in-Shih-huang. He was an expert in respecting the modern and belittling the ancient. Of course I do not like to quote him either. (Comrade Lin Piao interrupts: “Ch’in-shih-huang burned the books and buried the scholars alive”.)

What did he amount to? He only buried alive 460 scholars, while we buried 46,000. In our suppression of the counter-revolutionaries, did we not kill some counter-revolutionary intellectuals? I once debated with the democratic people: You accuse us of acting like Ch’in-shih-huang, but you are wrong; we surpass him 100 times. You berate us for imitating Ch’in-shih-huang in enforcing dictatorship. We admit them all.

Mao is significantly understating the number of people he'd had killed-- and this was before the Cultural Revolution.

The irony of Mao's speech seems to be lost on him. He's citing historical precedent for "belittling the ancient", which is more or less a contradiction in terms.

[time_killer]

I had an ant farm when I was a youth. They all work perfectly as a team throughout the days gathering, tending to all their chores working as one. Until the antfarm became overpopulated. The ants would begin to become side tracjed with fighting with the other ants and this behavior would increase as the population grew. Then there would be litteralky a massive kill. Ants would kill each other until the population was back to where it was a comfortable population. Then all would go back to normal until the process would repeat itself. Ants are very smart insects.

[Enrico32]

Originally Posted by time_killer

I had an ant farm when I was a youth. They all work perfectly as a team throughout the days gathering, tending to all their chores working as one. Until the antfarm became overpopulated. The ants would begin to become side tracjed with fighting with the other ants and this behavior would increase as the population grew. Then there would be litteralky a massive kill. Ants would kill each other until the population was back to where it was a comfortable population. Then all would go back to normal until the process would repeat itself. Ants are very smart insects.

Were you tending the ordinary Formica? In these, the only true "individual" is the reproducing queen. They evolved so the visible ants resemble the constantly shed cells of multicellular bodies. The trick won't work with Myrmecia - the primitive, individualist ant.

[Roubignol]

Originally Posted by time_killer

I had an ant farm when I was a youth. They all work perfectly as a team throughout the days gathering, tending to all their chores working as one. Until the antfarm became overpopulated. The ants would begin to become side tracjed with fighting with the other ants and this behavior would increase as the population grew. Then there would be litteralky a massive kill. Ants would kill each other until the population was back to where it was a comfortable population. Then all would go back to normal until the process would repeat itself. Ants are very smart insects.

That's what will happen in Capitalist societies.
The market has to grow. Overpopulation is good for the market.

[time_killer]

Say what hou will but capitalism is the only system that works. It's the left that is never right both literary and figuratively.

[SoIGotTheGroov]

Originally Posted by xyzde69

That's what will happen in Capitalist societies.
The market has to grow. Overpopulation is good for the market.

But the planet has limited resources, that's why market shouldn't grow anymore, and actually leads to the overuse of the planet: climate change, hunger in south hemisphere, and so on...


Overpopulation can be safe if only capitalism die: people have to consume less and responsibly to preserve the Earth. If you cannot breath anymore in 50 years, you'll look stupid will all that money hahaha



THIS is the biggest horror of late capitalism
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jgbY...-article_title

[sobaka]

Originally Posted by SoIGotTheGroov

But the planet has limited resources, that's why market shouldn't grow anymore, and actually leads to the overuse of the planet: climate change, hunger in south hemisphere, and so on...

Overpopulation can be safe if only capitalism die: people have to consume less and responsibly to preserve the Earth. If you cannot breath anymore in 50 years, you'll look stupid will all that money hahaha

THIS is the biggest horror of late capitalism
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jgbY...-article_title

Hardly, as a population gets wealthier, they generally start to have less children, so it in effect is self correcting. Also where there are scarce resources, capitalism encourages economic entities to preserve their assets, including those assets which are owned in common. Historically, it is communist and other state-centric systems which do the most damage to the environment. Look at what communism wrote in warpac countries such as east germany vs west germany. Look at the sheer scale of the enviromental damage done to the Aral sea. Case closed.