Industrial Capitalism has brought amazingly rapid development, stunning technological progress and extreme wealth into some nations and markedly uneven and dirt poor levels across the planet and among the poorer classes in our own industrial countries.
But many of these new technologies have far exceeded our wisdom to control them. Huge amounts of materials have been produced for weapons of war that only destroy. Our soil, oceans, waters and food supply are becoming toxic, polluted and a frequent cause of cancer. Diseases now spread across the planet quickly. Plastic bottle ares found six mile deep in the oceans on top of the Marianas Trench.
What’s even worse . . .
Our atmosphere has been overwhelmed by green house gases spread by our main energy source of fossil fuels, threatening the collapse of modern civilization. Yet billions, perhaps trillions, of dollars are being spent in American to elect Donald Trump, a fascist bigot who both personifies evil and symbolizes all that is destructive as just mentioned.
These same backers criminally deny the fate that awaits both them and us. Wars, under the new technologies birthed under the capitalism system, have grown more and more violent and destructive. The last great war, WWII, killed 60 million souls. If we had a Trump candidate winning during those years, and not FDR, that war may have been lost, or worse, we might have sided with Germany.
Industrial Capitalism Cannot Be Sustained
City destroying nuclear devices are now possessed by multiple nations, America being the only nation to have deployed them on major cities. Perhaps as many have died in wars since the 60 million lost in WWII in new conflicts.
A deaf ear has largely been turned to these realities and precious few in leadership are willing to face the fact that our industrial way of life is not sustainable but rather will become one day the instruments of our death. With most, if not all, of civilization in areas close to the equator becoming unlivable due to the extremes of heat.
What’s Behind Our Political Divisions?
Against this background, every industrialized country, and even many of the underdeveloped ones, contain the seeds of authoritarian patriarchy, a species characteristic that has followed and dominated humanity into the periods of more advanced civilization. It’s the driving sociological force behind the threats of fascism today, a more or less complete state of governmental collapse into madness and ignorance. The death toll from this developmental disease is likely more that a billion people since the birth of industrial capitalism.
Authoritarian patriarchy can be traced back thousands of years and has had a major influence of how industrial capitalism evolved. Even though America introduced a forward thinking form of democracy, the existing class divisions, racial slavery, the lack of women’s political rights and the class struggle itself that followed limited democracy and largely tied it, as it had been before, to the will of the upper classes.
The Role of the Corporate Media
For the most part, the corporate media is solidly behind Trump. They aren’t neutral, don’t be fooled. They’ve shown their true colors. That must be recognized by the White House. Republican and media attacks are presently being coordinated on numerous levels. It’s no accident that they are calling for Joe to resign, and not Trump.
Which is incredibly biased given the Nazi like baggage that accompanies Trump where ever he goes and whenever he speaks.
Social Progress Determined by Capitalist Interests
Social progress has been dependent and subject to both the rules and needs of the overall capitalist system. Which developed along with the limited number of political parties.
No challenges to the dominant capitalism system are tolerated for very long as exemplified by the vicious and often violent and armed oppression that was suffered by union organizers as capitalism expanded. These organizers had no political party to assist them. Attempts to create powerful unions to lobby for their interests were quickly undermined.
The Two Party System’s History
Given the great difficulty in building and maintaining a nationwide party, only the Democratic and Republican Party, both of which hold allegiance to industrial capitalism, have been able to dominate for decades. Other perspectives and points of view must be expressed in one party or the other.
Popular mass struggles, because they often contained anti-capitalist tendencies whether articulated as such or not, had to be absorbed and contained by the two party capitalist dominated system. Since the era of FDR, anti-capitalist and progressive tendencies were absorbed mostly by the Democratic Party. The Republican Party tended to absorb the more backward and reactionary elements in the working classes. So you’d expect fascism to eventually come from the latter Party.
Not surprisingly, authoritarian patriarchy has also sabotaged the international socialist/communist movement. The reasons these movements have largely failed are numerous, but one of the major ones was a failure to recognize the importance of democracy in any governing system and the inevitable backsliding into authoritarian methods. Another was the oppressive and compulsive nature of industrial and agricultural work itself.
Stalin and the Death of Socialism
We saw this in Russia, then the Soviet Union, almost from the beginning. The communists seized state power of what had been a Czarist state for centuries with a limited number of participants, and under siege from Western countries they resorted to increasingly authoritarian methods, particularly against the peasantry after the death of Lenin. Under a defacto dictatorship of Stalin, disaster struck and socialism existed in name only after he took over.
Most socialist aspiring states have devolved backward into authoritarian market capitalism systems. Pol Pot, a Cambodian Hitler, put millions of innocents to death, under his authoritarian plans to force his distorted version of socialism upon the masses. It took a bloody war to stop them, waged by a more rational nation aspiring to build socialism, North Vietnam.
The Class Struggle Takes a Turn
The media and most politicians lump everyone into convenient left and right categories and describes them the way that meets their interests at the moment. But neither side always speaks with the same voice. The terms become meaningless except that they contain whatever biases people may hold attached to the labels.
Labor, once a decidedly left leaning force, has been brought back under the influence of the capitalist classes, especially during and after the McCarthy period in the 1950s. It’s potential powers mostly contained by mob run, right wing and corrupted or weakened unions, with left wing leadership removed. And even those unions are threatened today.
Centrism and Capitalism
Many Democratic Centrist politicians have pro-claimed, at least once if not multiple times, that they are staunch capitalists. Very troubling in my opinion as many programs they support have socialist aspects to them, won by mass struggles in the past. Capitalism itself has been measurably oppressive to many people, both here and across the globe.
Usually these pro-capitalist statements are a knee jerk response to red baiting by Republicans and sometimes against progressives in their own party. Perhaps the best example of the latter being democratic socialist Bernie Sanders — the Centrists were terrified that he might actually win the nomination in 2016 and maybe the election. He was even polling fairly well among those who voted for Trump!
The capitalist system is not democratic by choice. It’s code of morality is profit by almost any means necessary. It’s not a system that has benefited the many millions of poor people through out the world or in the U.S. Nor has it benefited global ecology or our climate. It is, in fact, destroying them and us in the process.
Biden Must be Re-elected
It may surprise you that my views are, that at present, is it imperative to re-elect Joe Biden. The severity of political differences between Joe and Trump are so great, especially since the recent Supreme Courts rulings on presidential immunity, that it is an absolute no brainer.
I am not the ultra leftist I may have been in the 70s. Nor do I think a Third Party is the solution we should now seek.
But . . .
This does not mean that I do not have major reservations as to the Centrist-led Democratic Party. They have not yet been willing to see that future politics, if we survive the Trump era, will not tolerate being in the middle of the road or power not being legitimately shared by other classes.
Just as the corporate world and media have largely been favoring Trump and attacking government in every way imaginable. That’s not likely to change the behavior of Trump’s elite backers even if he’s defeated.
Defending government today without substantive reform is impossible. The corporate fascist elite is our prime enemy and runs the show, not their MAGA followers. The slavishness of the Republican political class may appear to be a submission to Trump and the MAGAs but don’t be fooled by appearances.
If I were his advisor, I’d recommend Biden fighting back as hard as possible and strengthening the spirits and will power of his base to get out the vote, and f*ck pleasing the corporate media, because he can’t. And to forget about the days of bipartisanship, they’re over. And not to show weakness in front of the fascists or they’ll devour him alive. And most of all, use the many good Democrats he has to get out the message, he has no done so yet as far as I can tell.
A Seat at the Table
If they are not exposed and discredited, Trump’s corporate backers will simply look for a younger and smarter fascist. The days of bipartisanship are not likely to return. The present Supreme Court must be transformed as does the fascist friendly corporate media exposed.
The working classes and the poor must have a legitimate seat at the table, if America and the rest of the world are to have any chance to defeat the other great enemy we all have. One which America helped create and will take a different world to defeat it: and that enemy is not only fascism, but also a world driven by fossil fuels.