I strongly suggest that you read through the recent Counterpunch article Bring on the Crackup: Hoping for a Trump-Sanders Election at least once…it deserves and requires much more attention than that…before you read the following piece.
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I started this article as a comment on Spink Akron’s reply to Booman’s recent post Does Trumpism Have Any Shelf Life?
Corporations are increasingly skittish of right wing ‘religious freedom’ laws. Some are expressing an unwillingness to be associated with the Republican convention. They’re being successfully educated that it might not be in their best interests for their ads to be broadcast on Rush Limbaugh’s show. These sorts of things give me some hope.
Yes.
Capitalism at work, doing precisely what it does best.
Everything…including morality…is monetized by capitalism. This produces a sort of monetized democracy. The needs and possibilities of the various consumerist groups rule the way Big Corp spends its money on politicians and also on the arbiters of social control. (Social control. Read: “mass media.”) No matter how much effort is put into subliminal propaganda (Subliminal propaganda. Read “advertising” and “popular culture.”), there is no way on earth to…for example…turn massive numbers of people of color into dedicated white supremacists. Ain’t gonna happen. Neither will the entrenched societal fortresses of white bigotry allow themselves to be transformed into societies that believe in social inclusivity for all races.
From this “monetization” fact arises a numbers game.
Read on for more.
Big Corp produces products…including the so-called “policies” of various and sundry political parties and levels of government…that are aimed (and advertised trance-media style) at different segments of the consumerist whole. This often produces serious culturally dissonant rubs…for example, the same media giants own, produce and disseminate both highly profitable hip-hop/gansta rap/call it what you will for the African-American market while simultaneously doing the same thing with country music aimed at the rural white market. Only when a given market begins to break down in terms of profit does Big Corp start to back off of that particular feed trough.
Another example…the war baby cultural market that consumes Glenn Miller revivals and ’40s/’50s B films/TV series is just a tiny sliver of the cultural market now due to the plain fact that most of those people are either dead or too old/too economically limited by retirement to spend much money on anything but trying to stay alive. Twenty, thirty years ago? Big business.
Back to Trumpism. All population studies point to an onging march towards a non-white majority in the U.S. within a fairly short period of time. 18 years, 20 years, 25 years…maybe even sooner given my own observation that the U.S. census numbers are skewed way off due to the entirely understandable fear harbored by most non-white people regarding the federal government. This “Browning of America” is an unavoidable fact barring some sort of major disaster that breaks up the U.S. into smaller principalities.
Assuming that a disaster of that does not happen, so-called “Trumpism” in its basic whites-only guise will eventually simply run out of sufficient numbers of bigoted whites to be a major force.
End of story.
Trump himself is putting all his eggs in that white basket. Now, before the situation changes. So-called Trumpism itself, however, presently relies entirely on Donald Trump’s projected personality. As seems to be the case recently, that also has a limited shelf life. How limited? Hard to tell. We’ll know by November. If he wins the presidency it will sustain for a while. If Trump is as clever as I think he is, he will put forward an increasingly much more racially and socially inclusive message as he gets closer to the prize.
But…what we must all remember here is the following.
Monetization of human life in all of its aspects will remain the central aspect of capitalism. Read the following very dense article…it really is hard going, but worth the time…by the philosopher Bill Martin.
Bring on the Crackup: Hoping for a Trump-Sanders Election
Do not be fooled by its title. It is a much deeper examination of the forces that have shaped this extraordinary election year by someone who counts influences “from Plato to Kant… from Marx to Sartre…from Mao to Badiou, and from Buddhism.”
A sample:
…even with many variations, what is advanced as “politics” in mainstream, and even much of the “fringe,” of the United States is not really politics. Instead it is the calculation of interests under the imperatives faced by the capitalist/global imperialist ruling class of the United States. When Marx talked about “class dictatorship” so long ago, what people seem to miss, and that needs to be driven home once again, is that there is a ruling class, and this class operates according to certain imperatives.
Simply put, and on one level it is just this simple, in the United States and for pretty much the whole world, capital decides. To bring in a little complexity: 1) In other words, G. W. Bush, or even Dick Cheney, or Bill Clinton, etc., don’t decide, capital, as a social process rooted in (but not confined to) socialized production and reproduction (and, sure, its accumulated wealth and power), decides, the basic social decisions in a capitalist society are made by what is necessary for this process to continue to advance; again, to simplify, the accumulation of profit decides; 2) This is the case unless there is some truly countervailing force. And the point is that pretty much nothing, with perhaps some rare exception and not to be dogmatic about this, that works within the acceptable bounds of “politics” comes to anything like a countervailing force.
Set aside a block of time where you will have no distractions and read through this article until you thoroughly get it. It certainly clarified a large number of things for me.
Later…
AG
Frenzied cries of “Anti-Capitalist, Radical Motherfucker!!!???”
I beg to differ.
It is what it is, this world. What wins, wins…and eventually, of course, stops winning. I only want people to understand how capitalism works so that it can be improved.
Later…
AG
P.S. That old saying “What goes up must come down?” I dunno about that one, myself. That depends on the gravity of the situation. For real.
I prefer this one.
“What goes up, must go up.”
Yup.
Hard to argue with that one.
I gave up half-way through, despairing that this will ever lead to some kind of conclusion. I mean Marx is dense, but this guy instead drones on and on and as far as I can see it is a tract in the marxism + defeatism = philosophy genre.
Now, I kind find it in the word sallad or I would quote it, but somewhere he states something to the effect of Sanders not being able to change anything because it is not in the interest of capital accumulation. Later on, he (rightfully) knocks Bill Clinton for doing away with the New Deal protections. But as far as I can see, in his analysis the New Deal should never have happened!
If he is not going to include anything that has happened after Lenin in your model, why should I read him instead of re-reading Capital? At least Marx has some fire and wants to do something!
Your choice. Like I said…it’s a slog. But…it’s been about 150 years since Karl Marx wrote Das Kapital. Much has happened since then…many changes. I like what Mr. Martin has to say.
AG
There are certain things that have changed in the 150+ years since Marx wrote Capital.
For one, reification of philosophical concepts and then treating them as forces of history has become out of favor. “Capital decides” is no longer sufficient to clarify what one is talking about except as a symbolic name for a network of people who interact in some complicated ways, including the enforcement of institutional values, goals, and defenses regardless of individual personal views.
For another, in English academic usage now makes “h” a vowel that requires and “an” when dealing with “history” or especially “historical”. It’s an interesting class marker.
So is his emails from his (unspecified) proletarian wife, who is also a philosopher.
And in that we face the contradiction of Marxism. The people who should most directly understand the social relations of capitalism must be educated in the language of a philosophical tradition that invented some of the most obscure language in order grasp that:
Rule 1. The boss is always right.
Rule 2. When the boss is not right, refer to Rule 1.
really expresses the social relationship fundamental to capitalism.
And that the perennial business owner’s complaint about anything:
I’ve got to make a profit.
is much better at explaining what “Capital decides.” actually means. The business owner, if influential (powerful) enough, prevails and makes his profit.
What has happened in what Martin calls postmodern capitalism is that influence no longer is wielded only through direct personal relationships from which others are excluded by omission–the condition in Jefferson’s day. Influence now requires the use of expensive narrowcasted media in the proper pattern so as to tell different audiences different things in a way that has different people supporting a policy that none understand or a candidate than none ever vets.
By narrowcasting, I mean the use of marketing through a variety of specialized media and amplification through deliberate social media campaigns.
The superstructure above that is the broadcast cable channel and a common advertising message and spin that need not have any coherence.
The effect of this is that common sense seems missing because there is a smaller and smaller span in which the collective sense of reality is indeed common.
Class was much easier to perceive when the capital side went home to their big houses with the latest utilities and the labor side went home to mass-produced houses with traditional utilities. Romney was so reassuring in this with his automobile elevator despite the fact that his business was taking apart industries.
Who is the working class indeed? And whoever is the proletariat but those who are kept alive only to reproduce workers that capital needs? Who is that these days when capital seems to need workers only to reduce the wages of other workers. Sussing out the reason that Trump cannot say that directly is very instructive.
As usual, the major criticism of this analysis is that it assumes that everything always goes the ruling class’s way until it doesn’t. And that always comes as a shock to everyone.
And now all sides are beginning to argue against 2016 being a disruptive election. That too is instructive.
Without relief the pressure builds intolerably. I used to design microcomputer controls for hydraulic farm and construction equipment. Failures are awesome. I’ll never forget the cracked glass and permanently bent arrows on 15,000 psi gauges when unstoppable force met unmovable object. The fountain of hydraulic fluid was impressive also. Everything was smooth running until a valve suddenly closed with the pump at top speed.
When capitalism invades culture–destruction of the public domain division.
Privacy News Online: Supreme Court: Wikimedia violates copyright by posting its own photos of public, taxpayer-funded art
It’s the Swedish Supreme Court that decided. When the government becomes just another private entities, the public space disappears.