innonimatu
the resident Cassandra
- Joined
- Dec 4, 2006
- Messages
- 15,069
Capitalism's goal is always having monopolies. In the end there's a planned economy - and society. It's just not the government doing the planning... Which makes a mockery of the whole democracy thing.
I will say though that the root cause of failure is imo first the failure of democracy, which allows for abuses of power to happen. Whatever the economic system. And this failure, under either nominally communist or capitalist systems, is an inevitable consequence of excessive scale. When polities get empire size, democracy falls apart. Even if they keep the trappings of elections and voting, or assemblies or soviets or formal constitutions full of guarantees. Big polities are poison for society, though their ill effects may sometimes take generations to show up. Empire-size is the necessary and sufficient condition to lack of democratic control. Then you depend on the personalities of the people who happen to make it to the top, who can make up a circle whose members get co-opted easily into shared interests, eventually things derail and there's no easy way to fix them because the scale is too big.
We shouldn't have to depend on "class traitors", either Roosevelts or Khrushchevs, to get these imperial-size polities back from the edge of disaster for a generations of respite before another top class reasserts control and cares nothing about the mass below. And even those breaks, from stalinism or from the US gilded age great depression version, were lucky breaks.
Decetralize power. And now, deglobalize. Then perhaps democracy will work as supposed and obvious problems can be talked about and fixed.
I will say though that the root cause of failure is imo first the failure of democracy, which allows for abuses of power to happen. Whatever the economic system. And this failure, under either nominally communist or capitalist systems, is an inevitable consequence of excessive scale. When polities get empire size, democracy falls apart. Even if they keep the trappings of elections and voting, or assemblies or soviets or formal constitutions full of guarantees. Big polities are poison for society, though their ill effects may sometimes take generations to show up. Empire-size is the necessary and sufficient condition to lack of democratic control. Then you depend on the personalities of the people who happen to make it to the top, who can make up a circle whose members get co-opted easily into shared interests, eventually things derail and there's no easy way to fix them because the scale is too big.
We shouldn't have to depend on "class traitors", either Roosevelts or Khrushchevs, to get these imperial-size polities back from the edge of disaster for a generations of respite before another top class reasserts control and cares nothing about the mass below. And even those breaks, from stalinism or from the US gilded age great depression version, were lucky breaks.
Decetralize power. And now, deglobalize. Then perhaps democracy will work as supposed and obvious problems can be talked about and fixed.
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also, fellating someone (or sucking someone's richard) is a pretty well-used pop culture term for agreeing with someone.
