Kayla wrote:
are you suggesting that they consciously think in those terms?
No, I'm stating it as a historically documented fact. Maybe some of them are less conscious than Nic Machiavelli, but the mind-set has been in place for some time, yes.
and yet despite protestations to the contrary the pro labour advances did not, in general, adversely affect profits
Not directly, no. (In fact, happy workers are more productive and less likely to steal supplies or spit in customers' soup, but that doesn't matter.) The reason workers must be kept 'in their place' is that each advance - each 'socialist' move - makes working people more secure. And unafraid workers have the luxury of looking around and asking uncomfortable questions, like "Why shouldn't my kid have as good an education as the foreman's kid?" and "Why do six railway labourers have to die for every mile of track?" Pension, injury compensation, maternity leave.... What next - health insurance? One of them marrying one of
our daughters? When the underclass gets uppity, privilege gets diluted.
i get very conflicting reports from the state of education (and other things) in the good old days
i went to elementary and junior high (the horror!) and high school in a rather affluent school board, and the people running it could not organize their way out of a wet paper bag
It's not really a good-old-days thing: the administration was also more inflexible; both students and teachers were less free. Some aspects of it were better, some worse. Anyway, different countries.
Yours was probably a Board of Education of middle-class people who couldn't agree among themselves and hired poor managers. That happens a lot. But it doesn't affect any Kochs or Goldmans.
Charlemange? there is a reason why we do not have feudalism any more -
If you believe
that, those BoE managers really did shortchange you on education!
it was not actually a profitable and efficient way of doing things
Efficiency is another middle-class, practical notion. The big winners don't need efficiency. They profit either way, just so long as the power remain in their hands. Industry replaced agriculture as the winning hand; serfs moved into mining towns and factory towns to become unskilled labourers. Feudalism didn't die - it just changed its shirt.
and it got replaced more or less in the way marx described
I doubt he'd agree.
in the days of charlemagne the death rate from violence for the men in the aristocracy was over 50% - i think the failures touched the aristocracy very much
No, their losses were not due to the serfs being afraid of them. They mostly killed each other, fighting over lands and inheritance. I never said they were
bright! You knows those bozos routinely wasted ten years an 200,000 men, contesting the throne of some country that was bankrupted by the civil war over who should rule it. They still do.
a big part of the reason the south lost the way is its inability economically compete with the north
That's another example of agriculture being displaced by industry. And they killed half their aristocracy and destroyed 70% of their wealth, fighting to keep an economic system that had already begun to fail. The
principle of the right to own people - even when they couldn't afford to - was that important to them.
It was never about the slaves causing their owners to lose money by being fearful. Indeed, northern industry got as close to slave-labour as it legally could, in the form of fresh immigrants, who were as frightened as their overseers could keep them. It still does, in the form of illegals and outsourcing. Keeping labour cost down is strategy; keeping labourers in their place - always, everywhere - is policy.
what is this ruling class? from what i can tell its not so much that there is a hierarchy but rather a web of influences, with some spiders bigger than others but no one in control
Membership changes over time, but basically, it's the least scrupulous and most greedy 0.0001 (like now) to 0.01% (like c 1000 BC) of people in the world at any given time. The very large variable is because the next three descending orders of sociopath get more opportunities to join the top rank when the overall population is small and fewer opportunities when the population is large.
i am one of the 1% i thought that made me part of the ruling class
That's a convenient fiction. It actually puts you nowhere near spitting distance of the real power, but you get the flak from the disgruntles serfs. They push your class out front every time there is trouble. The heroic dead officers in every war are the younger sons of your class; the older sons are the elected officials who sweat in front of tv cameras whenever feces encounters fan.
no but it has nothing to do with economics - marx erred in thinking economics is everything
He may well have. So? What's Marx to do with power distribution?
our farm is on the bigger end of what is often described as 'small business' and we simply cannot afford to mistreat our employees - the fact that we are not inclined to mistreat them just makes things easier
Yeah, that means you're sane. You'll never be one of the major players, but you may survive.
for some reason I thinking here of the last few days of joseph stalin
I don't know about those, but there sure was a lot of stifled jubilation at my house when they announced his death. My house was not unusual, and I imagine the sentiment of half a dozen nations was shared by those bodyguards. The man was a first-rank sociopath, and they're usually unpopular for excellent reasons. That's nothing to do with ideology.
from what i understand this sort of scenario replays itself regularly in corporate america
I wouldn't be a bit surprised.
They're crazy. If the rulers weren't crazy, the world wouldn't be the mess it is.
