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“When times get tough”? Rule by the wealthy was always the plan.
My friend. Rule by the wealthy has been the norm since the dawn of capitalism.
The people in the imperial core nations are just finally feeling imperialism turned inward. It’s what the rest of the world has been subjugated to by the ruling class of the empire for centuries. (And within the core indigenous populations, immigrants, women, black people, LGBTQ people, etc).
Not even, it’s just corruption getting too stable ultimately results in voter instability - as people are enticed to vote for ANYTHING BUT business as usual.
This means Obama’s Hope And Change is just as likely to be voted for as Trump’s “Grab them by the Pussy” because they equally appear to be offering a shift from the norms of the Capo-democratic swamp.
Meanwhile they’re both actually unfettered “too big to fail” Capitalism, with all its “make the rich richer, corrupt democracy further” aspects intact.
So Capitalism creates its own threat, and hence marches on oscillating democracy to its own needs like the perfect parasite.
The parasite won’t give you what you want. The corrupt won’t volunteer to end corruption. You have to smash the windows grab the parasite and squeeze the life out of it before you can issue genuine ideological reforms and take back a fairer system.
Sometimes violence is what’s necessary. The “slow fix” of democracy only works when the right radical candidates have the right free hand to make the right radical changes, and corruption tends to prevent that.
I suppose this is a “tough time” but it’s caused by moderate Neo-Liberal freemarket and often nominally democratic Capitalists.
What is the idea of a “fix” in your opinion? You didn’t really state a goal but did explain problems well. Because if it’s just a “nicer” form of capitalism that continues to burn the global South but gives healthcare to the imperial core, well, that’s not a considered a “fix” at all to a lot of us.
The “we’re in latestage capitalism” is an optimistic position.
Liberal capitalism more or less as it was can reassert itself. After the war, Western Germany went back almost immediately. Eastern Germany took longer to get there, but it ended up in the same place. In Stalin’s 1924 lectures (condensed into Foundations of Leninism), he thought Germany was a in a prime position to have a Russia-style revolution in the near future. In hindsight, he was obviously wrong, but it does show that there was a strong push forming to move Germany to the left at the time.
The United States does not have nearly as much leftist organizing going on. There isn’t enough push to do anything different. What we may get is something closer to a European-style social democracy with a better social safety net, and a voting system that doesn’t all but mandate only two viable parties. That would be nice. It doesn’t mean capitalism will go away any more than the French Revolution dispensed with every noble in Europe within a decade.
But the power of the nobility was shattered, and is now a shadow of what it was. Paul von Hindenburg was a member of the Junkers, the German aristocrats. He gave Hitler the chancellorship. That was the last politically meaningful thing a Junker ever did in Germany.
Considering wonderboy was good when working for the initially company, shouldnt he just be in both frames? As in fascism is just capitalism on a different day, not a different person?
For sure. Homelander is a “mask off” version of Superman. Not his opposite.
Superman does good but only within the existing power structures. Superman, despite fighting “bad capitalist” does nothing to change the systems of oppression that allow that power to exist in the first place. On the contrary, Superman upholds those systems and defends them when they are threatened.
It’s why when comic book movies have a “I want to change society” bad guy they always need some “and kill half the population” part to go along with it. It reinforces the narrative that the current systems are the best and just need “defending” or fixing.
For some, it is easier to imagine the end of the world than it is an end to capitalism.
Homelander is Superman when he stops pretending to be good. Still maintaining the overall structures of oppression and exploitation; but benefiting from them to their fullest extend by using the power he has (analogy here is to state and police power) to shut down anyone that even dares question him.
Undomesticated capitalism results in fascism.
More like “I’m you when somebody else writes the story”
Seems like we’ve been in “late stage capitalism” from before the invention communism all the way to late stage communism and post-communism.