PsYcHo wrote: ↑Fri Jan 12, 2018 11:04 pm
Your cartoon is funny (and accurate in some sense), but I actually started and ran three different businesses. I started in a minimum wage fast-food job, worked my ass off and got promoted to a decent wage, scrimped/sacrificed/and saved money to be able to start the first business. Ironically, it would have been so much cheaper to start if I didn't have to pay the government for the privilege of being allowed to sell my labor.
My latest business is on ice for now because of an unforeseen medical issue with my partner, but I had a really good plan for another business with low start up cost and high profitability (a rehash of my second business), but I can't get that off the ground because I had to pay all my savings in taxes.
The same government you want to allow to give the means of production to the workers is the same government that takes money from small business people like me and doesn't do shit to help when things go wrong.
In both of our cases, the
Government is the problem. Capitalism as it exist now is corrupt for the same reason socialist/communist governments all turn corrupt.
Giving such power to so few never turns out well in the long run. The same people complaining about the 1% are perfectly fine with letting a different 1% control them (as long as they get to believe it was all their idea. The collective wins!
)
A government as it stands in both the United States and the United Kingdom is not truly a democratic one. In both cases, the governments are not representative of their people. If they were, in the United States, you would have a democratic socialist government led by Bernie Sanders (because the "Democratic" Party wouldn't have rigged the nominations against him, and the electoral college wouldn't exist to allow Trump to become President), and in the United Kingdom, you would have a democratic socialist government led by Jeremy Corbyn (because a proportional representation system would allow the left-wing parties to form a coalition). The problem is that because the government is not democratic, it is not people-oriented, and works in the interests of capital.
Take for instance the democratic socialist government in Chile under Salvador Allende. Chile enjoyed much prosperity under his people oriented system of government. His government reduced inflation, unemployment and taxes, while increasing wages for Chilean workers, and pensions for widows, orphans and the elderly. Under his rule, Chile achieved an 8.6% growth in GDP.
However, when Allende was overthrow in a fascist CIA-backed coup, the undemocratic dictatorship government of Augusto Pinochet worked in the interests of capital and achieved nothing for ordinary Chilean people but human rights violations and misery.
The problem is not the government itself but the fact that the government as it stands is undemocratic and is in the pocket of capitalist big businesses which wish to exploit the working classes and small businesses. This is corporatism - A merger of the state and corporate power to work in the interests of capitalism. Many people like to claim that corporatism is not true capitalism. However, this is not the case. Corporatism is the only form of capitalism to actually exist, and that could feasibly work. This is because in order for capitalist parasites to survive, they need the government to be utilized as a mechanism to protect their private ownership of the means of production.
This can be seen in Spain. An Anarchist Socialist society where the means of production were collectively owned and there was no government existed in Revolutionary Catalonia. The capitalists, during this period, did not use this opportunity to set up their own Anarcho-Capitalist society. Instead, they sided with Francoist fascism during the Spanish Civil War. This shows you how capitalism exists.