The Rich on Trial
The regular, ordinary people vs. the rich. Find here a celebration of grit, a recollection of sleaze...
The conflict between the regular ordinary people and the rich and famous corresponds to a difference in viewpoint. Of course the views of ordinary persons have never mattered. There is a distinction to be made here, between the way the newspapers say (and the college experts do say) to do things and the way the ordinary would rather like to do things. But the real perversity is simply that the rich side are all perverted. For the ways of the rich and famous are utterly unnatural. In the following, I will identify with the regulars (of course that cound change, if my newsletter goes paid and I get over, Say one hundred paying subscribers — and move to easy street. To wit:
We use instinct.
They use books.They are making money wherever they can
and we are keeping our wits about usWe are in tune with nature. THEY are in tune with the scientific analysis of nature. We live in it. They study it. [I….]
take my coffee at a place called The Wooden Rooster. B roosters are not made of wood (well, but… the “B” ones are; it is the other ones who are not).
Persons ought to have sense. They ought to understand that a Rooster made of wood is not alive. Yet we called the restaurant that, and we drink our coffee here.
We eat at the bar, we drink at the table. All the rules are cast asunder
The regular ordinary army stood around and watched, in dirty T-shirts as scientists declared vaccines safe/effective.
The doctors make a living. They have a vested interest in all of this. There’s a little silver disk they use. They look through the hole in it.
Our activists told us that “All Men are Created Equal” and all men are allowed to buy stocks and bonds and invest in the new machines that created ever more-concentrated stuff of labor-power. It didn’t end in A/Marxist revolution! It didn’t end in Mexico or Russia. It didn’t end with a penguin in Antarctica.
And back on earth, Bill Gates, self-created Man, develops and backs the manufacture of a new product: Fake Meat. In other words, his crew invents the artificial meat. And now they “invent” vaccines. His “free market” choices determine what we get injected with.
And all of this is only for this person named “Bill Gates,” whom nobody can judge honestly at this point, whose favorite thing (of them all) seems to be making money. And he is not the point. The communist position would be he has no more right to that money than anybody does, and there are about 100 million persons for every wealthy individual, at anything close to Gates’s level. What do we do with this information (it isn’t signing up for M.Soft products, no ~ )—?
The economic distribution of assets does not proceed in an orderly or fair manner. But most importantly it does not work according to logic, and there is no science of, for, or about — that. Depending on capitalism to distribute the end results (assets) is a fool’s errand—which is not to say that many have not done it, made that claim. There are perhaps a dozken or so “automatic fair-distribution” schemes I have seen in my own lifetime. But does capitalism even do that?
So—we are saying the capitalistic society -just left to the wind - (or “unregulated” state if you wish) will tend not to enforce fair distribution. Oh, you may get it once in a while, by the right combination of karate strokes, but it is not a law or anything logical.
The distribution of assets must be at some point controlled or regulated. That is to say by an outside factor. By its very definition, capitalism consists of many “private” owners. Okay, regulation cannot be an inside job—this type of control can only come from the outside. Another possibility is for it to come from human culture.
Human culture is the origin of many behaviors all agree with. This is to say that all members of a society will tend to go along with anything all of the other people in the society are doing. We are all conformists to one degree or another. Capitalism reflects our tendency towards conformism in some ways. But how deep is that culture? Capitalism does not reach back into an endless well of human culture.
It does have culture—about 200 years’ worth. But when that ends—? What? Suddenly it won’t look like such a wonderful thing to have made 20 Billion in Real Estate.
That should be what it looks like — not so wonderful of a thing. Sitting around with a bunch of other vipers in a billionaire snake den?
It isn’t so great; we do not need to praise it and follow it. For example:
Gates is not your master. He’s a fucking capitalist.