Cutting off your nose to spite your face.
The guys on the other side may not be your enemy
2020 seems to be the year when everyone has dug their trench and are now ready for the siege. Maybe it’s time to have a look at who is in the trench with you.
Damon Young says:
“A true racial reckoning includes, interrogates and eventually extinguishes all systems of oppression. That includes capitalism. That includes patriarchy. It’s not carpet cleansing. It’s carpet bombing.”
It’s too bad that Young wasn’t asked what he expects to replace capitalism with, when, and how.
There is no country on the planet right now that doesn’t have a capitalist economy. That includes so-called communist countries like China, which seems to be as good at running a capitalist economy as the USA. Likewise Russia, with its capitalist oligarchs. I don’t see capitalism being replaced anytime soon unless and until someone can demonstrate that they have a better alternative that has been tried and proven elsewhere.
The Marxist-Leninist alternative to capitalism is for the government to own the means of production through nationalization. That might’ve been reasonable to propose in the child labour days of England and much of Europe in the nineteenth century. Today, many small and medium-sized businesses are owned by people with all sorts of different skin colours and ethnic origins. Does every Indian or Chinese restaurant, everyone’s home computer (an important means of production), every construction worker’s truck, family farm and private home, all of which take investment of capital to acquire, have to be nationalized? I doubt the people of any skin colour would advocate that. Yet that is the only alternative to some form of capitalism that has ever been tried.
We don’t live under capitalism. We live in a regulatory state. That is why we have Medicare, social assistance, employment insurance, pollution control laws etc. If there is oppression it is not because of capitalism but because the regulatory state is regulating the wrong things, or regulating the right things improperly.
As a bit of shameless self-promotion may I suggest that you read my most recent blog post on this very topic. https://andrewromanviews.blog/2020/07/06/capitalism-socialism-and-democracy-in-2020/
If the serious racial issues plaguing the US and some other countries are going to be resolved successfully they will require deeper and better thought than merely dividing humanity into oppressors and oppressed on the basis of skin colour, and then eliminating capitalism (which doesn’t exist in its pure form anywhere) without knowing what to replace it with. That is what I would call cutting off your nose to spite your face.
we’ll do better than that Andrew, we’ll post it as a stand alone entry.
Thanks.