No, you fundamentally don’t know what you’re talking about.
Marx never spoke about corruption in the way that you’re speaking of it. The way you tell it, the system is undermined by the corrupting influence of individuals or individual bad actors, or bad apples. Not unlike the idea that only some cops are bad and some are good, or most and good and it’s just a few who are bad. This misses the point and the fundamental nature of policing. Police play a particular role in society. And we can measure their function empirically and we have found that their functions are correlated with the evaluation of property and market dynamics.
Marx spends little to no time outlining political corruption as you are using it. He is talking about systemic corruption rooted in the machinations of capitalism.
When you and other Liberals like Warren whine about corruption or Trump being corrupt what you are necessarily implying is that the system is otherwise good but for the influence of a few particular bad actors. Therefore it is necessary in the preservation and conservation of markets and market transparency that those bad market actors be removed or held accountable. This is inherently conservative, it presupposes the market as as the solution to human needs. It forecloses the possibility of altering the underlying conditions which may produce a ‘corrupting’ influence to begin with. Marx would have considered anybody reactionary that attempts to preserve the conditions established by Liberalism and the bourgeois revolution and the conditions established by the bourgeois revolution are the state of need.
Not sure why you cited the definition of Fascism as if that was supposed to prove that what you were proposing wasn’t actually Fascist in nature. You’re proposing suppression of the democratic voice of trump supporters and workers in general in order to establish a transparently 1 party state with the goal of unifying and preserving an ideal notion of state and society. You are proposing class collaboration and the repression of dissenting political views in the service of a state where big business and political power are inseparable. I encourage you to look at all the developments of Fascism throughout the 20th century and how often fascists use the charge of “corruption” to advance conservative ideas and manipulate real discontent and disillusionment among their people.
For contemporary examples outside the US I would pay very close attention to the use of narratives of corruption by Bolsonaro and the far right in Brazil against Lula and PT, or in Hungary with Orban, or in Ukraine with far right nationalists.
The EC was not created to protect slavery explicitly, but that was one of tis consequences. The goal was balancing the power of smaller states and larger states as I’ve already gone over. Slave states tended to have large populations of slaves. It was created to protect the rule of elite plantation owners in the south. But we no longer have rich plantation owners in the south. And the effects of the EC today are very different from maintaining the institution of slavery.
The problem with you people is you mistake moral claims for having trans-historical truths and properties. Slavery is abhorrent and nobody is defending it. Regardless of the moral questions surrounding its creation re: the slave system , the EC has a different function today. You don’t need to agree with or disagree with the moral crime of slavery or racism to see that. The EC enhances the voting power of smaller less developed states so they do not get railroaded by the large states and dominant economic regions of the country.
I am all for moving the US towards a more democratic system. If you want to abolish the EC and replace it with something more democratic that preserves the representation of smaller states within our Federated system then I am certainly on board with that and I encourage it. What I disagree with is the flippant dismissal of people, particularly workers in smaller red states that raise objections about just abolishing the EC, simply because it’s “wrong”. You want coastal elites to dominate workers in red states, you’re a reactionary, you’re not talking about improving democracy you’re talking about domination by coastal political and economic elites who don’t even represent the majority of people in the regions they claim to. They represent bourgeois and petit-bourgeois interests aka PMCs.
Again, it’s the same thing with the civil war discourse. Either the civil war gets talked about in moral terms or it gets dismissed as being about states rights. Both are Liberal idealist conceptions which I do not accept or agree with at face value.
The civil war was fought over what economic model the US would employ. One economic model which featured chattel slavery and one economic model that featured the wage slavery of industrial capitalism.
The early 19th century in the US is a period of immense conflict and upheaval over tariffs. Northern industrialists wanted high tariffs on British manufactured goods and southern agriculturalists wanted low tariffs on British manufacturing imports.
The southern agriculturalists wanted low tariffs because every time the Northern Industrialists raised tariffs on British goods, the British would raise tariffs on US agricultural exports, specifically cotton. High British tariffs on American cotton = cotton industry in other regions of the world in British East India for example to develop and reduced the competitiveness of US agriculturalists in the future.
So anytime the Northern Industrialists attempted to protect US industry from competition with the more dominant British manufacturing industry, the British used the South to create political opposition to that tariff in the US. See 1828 tariff of abominations which dramatically raised tariffs and invited retaliatory tariffs from the British and resulted in South Carolina threatening to secede from the union if the tariff was not nullified. The compromise of 1832 lowered that tariff significantly and capitulated to the demands of the south.
Friedrich List, a German-American economist, saw British manufacturing reducing the development of industry in other parts of the world. List encouraged European states and the US to institute protective tariffs to protect their infant industrial sectors from being held back by British manufacturing dominance in the world market.
It is no more than fair that England, now that she has attained the culminating point of her industrial growth and progress, should restore again to the nations of Continental Europe a portion of those productive forces which she originally derived from them.
What benefit is it to the people of the United States for instance, that they sacrifice the welfare of their finest and most cultivated states. The states of free labor and perhaps their entire future natural greatness for the advantage of supplying England with raw cotton. On this system the trade with England only tended to promote the agricultural labor of the American slaves while on the other hand the freest most enlightened and most powerful states of the union found themselves entirely arrested in their economical progress and thus reduced to dispose of the annual surplus of their population and capital by emigration to the wastelands of the west.
By means of the influence of the cotton planters and importers and by the aid of the Democratic Party, especially by means of the so-called compromise bill in1832, a modification of the former tariff had taken place. Which although it certainly amended the excesses and faults of the former tariff and also still secured to the American manufacturers a tolerable degree of protection in respect of the courser fabrics of cotton and woolen, nevertheless gave the English all concession which they would’ve desired without England being compelled to make any counter concessions. Since the passage of that bill, the exports of England to America have enormously increased.
Who is depicted as the primary victims of Trump’s tariffs? Farmers. Agriculturalists are always depicted as the victim of tariffs on foreign manufactured goods because reciprocal tariffs are invariably always on agricultural exports.
Opposition to the southern economic model and moral opposition to slavery went hand in hand. One way to encourage opposition to the Southern economic model is the fact that slavery is a repugnant institution that has no place in a civilized society. It bolsters the economic argument to engage in a moral campaign against the Southern economic model which featured slavery as its dominant form of labor.
I have nothing in common with neoconfederates, you don’t even know what that means. I don’t know what point you Libs are trying to make by likening anybody that might question the moral justification of abolishing the EC today based on an institution a war was fought to end by your own account. It’s shitty politics regardless of the moral question of slavery if you claim to care about working class people of any race. All it doest is alienate people in red states who have no interest in challenging the fact slavery is morally abhorrent but are rightly concerned about being dominated by elites in coastal cities.
You can call me a Fascist, a neoconfederate, a racist, a Trump supporter, you throw these terms at people reflexively, they don’t mean anything and they have no power outside your little Liberal echo-chamber.
The European states that were able to abolish serfdom and break the power of the landed aristocrats or get them out of slavery and into industry and away from farming are the states that industrialized most rapidly and were most competitive going into the 20th century. The states which retained slavery for longer and didn’t push the landed aristocracy into heavy industry as the INDUSTRIAL BOURGEOISIE, AS THE MATURATION OF A HISTORIC CLASS, entered the 20th century on weaker footing.
Austria-Hungary which abolished slavery late and under duress entered the 20th century in much worse shape than Germany and Britain who abolished it much earlier. Agriculture in most cases is dominated by a competing interest with industrial capitalists. The agricultural sector, regardless of the nature of the exploitation whether it is wage labor or slave labor is going to want its interests met at the expense of the overall development of other competing industry. It is a matter of opportunity cost as well.
Prior to the civil war tariffs are around 20%, after the civil war tariff rates hover between 40-50% and they stay there until at least 1910. 50 year of dramatically higher tariffs because agricultural interests were systematically broken by state violence. Good. Slavery is an abhorrent institution. But the contents of peoples minds and hearts are irrelevant.
Whether you are a landed aristocrat who owns slaves, like the first president of the United States or an industrial capitalist the situation is basically the same. You are exploiting people in a more vulnerable position than you in the name of your own private interest. The difference is the form and economic potential of that exploitation. The North won because their system of exploitation was more effective. This does not trivialize the wrong of chattel slavery. The point is that Capitalism is much worse than people think and employee-employer relationship are worse than people think. The entire premise is that slavery is unquestionably wrong, it relies on the shared consensus that slavery is wrong. Marxism objects to exploitation in ALL its forms.
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