Trump is terrible for workers, but like his models Putin and Orban, also for capitalists. Anyone who opposes him risks being stripped of their property and possibly life and liberty as well. This is, I think, new in the history of capitalism. It could be dismissed as exceptional in the cases of Putin and Orban, new men in post-communist states with no history of liberal capitalism. Similarly with third world kleptocrats. I'm not aware that the fascist/Nazi regimes of C20 displayed the same degree of personal corruption
But Trump has captured the centre of the globla capitalist system and is extracting rent on a massive scale. I think this may require an entirely new analysis, but I can't as yet supply it
There is a line of Ta-Nehisi Coates that comes to my mind in this talk about vulnerability. Coates writes: “you have been cast in
to a race in which the wind is always at your face and the hounds are always at your heels. And to
varying degrees this is true of all life. The difference is that you do not have the privilige of living in
ignorance of this essential fact”.
I guess capitalism is not the origin of vulnerability. Life is. , but it is the origin of the illusion vulnerability is far away. And that illusion is the privilege of the rich, a group that seems to get smaller when capitalism takes
Trump is terrible for workers, but like his models Putin and Orban, also for capitalists. Anyone who opposes him risks being stripped of their property and possibly life and liberty as well. This is, I think, new in the history of capitalism. It could be dismissed as exceptional in the cases of Putin and Orban, new men in post-communist states with no history of liberal capitalism. Similarly with third world kleptocrats. I'm not aware that the fascist/Nazi regimes of C20 displayed the same degree of personal corruption
But Trump has captured the centre of the globla capitalist system and is extracting rent on a massive scale. I think this may require an entirely new analysis, but I can't as yet supply it
There is a line of Ta-Nehisi Coates that comes to my mind in this talk about vulnerability. Coates writes: “you have been cast in
to a race in which the wind is always at your face and the hounds are always at your heels. And to
varying degrees this is true of all life. The difference is that you do not have the privilige of living in
ignorance of this essential fact”.
I guess capitalism is not the origin of vulnerability. Life is. , but it is the origin of the illusion vulnerability is far away. And that illusion is the privilege of the rich, a group that seems to get smaller when capitalism takes