Reply #17: You're not wrong, but you miss something... [View All]

[Dirk39]

Hello Selatius,
the corporations never called it "class warfare". They did always claim they would do what they are doing for the best of mankind...
The labour-movement, the socialists and later the communists called it "class-struggle" or "class-warfare".

When the former nearly unregulated capitalism did collapse in the 1920's , two different kind of developments occured: the New Deal in the USA - and Fascism in Italy and Germany. The danger of fascism did also exist in the USA.

The New Deal later became the model for the rebuilding of Europe after World War II. There was a kind of consensus after WWII, that an unpacified capitalism has led to the desaster of the first half of the 20th century. This model did work until the Seventies. In Germany it was often labelled "Sozialpartnerschaft", social-partnership. It was used as a kind of opposite model against "classwar".

I think you somehow miss the irony of the original post: while the labour-movement and the socialdemocratic and socialist parties in Europe as well as the Unions gave up the concept of "classwarfare" in the "social-market-economies" of Post-WWII, this time the Corpocrats did re-invent and relaunch it. They started a class-war and along with the neoliberal and so-called neoclassical economic concepts of Thatcher and Reagan, a new classwar started, but this time openly initiated by those at the top.

And this really is a new situation. I think, historically there isn't hardly a difference bigger than the one between people, who don't have any rights and start to fight for their rights on the one hand - and people, who lose their rights on the other hand. There is an unprecedented "backlash" happening since at least the early eighties.

The question isn't so much, if Reagan was worse than the railroad barons and industrialists of the 1800s. But how could someone like Reagan do what he was doing AFTER the New Deal? How could Reagan and Thatcher even take away the little rights that were well established after WWII. How could they do it with so little resistance?

Hello from Germany,
Dirk