The Democratic Party's Slide Into Irrelevance

So you're assuming that the only reason party leaders would want other members to agree with them is because of "big money interests"?

Then you give examples of the two Senators who have done the most to prevent the Democratic leadership from winning votes.

Lol, yeah. Fetterman’s “change” was literal brain damage.

Fetterman was always awful.

Still wasn't as bad as Feinstein

Fair enough.

That said, in your opinion, who is NOT awful?

I don't think it was brain damage either, but it's certainly possible given his stroke.

Yes. Absolutely.

I am asserting without any equivocation that the Democratic establishment (as embodied by Schumer, Pelosi, Obama, Biden, Clyburn & the Clintons) is owned by big money ..... lock, stock and barrel,

Well, I disagree with you, but even if that is true it doesn't prove your point. Regardless of their governing philosophy, they would logically want to have other members who agree with them on most issues.

I don’t buy the leftist idea that labor and capital are natural enemies and its an inevitable zero-sum game between the two factions. Historically, both grow when their time horizons are aligned eg when firms invest long-term and households save long-term, wages and profits rise together.

The relationship only becomes cannibalistic when either side shortens its timeframe: households taking on debt to improve living standards and bidding up housing for immediate gains, or capital chasing quarterly returns instead of long-term productivity. That’s when conflict emerges, not because the economy is zero-sum, but because the time horizons are.

OECD & BLS data: periods of high business investment coincide with rising real wages.

Peter Drucker: short-term shareholderism kills cooperative labor-capital relations.

Thomas Piketty (ironically): rising capital returns often follow low investment in long-term productive assets.

Capital is building robots wherever possible to replace human labor. Capital is anti-collective bargaining. Capital will replace your job with someone overseas who makes a fraction of your salary and works in unsafe conditions.

The only thing capital cares about is its own growth.

Right. That's probably the biggest difference between what Marx thought would happen in the 20th century and what actually happened. Britain and other advanced, industrialized economies never had socialist revolutions because they made milder reforms that involved cooperation between labor and owners. Instead you had socialist revolutions in the exact opposite places; Russia and China as they were transitioning from agrarian to industrialized societies. Basically the worst possible place for it to happen as they did not have long standing institutions to protect anyone with a difference of opinion during times of massive change.

If Bezos personally owned every firm and wrote every regulation, our living standard would go up, not down. Capital has no incentive to impoverish the people it needs as workers AND customers.

And sure, companies automate and offshore. But they do those things when productivity gains or cost structures demand it, not because they want to destroy labor. The historical evidence shows that when investment rises in technology, training, and capital goods, etc. wages and living standards rise alongside profits, not in opposition.

There’s no data supporting what you or the far left “exploitation” narrative claims. It’s just unsupported stump speech rhetoric. You can talk about how the gains of capital get distributed, but capital is continually building more factories, more productive capital goods and more and more stuff for people to consume.

Marx didn’t think socialism was around the corner for Britain or the U.S. He expected it far in the future once capitalism had fully matured.

And he really wasn’t a revolutionary in the Lenin sense. Marx saw socialism as something that would evolve out of capitalism’s own internal dynamics, not something you could fast-forward with a vanguard party. Lenin was the one who tried to accelerate the process politically.

One of Marx’s core ideas was that as technology advanced, capital would eventually start undermining its own value with machines becoming so productive, so automated, that they could essentially build more machines with minimal human input. In modern terms it’s what happens when the robots that produce everything can also produce the next generation of robots without needing new workers or much new capital at all?

That’s the long-run scenario he had in mind, not an immediate revolution in already-industrial countries. The only place Marx really imagined political conflict breaking out was at the end of that process when capitalists would try to hang on to political power even as the economic power of their wealth was evaporating. In other words, the revolution wasn’t supposed to create socialism; it was supposed to happen when capitalism had already consumed itself and its value technologically.

He wouldn't need to win customers if he owned every business - they would have to be his customers or starve to death. And to be able to buy from him, they would have to work for him, regardless of wages. I don't believe you thought about this very hard. His personal living standard would be to enjoy everything in the world, while everyone else got just enough to keep them alive.

I don't disagree with that.

But capital isn't growing Earth's resources.

All of that consumption is transforming the resources of the Earth.

So long as we adhere to an ideology that consumption of finite resources is a good thing, we're doomed.

If that were remotely true, we’d all still be living at bare subsistence levels because the wealthy have effectively shaped policy for centuries. And yet living standards for the people have risen dramatically across every industrialized society during that same period.

Yeah. I think obsessive over consumption is our primary problem for a few reasons. In a way its a good problem to have. But at the same time our wiring might not be very well suited to surplus.

How do you define "bare subsistence levels" ?

Most people in the US live paycheck to paycheck. Is that not subsistence level ?

Regardless of their wealth, current business owners have to compete with each other; that's the way capitalism works and why there are laws against collusion and monopoly, to keep competition.

If one owner owns all production of a certain item, he would have far more power. And if one person owned production of everything, he could set prices and wages to any level that would keep workers alive.

Only if they manage money poorly and spend money on things that are not necessarities. I've never met a poor person (or anyone who spends all their paycheck before the next one arrives) who didn't waste lots of their income.

You must live in a tight sequestered bubble.

Go visit a fast food restaurant or a Walmart.

Okay but then what? Our entire economy is geared toward final consumption. Limit that to just the necessities and something like 80% of factories would close and a similar percentage of people would be out of work and on welfare or only working one day a week to sustain their meager living standards.

So I dont think Bezos would reduce the output capacity of all the businesses in the country by 80% if he owned all the businesses in the country. Then again, Im thinking Gates might but for sustainability reasons. But thats more a social or ethical motive than a business one.

Lol, if they're at a fast food restaurant, that proves my point that they're wasting their money.

You seem to be blinded by your love for billionaires.