Stop Me Before I Vote Again

"If you over-focus on the for-profit corporate form"

i should have added and added emphatically

for corporate forms
in any one sector
or even just a few sectors of the economy
----------------------

if one could take
the for profit corporate form
out of the commanding heights of the system
ie the FIRE sector

and formed a government
that was in essence
not merely anti corporate
but pro job class
and as such able to exact certain actions in exchange for
the privilege of limited liability

then we could really fly 'round here
which of course is the silvery truth
inside zeese's pwog platitude:

"concentrated corporate power is the central issue creating dysfunction in government."

Not quite witcha on this one, op-san, though you have a point. You can't really think profit-seekers are no worse than no-profs, can you?

Hell, the true problem with "elections" in this society is that they are conducted entirely via 30-second TV spots, with a soupcon (funny French "c" not used on purpose) of reportage to make the elite feel elite about the whole thing.

But to question this is to question TV itself, and that is among the Top Five Most Forbidden Items in the overclass universe. And that's for reasons of sales and profits, not simple bureaucracy.

The word/term "non-profit" in the context of business entities has the same cachet as the word "public" in the context of broadcasting entities. A lot of Americans I've known have ascribed to "non-profit" and "public" a kind of benevolence and purity of motive that are not really deserved. They are both forms of gatekeeping for those who follow urges to step outside the mainstream of public thought.

Televangelist churches and the like (Jim Bakker, Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson, etc) abuse the "non-profit" gig more obviously to more people, I think, but a lot of "non-profits" like pseudo-activist groups (Sierra Club, Nature Conservancy, NRDC, EDF) follow a kind of crackpot realist variant of constant capitulation to capital's power. I'll never forget listening to NRDC and Sierra Club lawyers offering their wussy little "pragmatic environmentalist" thoughts at EPA air quality policy hearings in the early 90s. If those were radical thoughts trying to make for a greener EPA policy, I thought, then the public image ain't matching the practice. Or vice versa.

"You can't really think profit-seekers are no worse than no-profs, can you?"
the for profits run the system and generate the surplus from exploitation
so of course in general they are the key
but i agree with oxy

in a commercial society
the budget constrained non profits

" A lot of Americans I've known have ascribed to "non-profit" and "public" a kind of benevolence and purity of motive that are not really deserved."
i'll go further
and suggest the history of nationalized corporations
show us something crucial
to job class liberation
does not emerge
when the private apropriation
of the operating surplus is removed
from a corporation like its a malignant growth

The best framework I've seen for pretty good job class liberation comes in the council communist form. That can be profit-making without the wretchedness of privateer capitalism. But it has to be backstopped with the citizen's dividend MD mentioned a thread or two back. It's still exploitation if you can't walk away from a job situation that just isn't working out.

There's no doubt that many orgs exploit the label or that most major orgs are supplicants to the system.

But, seriously, come on. If you really mean this, op-san, then why bother? So all possible forms of PBS are just as awful as the PBS we have? The Medicare administration is just as much an obstacle as the Jackson Holers?

As to "nationalized industries," call me when one of them is reclaimed at its pinnacle, rather than at its trough. And call me when somebody, anybody summons the chutzpah to launch a public venture to compete with the profiteers exactly when and where they want no such thing.

As to Al's point about profit-making in Mondragon, well that's a totally different thing, isn't it? Profit maximization for private investors is not the same thing as shared control of operating surpluses.

Crap, SMBIVA is decaying just at the moment of its proof-against-tests, what with the "you" pipe stuffers, MJS's tiredness, and now this amazing hooey.

"If you really mean this, op-san, then why bother? ..."

to notice the limits of a reform
is not
always to reject it

"The Medicare administration is just as much an obstacle as the Jackson Holers?"
of course not
in fact
its precisely that sort of conflation
that on a less grand scale
causes posturing radicals to reject pub op

in general my post accomplished its mission

the can of worms is now open

===============
here you get at a core action

" launch a public venture to compete with the profiteers exactly when and where they want no such thing"

we need to discover
exactly what actions reveal
a class power to struggle for

"Profit maximization for private investors is not the same thing as shared control of operating surpluses"

the context requires totalization
ie
the flow of surplus out of each and every firm
generating a social surplus that flows into and thru
a fully socialized transfer system

we have its pre figuration in the credit system and the various safety net mechanisms

---

the great fallacy of most co op paradigms
is the reliance on sterile
notions about reified market mechanisms
for mediation
and the wildly limited
fostering
of specific worker/producer collectives
with control of specific
facilities and funds

to accomplish the impossible is ..not possible

the prole state will "intervene " everywhere and deeply

there can be no notion of a just wage
or
realizable compensation
that amounts to a task based
clarkian "full value added " compensation

the social dividend

---grotesquely called in euro zone the social wage --

will begin to negate has begun to negate
the bourgeois right based wage
long before it fully sublates
bourgeois right wages however
we face a protracted interval
of contradictory motion there indeed

lets note as pompously as possible

to expect a result that contradicts
the retained substance of a process
after a change of form is plain folly

after formal sublation
the struggle for full sublation
has only begun
---------------

more emerging worms:

too many spontaneously conjured
generalized notions
of radical "total" system wide reform
of our social institutions
along the victorian lines
of nationalization
of the enterprises of production
delude their advoactes
into rejecting actual reforms
thrown up by the class struggle

reforms like
the public health insurance option

It's a small point, but there are considerable differences between the Mondragon model and council communist model.

Mondragon has laudable democratic practices, but management gets an absurdly high level of pay relative to value producers. Is there any management so magnificent that it should receive three or more times the salary of labor? The co-op workers can vote on that wage ratio, but firing the boss is difficult. Managers and supervisors have weighted votes, preferred shares in the co-op. That's not good. Management needs to be delegative.

A term that comes to mind is full spectrum dominance. Private equity fuels both for profit and non-profit corporations, as it does the two major political parties. With its primary purpose being theft, the vehicle used becomes secondary. Thus tax evasion and fraud become enshrined as philanthropy.

Jay's got the news.

" With its primary purpose being theft, the vehicle used becomes secondary. Thus tax evasion and fraud become enshrined as philanthropy."

rhetorical device: litotes
-------------------

moray Al :
you nicely show the spontaneous
morphing stages
back to
main frame exploitation

one thinks of a renowned contra temps between
the great bronsstein and uncle vlad

something vague but heavy
in v.i.'s gut
seems to have told him
the working class would need
their unions
even under the workers state

Re: heathcare: it could be made cheaper even and more accessible--as most countries seeming prove--while still being based on a reactionary institutional model. And in my opinion that's better than nothing.

Saying that--here in America--give our political character, I think it would basically take a revolution before there is any hope of the situation seriously changing. So calling for public insurance or whatever is probably vain at this point (like just about everything else leftists advocate).

Non-profits are, by and large, shadow ops for for-profits. They are administered by the same forces that run for-profits, and although they reinvest their operating budgets in future operations, and do not account for a traditional profit, they prop up the power structure for the elites just as thoroughly as for-profits.

In fact, because they are so good at fooling more people into believing that they are benevolent, non-profits (such as the Pentagon, churches, the Gates Foundation) are more destructive to good than for-profits.