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Fri 27 Mar, 2020 08:44 am
As the pandemic threat turns into a new threat of socialism milking it for money, which turns into a threat of more fiscal discipline to fend off socialism, Karl Marx's theory of historical dialectics seems relevant.
Excuse my weak history knowledge, but it seems to me that if you look at the rise of Hitler, that was a dialectical response to the spectre of Bolshevism, and Bolshevism was threatening because of dialectical conflicts within the Bolshevics of the early USSR, where what originated as peasants taking over farmland for their own benefit turned into 'war communism' where bread was being sold in international markets to fund Soviet industrial expansion.
Then, Hitlerism/Nazism gave rise to a dialectical response that was WWII, and the nuclear end to WWII gave rise to a series of dialectical responses that came to be known generally as the Cold War.
As the Cold War seemed to end and the wall go down in the 80s/90s, there seems to have been dialectical responses within the 'new world order,' which are harder to generalize, but which have led to developments in the dialectics of terrorism and anti-terrorism and, correspondingly, with various forms of fiscal stimulus and conservative counter-stimulus efforts.
Now we seem to entering into a new phase of history where pandemic-threats are becoming a new impetus for Cold-War arms-race-like politics where military-industrial-complex type economics are combined with health/medical industry economics.
Since the ACA/Obamacare interweaving of tax policy with insurance demand, new frontiers have emerged in the prospects of combining governmental fiscal power with health care spending, and that seems to be the driving issue in the current presidential race. But as the corona pandemic threat has emerged, health/medicine seems to be blooming into a more intense arena for the ongoing battle between socialism and conservatism to continue.
Marx may have been right in forecasting these ongoing historical dialectics, but he has never been right about real communism emerging from it all, probably because people like fighting over money better than they like the idea of peacefully and selflessly contributing all their effort to pursuit of a 'common good' that can easily be manipulated and exploited for power and greed in various ways.
So the dialectics continue, but what can we expect as the 2o2os continue now that coronamania has crowned this decade as the one in which the politicization of pandemic virus threats will have to be dealt with along with the prospect of natural and artificial viruses themselves as well as other issues of genetic engineering, health care issues of an aging population, and the problems of climate and environment that underlie everything else?