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this post was submitted on 16 Aug 2023
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There's no grand conspiracy and there is no set of rules that will tame the beast.
It's not about individual greed. It is structurally inevitable. Any system which relies on power being in the hands of saintly individuals is doomed to fail.
Power protects itself because it can. Any system with unchecked imbalances of power will devolve into a corrupt oligarchy. Monopoly (the board game) was originally developed to make exactly that point.
I don't know what a genuine Marxist revolution would look like because there has never been one. And I'm not optimistic that there ever will be. The crises of capitalism which create the conditions for a (theoretical) Marxist revolution occur when (and because) labour is at its weakest.
It's fascism that wins out when liberals fuck up. Not least because liberals prefer it that way.
I don't have any answers. But I'm not going to stop looking for them.
It's not a conspiracy, its just a change of motivations for individuals and the whole changes completelly because different motivations at the individuals can result in very different emergent properties of the whole (there's an area of Mathematics for this kind of thing).
Apparently there was investment of money by some very rich people early in the 70s in things like Think Tanks which pushed out the theoretical underpinnings of neoliberalism (and have been shilling fot it ever since) but most of what happenned quite overtly (the fishyest part was them hidding their aources of funding) and most of whate ended up happenning was really just the natural product of human behaviour and how in a "greed is good" system many will naturally seek power as a shortcut for quick personal upside maximization.
There are tons of effects like that: for example people who see power as responsability towards other and thus feel the weight of holding power, are much less likely to seek it than those who feel no weight of responsability whatsoever and just want it to benefit themselves. Interestingly enough there was a study published in the Harvard Business Review some years ago showing something related to that: specifically they discovered that companies led by people who had not got the CEO position by seeking it (for example, the second in line getting the position because the CEO died in an accident) performed better than those with CEOs who had activelly sought that position.
The point being that if structurally you put personal upside maximization at the core of decision making, given human nature you're going to naturally get emerging properties of the whole such as widespread corruption or legal outcomes depending on a person's wealth more than guilt.