What? Why should it be broken up afterwards? Modern aerospace requires the stability and funding of a large SOE. Every time Boeing or Airbus designs a new airplane, they gamble their entire budget.
this post was submitted on 26 Mar 2024
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it's a peculiarity of the western brainpan that when they imagine large-scale regulatory action, even in those dreams that action must be in service of producing m a r k e t c o m p e t i t i o n
less jokingly, you could decouple the defense contracting from the civilian work (so like pre-90s boeing). but in a world where the guvmint would nationalize boeing, that guvmint's probably a DotP, in which case idk that we care that the civvie and military work be kept distinct
If it happened in the US, then that military division would probably shrink down to nothing pretty quickly.
I like to imagine that they actually mean the people who work for Boeing. Just snapping board members and managers in half.
: p
It's been time for so long. The whole airline industry is shattering under the weight of capitalism. It's breathtaking watching the accelerating decay of vital national infrastructure, and Capitalism's apparently complete inability to counter-act it's own corrosive tendencies.
As far as I know the US airline industry has always been propped up by 
. It’s always gotten subsidies and bailouts.
You're right as far as I know. But from what I understand the airlines have cut things so close to the bone that the system is on the verge of total, irrecoverable collapse. There's a crisis with finding enough pilots - becoming a pilot is ruinously expensive and many were killed or disabled by covid. A lot of the infrastructure that allows the planning of flights and monitoring of planes is ancient, on the verge of collapse, and very hard to replace. Boeing, obviously, is having problems.
I'm starting to worry just how non-competitive US industry actually is. I swear, the poster child for capitalism is the most inferior version of capitalism. Switzerland would make for a much better capitalist rival than the US.
The issue is that Boeing already is nationalized in the American sense. Boeing isn't even just a massive security contractor. Or one of the US's most historically profitable exports. It's a integral part of the actual US state, including and especially for all the shady shit it does behind it's public product of flying people places on the cheap.
The way people are just starting to think about Google or Facebook is what Boeing has been for over 50 years.
Don't get me wrong; if we're going to have lots of air travel it should absolutely be regulated, publicly controlled, and for broad benefit not profit. But the idea there would be a will or a way to break up the institution of Boeing and turn it toward the public good is like saying let's divide up the NSA as competing privacy advocates.
It's time to nationalize and then merge all the aircraft producers.
This discussion continues to be weird to me, like when people claim that Boeing is going to go out of business or be allowed to fail.
Boeing is essentially a branch of the US Air Force, it will never be allowed to fail or broken up.
I don't think breaking Boeing up into ten squabbling, feuding companies will make things better.
Just look at what happened with Bell Telephone and the baby bells. Like the T1000 it just took a couple decades to re-form into a duopoly (Verizon and AT&T) and would completely reform back into Bell Telephone if the regulators would let it.
I don't know what the solution would be, but it's not more capitalism
Well if your trying to give everyone in america a gilded cage then breaking boeing up would distribute the wealth in a manner that would alleviate the contradictions in capitalism enough to give the workers enough treats to not rebel. I want the workers starving so they do the revolution, hence I believe that boeing should be bailed out so that american aviation and engineering can decline. Best case scenario is americas nuclear capability becomes so degraded it cant actually work and we get nuked without being able to retaliate.
then breaking boeing up would distribute the wealth in a manner that would alleviate the contradictions in capitalism enough to give the workers enough treats to not rebel
I don't know if that's really true though. It didn't happen when they broke up Bell Telephone.
I don't know what the unionization level was like at Bell before the anti trust decision, but it's certainly the case today that things are worse. The CWA is still present but I don't think they have a lot of leverage.
I honestly don't even think the breakup of Bell was good for consumers. It might have led to some technical innovations but I don't know if prices really came down that much.
The gist of what I’m try to say is that there is an option here that is the best for capitalism to continue existing and usually that option has some concessions for the workers/consumers/ect and we should not pick that option as we need to do full fucking communism full throttle straight into that brick wall saying capitalism and we got to smash through it even if everyone in the car dies.
aimixin on "competitive industry", a bit tangentially:
This hits at one of the core flaws of libertarianism. They tend to hold as a core axiom that competitive markets and free markets are one in the same, i.e. that the "natural state" of the markets are highly competitive, and if there is a lack of competition, it must be an "unnatural state", i.e. there is some sort of top-down interference, government policies, which restrict competition.
Libertarians thus see cronyism as happening from the top-down, where governments interfere with the markets, create monopolies, and all for the purpose of enriching themselves. Hence, they conclude the problem is government, that you have to get rid of government and then the problems will be solved.
This is the direct opposite view of Marxists. Marxists instead argue that markets inherently lead to a gradual increase in monopolization over time, what Marx referred to as the "laws of the concentration and centralization of capitals", and that market economies have a natural tendency to move more and more away from competition over time.
More than this, Marxists also see political power as not ultimately originating from the superstructure of society (the politics), but instead from the base of society (the economics). Any government policy requires enforcement, but any enforcement inherently presupposes an economic system which can produce tools of enforcement and allocate them appropriately to the enforcers. Politics is inherently derivative of economics.
The reason the political system favors the wealthy is not because of some laws implemented by some evil cabal that if they were just abolished, then capitalism would "work". No, the reason the political system favors the wealthy is because the wealthy are the ones who control society's wealth, and so of course the political system will favor them.
No law you write on a piece of paper will make a billionaire like Jeff Bezos have equal political influence as a minimum wage worker barely making ends meet. Production is the most fundamental basis of human society and those who control production control society's wealth and will inevitably have more influence. Even if you write laws saying bribery is illegal then they can just bribe those who enforce it.
Hence, Marxists do not see cronyism as a result of top-down processes implemented by a corrupt superstructure, by some evil cabal within the government that corrupted "true capitalism" and turned it into cronyism.
Rather, Marxists see cronyism as originating from a bottom-up process, that stems from the economic base in and of itself. Markets inevitably lead over time to greater and greater monopolization, creating a larger and larger gap between the working masses and the capitalists, and even if there is a "rising tide" and workers' wages rise as well, the profits of capital increase disproportionality faster, and capital continues to centralize rapidly, leading to an increasing social chasm between the rich and the poor.
This is why libertarianism/conservatism has never worked in history and will never work. They can't get rid of "big government" because the economic base, capitalism, inherently creates an enormous social divide, enormous polarization in the economy. This enormous wealth inequality naturally translates to power inequality, which then allows the capitalists to capture the state for their interests.
Once the capitalists capture the state, there is no reason for them not to implement "big government" but for their own benefit, i.e. corporate bailouts and subsidies and such. Libertarian policies, hence, in practice, always lead to "big government". Never in human history have they actually achieved their goals, because their goals are fundamentally impossible and self-contradictory.
Another separate point is that these people also have a tendency to water down what "capitalism" means. Capitalism is about capital, that's why it's called capitalism. This refers to a specific kind of society dominated by capital, i.e. production for profit. Libertarians like water down "capitalism" to refer specifically just to trade or markets, but capitalism is not tradeism or marketism. It's capitalism. Pre-capitalist economies have had trade and markets and so have socialist economies.