convergence of ideologies

Wow! I just now had the weirdest realisation.
Pure capitalist free market practices are in some central ways actually indistiguishable from pure communist ideology! The revelation just about knocked me over.

I was doing some tidying up and glanced casually over a row of books. A stray thought struck me: how few of the older publishing companies still exist. I mused for a moment that this was natural for a free market; there would be a shifting of the publishing population as some go out of business and new ones pop up to replace them. The free market rationalises that it is OK for people to lose all when their businesses fail because that is part of survival of the fittest and overall society maintains an efficient service.

Then it hit me. The free market is using the same rationale that communism does: the individuals don't matter -- it is the larger society that is important. They just go about it in slightly different ways.

The kind of communism that USSR had was really just a single, big, bureaucratic company. It worked the same way: board members picked the leader; the general workers were told what to do and had little or no say in matters. The US is heading in the same direction as larger and larger corporations conglomerate into single monolithic organisations where board members pick the leader and the workers are told what to do with little or no say in matters.

Old Europe, particularly the northern countries, seem to be the only ones still trying to look after individuals. Australia was always good at that in the past, but is going after the US model of "fuck the individual, the nation state is all that matters". The weird thing is that this is done while saying in very Orwellian fashion that individuals matter.