In the tiny clips of Trump that I hear on radio and TV, one kind interests me a lot: it's the one where he says that he's going to be bringing jobs and prosperity to workers. This goes right to the core of capitalism as an idea, as opposed to how it actually works as an economic system. The idea is that capitalists like Trump give people jobs. Going with this is the idea that if you don't have a job, it's NOT because a capitalist failed to give you one, it's your fault. It's your fault because 1) you didn't do the right things and/or you're not the right kind of person to be ready for the capitalist to give you a job or 2) socialist liberal sleaze balls (like Hilary Clinton) have created a welfare system that prevents capitalists from giving you a job.
In order to sell these ideas, it's crucial that one part of the process of capitalism is hidden or obscured from the people: capitalists are simply people who will do anything and everything necessary to make money for capitalists. It's not a secret. It's what the system is for. It's not a charity. It's not philanthropy. So, totally openly and legally capitalists go about opening businesses where they can get workers on the lowest possible wages, they can get their materials at the lowest possible price, they can hire buildings and plant at the lowest possible price and they can distribute what they sell at the lowest possible rate.
The result of these imperatives is that they not only open businesses, they also move them and close them.
That's people like Trump. In other words, even if we say they 'provide jobs', then by the very same token, and as part of the very same process, they take them away, they lose them, they vanish them. They go. And yet, mysteriously this part of the process - as an act or deed or decision taken by capitalists - is rarely included in the image of the capitalist as the job-giver, even if the media do tell stories of factory closures.
In order to get away with this 'vanishing', it's vital to keep up the myth of the undeserving, feckless, unqualified work-shy poor, side by side with the image of the bloated welfare system sponging off the poor capitalists who would, if only their hands weren't tied, be rushing to the other side of the tracks, opening factories, running industries.
So it is that someone like Trump, or indeed any spokesperson for the system, keeps up the picture that if you trust him (or them) you will get a job.
