22,748

This topic has 19 replies, 5 voices, and was last updated 6 years, 11 months ago by Billy_T.

Viewing 20 posts - 1 through 20 (of 20 total)

Author

Posts
May 10, 2017 at 8:55 pm #68608

wv
Participant

Here’s a shock. The system’s election-system is broke.

link:https://www.commondreams.org/news/2017/05/09/wisconsin-id-law-kept-200000-voters-polls-and-trump-won-just-22748-votes
Wisconsin ID Law Kept 200,000 Voters From Polls—And Trump Won by Just 22,748 Votes

‘The lost voters skewed more African-American and more Democrat’

==========
w
v

May 10, 2017 at 9:09 pm #68610

Zooey
Participant

Huh.

Well, I would yell, “Stop the Presses!” but that picture of Kim Kardashian flossing her twat with an American flag just needs to hit the streets.

May 10, 2017 at 9:57 pm #68613

zn
Moderator

See here’s yet another issue that matters, taken in its own terms.

And yes the USA overthrew Mosedegh in Iran thereby destabilizing the region for years.

Yet, even given that, and all the other horrors of poscolonial modernity and post-war awfulness, here’s a lesser injustice than those, that still needs to be fixed.

That’s my theme du jour.

May 10, 2017 at 11:14 pm #68615

wv
Participant

zn wrote:

See here’s yet another issue that matters, taken in its own terms.

And yes the USA overthrew Mosedegh in Iran thereby destabilizing the region for years.

Yet, even given that, and all the other horrors of poscolonial modernity and post-war awfulness, here’s a lesser injustice than those, that still needs to be fixed.

That’s my theme du jour.

=============

Well, yes, you still think the ship can be saved.
I think thats good. Its a good way to live.

And I’ll continue to think that your outlook is a good one,
as I look at the iceburg and the gaping hole in the side of the ship.

Gotta do ‘somethin’. Might as well try and do some good.

w
v

May 11, 2017 at 12:54 am #68625

zn
Moderator

wv wrote:

And I’ll continue to think that your outlook is a good one,
as I look at the iceburg and the gaping hole in the side of the ship.

Well the church and the lords with their castles and armies have total power and there’s no fighting that. Between them they dominate the world, and it will never change.

May 11, 2017 at 8:33 am #68631

wv
Participant

zn wrote:

Well the church and the lords with their castles and armies have total power and there’s no fighting that. Between them they dominate the world, and it will never change.

===============

Yes, the olden systems were replaced — with a new modern system that is unlike anything humans have had before. There’s never been a system that threatened the biosphere before. And there’s never been a system like this before (psyops, mega-propaganda, think-tanks, nuclear weapons, chemical weapons, bio-weapons, CIA, NSA, satellites, FBI, media, etc).

So looking to the past and thinking “well things have changed before” doesnt do it for me. This system is unique.

w
v

May 11, 2017 at 9:05 am #68633

Billy_T
Participant

The unprecedented nature of capitalism is captured brilliantly by Ellen Meiksins Wood, in her The Origin of Capitalism. My highest recommendation for that book, with the only criticism being it’s too short.

It’s the first inherently imperialistic economic system in world history. It brought us the Industrial Revolution. It must absorb all formerly independent, local economies, or it can’t grow. And its Prime Directive is Grow or Die.

The old feudal system could survive for centuries without expansion. Its local, independent markets could survive in that state for centuries — and did. It didn’t need to conquer other territories for its local markets to remain healthy. But the same can not be said for capitalism. It must destroy or absorb all independent markets, unify them, or it can’t do what it needs to do — increase profits, year after year after year. It dies if it has a static-state economy like feudalism.

To me, “corporations” are just the symptom of all of this. They aren’t the disease itself. They’re the natural result of capitalist laws of competitive motion, and those laws are killing the biosphere.

May 11, 2017 at 9:10 am #68634

Billy_T
Participant

Beyond all of that, those laws are like laws invented for Sci-Fi worlds. Too many people, especially in America, take capitalism as “natural,” and its internal logic as “natural” too. No. It’s just a fiction imposed on all of us, which then has a kind of logic that works within that fiction. But if you deconstruct it, you find it’s built on air. There is nothing real or necessary or logical about any of it. Not in the way we price goods and services; not in the way we set up wages; not in the way we value individual labor. It’s completely and utterly arbitrary and can only be even slightly defended on the grounds of its fictional coherence to fictional norms.

Why humans ever allowed fictions that crush billions and reward the few . . . . I’ll never understand. It’s even more baffling that the masses defend those fictions. We have it within our power to choose much, much better fictions that work on our behalf, for us, instead of the few.

May 11, 2017 at 9:18 am #68635

Billy_T
Participant

One of the things that keeps nagging at me about the capitalist system. As it grows, as it increases neck-breaking hierarchies — and no previous economic systems comes close to this aspect — it’s more and more as if the verticality of wealth and income corresponds to thousands of different species, not just we humans. As in, we’re paid in such extraordinarily segregated forms, with such a massive difference between top and bottom, it’s as if you have humans at the top, dogs in the middle, and worms at the bottom, plus all kinds of different species in between. There simply aren’t enough individual differences between humans to warrant the ginormous gaps. Not in intelligence, “hard work,” creativity, etc. etc.

There aren’t enough, really, to warrant more than about a 4 to 1 ratio, max. And that wouldn’t take into account all the massive advantages or disadvantages coming from the birth lottery — which, it could be argued, cancel out that 4 to 1 ratio.

The disease is capitalism itself. We need new economic forms that correspond with actual human differences, which are minimal, and much of that is due to the luck of the birth lottery itself.

May 11, 2017 at 12:39 pm #68638

zn
Moderator

wv wrote:

There’s never been a system that threatened the biosphere before.

Yes there has been. That’s been the way all along. For example, in the 1500s, one year, and I forget which, ship builders in England could not find a single pine tree tall enough to be made into a shipmast. People had to switch to sea coal for their home fires. Where was all the wood going? Among other things, to the gunpowder industry. You know that rivers like the Rhine and Danube used to be famously clear? Now they’re famously muddy. That was because of deforestization, which itself was driven by the fact that while castles are made of stone they are also made of wood scaffolding. Deforestization led to more sediment runoff from the land, so the great rivers of europe all darkened.

May 11, 2017 at 6:16 pm #68651

wv
Participant

zn wrote:

wv wrote:

There’s never been a system that threatened the biosphere before.

Yes there has been. That’s been the way all along. For example, in the 1500s, one year, and I forget which, ship builders in England could not find a single pine tree tall enough to be made into a shipmast. People had to switch to sea coal for their home fires. Where was all the wood going? Among other things, to the gunpowder industry. You know that rivers like the Rhine and Danube used to be famously clear? Now they’re famously muddy. That was because of deforestization, which itself was driven by the fact that while castles are made of stone they are also made of wood scaffolding. Deforestization led to more sediment runoff from the land, so the great rivers of europe all darkened.

==================

Interesting. Didnt know that. But i still dont think that comes close to the present situation. The toxic-massive-corporate mix of pollutants and poisons and nuclear weapons and climate-change-agents….etc.

So, we’ll have to agree to disagree on there being a historical precedence for this.

w
v

May 11, 2017 at 7:01 pm #68658

zn
Moderator

wv wrote:

But i still dont think that comes close to the present situation

Remember, what I said is, this has been happening all along. I didn’t exclude the new technology magnifying it. I just mean to point out that the history on this was deep.

It’s just that before, it was kings doing it.

May 11, 2017 at 7:13 pm #68659

nittany ram
Moderator

wv wrote:

Interesting. Didnt know that. But i still dont think that comes close to the present situation. The toxic-massive-corporate mix of pollutants and poisons and nuclear weapons and climate-change-agents….etc.

So, we’ll have to agree to disagree on there being a historical precedence for this.

w
v

Technology (or a lack thereof) is what sets them apart from what’s happening today more-so than the system. The system was basically the same I would suspect, or at least it was at its core – the “haves” were trying to gain wealth and power at the expense of the “havenots” – just as today. The difference is the “haves” weren’t running mega corporations – they were the royal classes and privileged gentry.

Modern technology and how it’s applied is the big difference. That’s what puts us and so many other species in danger today. Of course, if there is a hope of turning this around technology will have to play a key part in that as well. It’s a double-edged sword.

May 11, 2017 at 7:46 pm #68663

Billy_T
Participant

IMO,

Folks are missing the fundamentally revolutionary changes wrought by capitalism, when it overthrew previous economics forms — which were all local and independent of one another. No previous economic system had even tried to subsume all local markets under its umbrella, and then get governments to make all of that the only legal structure.

Capitalism is unique. Yes, you always had the “haves” and the “have nots.” But we never had one dominant force, backed by government, unify by force everything in its wake. If it couldn’t be unified, it was destroyed. Often that destruction precipitated the unification.

We also never had a system based almost exclusively on “exchange value” before. When people got rich before capitalism, they do so by hording the trade of “use value” goods and services. With rare exceptions, production just wasn’t done for sole reason of exchange. That’s new to capitalism. That became the norm with capitalism. And the mass production of exchange value is what is killing the biosphere.

May 11, 2017 at 7:51 pm #68664

Billy_T
Participant

Before capitalism, we had C-M-C and use value dominate. Commodities exchanged for money to buy more commodities we all needed.

After the capitalist revolution, that became M-C-M and exchange value. Money, purchasing labor (as a commodity) to produce commodities in exchange for more money. It no longer mattered if anything produced was needed. If they could sell shit on a stick, they did. All that mattered (and matters now) was if it could generate profits. The goal of fulfilling needs was dropped, and “sales and marketing” was established as a wing in order to create “needs” that did not exist.

Also gone forever were local, independent markets, which could function on their own, outside other dominant systems.

May 11, 2017 at 9:14 pm #68667

nittany ram
Moderator

Billy_T wrote:

IMO,

Folks are missing the fundamentally revolutionary changes wrought by capitalism, when it overthrew previous economics forms — which were all local and independent of one another. No previous economic system had even tried to subsume all local markets under its umbrella, and then get governments to make all of that the only legal structure.

Well I don’t disagree with anything you’re saying about capitalism, Billy. I was speaking more in generalities though. I don’t know much about economic systems but I doubt the systems that existed in Western Europe in the 1500s were any ‘better’for the masses than what we have today.

May 11, 2017 at 10:03 pm #68668

wv
Participant

zn wrote:

wv wrote:

But i still dont think that comes close to the present situation

Remember, what I said is, this has been happening all along. I didn’t exclude the new technology magnifying it. I just mean to point out that the history on this was deep.

It’s just that before, it was kings doing it.

=============

Yes, and I’m saying that view doesnt work for ME. I dont think i can say “well history is just continuing along its path like a river”.

To me, what we have now is something NEW. Qualitatively different. Sui Generis.

The technology-of-capitalism has changed the game into something new. A mutation has emerged. Or somethin.

w
v

May 11, 2017 at 10:06 pm #68669

Billy_T
Participant

nittany ram wrote:

Billy_T wrote:

IMO,

Folks are missing the fundamentally revolutionary changes wrought by capitalism, when it overthrew previous economics forms — which were all local and independent of one another. No previous economic system had even tried to subsume all local markets under its umbrella, and then get governments to make all of that the only legal structure.

Well I don’t disagree with anything you’re saying about capitalism, Billy. I was speaking more in generalities though. I don’t know much about economic systems but I doubt the systems that existed in Western Europe in the 1500s were any ‘better’for the masses than what we have today.

They were rotten back then for the masses, too, of course. But within those local, independent market systems there were kernels of hope for a real revolution from the bottom up. Under feudalism, for example, the lord of the manor didn’t have legal ownership of what the people renting his land produced. Yes, they had to tithe to him. But there was not yet any strict employer/employee relationship, under the law, that said someone automatically owns everything generated by others. That came later with capitalism. It was the first system that encoded this upfront ownership of someone else’s production. And until capitalism, most people were self-employed, self-producers, small farmers, artisans, craftsmen, etc. etc. Many of them were independent of feudal lords.

Anyway . . . the bottom line is: The capitalist system, for the first time in history, primarily due to its Grow or Die imperative, subsumed local market after local market, until none were free. And it still has to do this in some form, be it into the future (debt and speculation), into the formerly public realm (privatization), or via consumer labor (self-service). It can never stop its expansion into new markets or reconfiguring old ones. This is really what threatens the planet. Its inexorable need for more and more and more. That was never an innate dynamic for any previous system.

May 11, 2017 at 10:09 pm #68671

Billy_T
Participant

Also, Nittany,

If you’re interested, I think you’d get a ton from The Origin of Capitalism, by Ellen Meiksins Wood. Just a brilliant study of what makes capitalism unique and why. And it’s short. Plus a great bibliography for future reading.

https://www.versobooks.com/books/2407-the-origin-of-capitalism

Can be usefully read along with Michael Perelman’s exceptional The Invention of Capitalism.

https://www.dukeupress.edu/The-Invention-of-Capitalism/

May 11, 2017 at 10:13 pm #68672
Billy_T
Participant
wv wrote:

zn wrote:

wv wrote:

But i still dont think that comes close to the present situation

Remember, what I said is, this has been happening all along. I didn’t exclude the new technology magnifying it. I just mean to point out that the history on this was deep.

It’s just that before, it was kings doing it.

=============

Yes, and I’m saying that view doesnt work for ME. I dont think i can say “well history is just continuing along its path like a river”.

To me, what we have now is something NEW. Qualitatively different. Sui Generis.

The technology-of-capitalism has changed the game into something new. A mutation has emerged. Or somethin.

w
v

I agree with this, but with a caveat. And it’s kinda weird. Cuz it’s almost like a changing river of thought from ZN to you to me. Unless I misread you guys, and it wouldn’t be the first time . . . ZN is essentially saying nothing is new except for the folks in charge. You’re saying, no, this corporatist model is brand new. It’s unique. And I’m saying, it goes deeper still. It’s the underlying system of legal forms and social relations invented for the capitalist system itself . . . the capitalist system in and of itself, its inherent, internal logic . . . that the corporatist model is just the logical progression, the natural evolution of a highly unnatural and unique economic form.

We could end the corporate model today, and capitalism would innovate and sprout something just as bad or worse tomorrow. It needs to be taken out, root, trunk and branch.
- This reply was modified 6 years, 11 months ago by Billy_T.
Author

Posts