22,748

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 7 years, 6 months ago by Billy_T.