The historical record for capitalism is utterly appalling.

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  • March 19, 2020 at 9:54 am #112593
    Billy_T
    Participant

    As mentioned before, reading a really good history on the topic:

    The History of the World in Seven Cheap Things, by Raj Patel and Jason Moore}
    https://www.ucpress.edu/book/9780520299931/a-history-of-the-world-in-seven-cheap-things

    It’s just further confirmation, with new details and insights (for me, at least), that there has never, ever been a more destructive, barbaric, sadistic or bloody economic system in the history of the world. It’s not at all close.

    I’m so sick of hearing or reading people championing capitalism and cheering it on with the endless “it’s lifted more people out of poverty” blah blah blah.

    First off, that’s not true at all. It’s actually created endless poverty where none had existed previous to its conquest in locale after locale. An actual majority of the world’s population lives in poverty today, and we actually have more slavery in the world now than we did in the Atlantic region during the slave era there.

    Second, even if it were true, and it’s not, at what price?

    The numbers of dead, the genocides, the enslavement, the torture, the wars and coups on its behalf, the cultures wiped out, the “disciplining” of countless bodies, the mass extinctions of wildlife, the destruction of ecosystems . . .

    I try damn hard to believe that the people who cheer it on just haven’t looked at the history, that if they did, they’d stop with the cheerleading and seek alternatives. But I really don’t know. I can’t read minds, obviously. I can only hope that “enlightenment” would change human ways.

    In short, it’s not just “neoliberalism” or corporate America. This shit goes back to Columbus and the rise of the capitalist system overall. It’s the first naturally imperialistic economic system in world history, and it’s killing the planet and making people lose their minds.

    March 19, 2020 at 1:11 pm #112601
    wv
    Participant

    Preach, Comrad 🙂

    I dont disagree with any of that.

    We Americans who think that are a tiny minority though, BT.

    “Progressives” make up a bigger group and even they cant get more than a handful of progressive-dems elected in this nation. There’s Bernie, AOC, a few others. A tiny group.

    We are trapped in the Madhouse.

    I’m just gonna feed the Crows, and drink my tea.

    w
    v
    “Drink your tea slowly and reverently, as if it is the axis
    on which the world earth revolves – slowly, evenly,
    without rushing toward the future.”
    Thich Nhat Hanh

    March 19, 2020 at 1:19 pm #112603
    wv
    Participant

    PS — I always have at least one Political Book I’m reading, cuz thats my ‘core’. I’m ‘political’ at my core.

    But the political books almost always infuriate me. I walk around in a quiet Fury for big parts of the day. And if i read the internet and read about Dems, Reps, Trump, Biden — all the swamp-dwellers — it makes me furious.

    So, much of my day is devoted to resisting that fury-feeling.

    I find i have to have non-political books, dvds, nature-walks, etc.
    If I dont, I walk around like Alex-Jones er somethin.

    So I’m reading about Free-Diving and Whales right now. Keeps me sane, in the Madhouse.

    w
    v
    “The mind is its own place, and in itself
    Can make a Heaven of Hell, a Hell of Heaven”
    John Milton, Paradise Lost

    March 19, 2020 at 5:06 pm #112645
    Billy_T
    Participant

    Good quotes, WV, as per usual.

    Yeah, gotta step back from all that, frequently.

    Nietzsche said:

    “Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster. And when you look long into an abyss, the abyss also looks into you.”

    (Probably not the best translation. Found it on the Web, etc. etc. Too tired to dig through my books.)

    • This reply was modified 4 years, 2 months ago by Billy_T.
    March 19, 2020 at 5:12 pm #112648
    Billy_T
    Participant

    I sometimes wonder if the way I talk about capitalism is even remotely adequate. Even words like “genocide, slavery, poverty, inequality” and so on can act as a way to de-personalize all of this. There are always individual human beings involved in that suffering, that torture, those chains. They have names, faces, families and so on. They exist in the real world, or once did.

    History books can help us connect the dots, think about the Big Picture, and perhaps even walk in the shoes of others for a time, in our heads at least. But it’s really not a substitute for “being there.” It really doesn’t convey the depths of despair all of these poor souls experienced, and still experience, because of the capitalist system.

    Hope all is well in WV. Stay safe.

    March 19, 2020 at 5:40 pm #112655
    wv
    Participant
    Billy_T wrote:

    I sometimes wonder if the way I talk about capitalism is even remotely adequate. Even words like “genocide, slavery, poverty, inequality” and so on can act as a way to de-personalize all of this..

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

    I dunno, BT. Its a wise person who wonders those kinds of things, though.

    But i dunno if there’s a best way. Seems like the left has always
    needed many kinds of flowers to bloom.

    Scott Nearing in his autobio describes such an amazing assortment of lefties with
    various kinds of voices prior to 1914 or so.
    And then he describes what he defines as “the Oligarchy’s” utter destruction of the American left between WWI and WWII.

    I just dont think many Americans are listening anymore, BT. I dont know that it matters how you talk about the situation. I dont think they can hear.
    Nearing used the word “brainwashing”. I usually avoid that word…but it fits.

    w
    v

    March 20, 2020 at 10:13 am #112694
    Billy_T
    Participant

    WV,

    I had never heard of Nearing before your post. Looked him up on Wiki, skimmed most of it, and, wow! He sounds like he was an amazing leftist. Lived to be 100, walked the walked. Courageous, etc.

    I then looked him up via “Libby” to see if my local library systems had any of his work. They have his The American Empire (via project Gutenberg).

    That’s on my virtual book shelf now.

    You are a great resource, WV!!

    March 20, 2020 at 11:19 am #112698
    wv
    Participant
    Billy_T wrote:

    WV,

    I had never heard of Nearing before your post. Looked him up on Wiki, skimmed most of it, and, wow! He sounds like he was an amazing leftist. Lived to be 100, walked the walked. Courageous, etc.

    I then looked him up via “Libby” to see if my local library systems had any of his work. They have his The American Empire (via project Gutenberg).

    That’s on my virtual book shelf now.

    You are a great resource, WV!!

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

    “The Making of a Radical” — one of the most enjoyable/infuriating books I’ve read in the last few years.

    Nearing was involved in almost every socialist/commie organization in the US, during the Pre-WWI years and after. Firsthand knowledge of the people, the factions, the history.
    The book was written in 1972 when he was about 80. He essentially lays out the ‘propaganda model’ long before Noam and Herman wrote their book.

    He was fired from his Professor jobs because of his anti-war notions, and then his publishers even refused to publish his books anymore, etc and so forth. He describes the learning-suffering-curve of being a radical in the US.

    Later in his life he focused on the whole ‘homesteading’ ecology thing. Whats a radical to do, but eventually go off into the woods 🙂
    But earlier in his life he was yer basic radical-anti-capitalist-commie.

    An awesome guy, and a must-read for any commie.

    w
    v

    March 20, 2020 at 2:49 pm #112706
    Zooey
    Participant

    Re: “Lifting people out of poverty.”

    I think the mistake people make…and it’s really dead easy to see why they make it…is that capitalism is obviously good because we have cars, air conditioning, microwave ovens, and smartphones.

    Of course they attribute those products to capitalism because we didn’t have them prior to capitalism, and communist countries did not have widespread consumer goods available.

    Why on earth would it ever occur to anybody that those things could have…WOULD have…been developed under another economic system. By and large, very few humans question the facts of their existences. You know…we have the entire human mindset to go up against (zn might disagree with that), but I just see humans as very limited creatures.

    I was at a store yesterday purchasing a snake because my drains are clogged and we can’t shit or shower at home until I fix it, and I’m sick of renting them every year or two. Tree roots get in my lines, and as expensive as snakes are, long term it makes more sense to just buy one of ’em. Anyway, the 40-year old checker was talking to the 30-year old guy right in front of me in the checkout line, and they are both talking about how coronavirus is overblown and shutting down the country is a panic-stricken over-reaction.

    And I’m just looking at two physically-fit single males with no dependents, and maybe no parents they care about, just believing that their world view is universal.

    My musical director was under chemo last year, and has a heart something-thingie plugged into her chest. One of her sons has a respiratory weakness, and one of her daughters has immune deficiency. Three people in one house who could die if they catch covid-19 if the hospitals are full because the two fuckfaces in line in front of me won’t alter their behavior in any way.

    Then there is all the doublethink and hypocrisy that is so common in humans. People just don’t think straight. They don’t question their assumptions. They are not even aware they HAVE assumptions. So…how are we supposed to get around when the entire culture shares an ideology and believes that they don’t?

    March 20, 2020 at 5:15 pm #112711
    wv
    Participant

    A few Scott Nearing quotes, fwiw:

    “
above all I had awakened to the quite obvious fact that the masters and shapers of the world and the possessors of the world’s riches were cleverly scattering crumbs of wealth and power among the masses. They gave just enough crumbs to divert, deceive and corrupt each generation to secure its adherence, and to keep it in line, serving the interests of masters and corrupters. This indeed was the essence of the social problem – the success of the Oligarchy in brainwashing the populace to the point where they believed that what is best for the Oligarchy is best for them. So long as the brainwashing worked the masses remained in line and the Oligarchy could follow its program of making the rich richer and the powerful, stronger. Whither mankind?”
    Making of a Radical, Scott Nearing (1972)
    —————–

    “By the middle 1930’s this brainwashing campaign had become so effective that controversial issues were termed subversive, against the public interest, unpatriotic, disloyal, even traitorous. Leftist speakers were neither encouraged or permitted to air their views. Often they were mobbed and leftist meetings were attacked and broken up by hundred-percent Americans frequently aided by the police.”
    Making of a Radical, Scott Nearing (1972)
    ————–

    “Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, then a young, enthusiastic, fiery union organizer announced that she would speak in Paterson. Chief of Police Bimba stated publicly that she would not. “But I have a right under the Constitution to speak,” Elizabeth protested. “You may have the right,” the police chief rejoined, “but we have the power, and we will prevent you.” Elizabeth did not speak. That has been my situation for the past half century. I have had the ‘right’ to speak, write, print, publish but my words dropped into the well of oblivion. I have had the ‘right’ to teach, but no university or school in the country would accept me
”
    Making of a Radical, Scott Nearing (1972)
    ————

    “Anything that squarely challenges The American Way or western civilization is suspect. After the War of 1914-1918, censorship, secret police and ‘voluntary discipline in the public interest’ took over. Step by step, year by year, war by war, the interests of big business were synchronized with the public interests until big business made the policy decisions which determined what was good for the people to hear, see and read – therefore good for the best interests of the United States Oligarchy and the American Empire.”
    Making of a Radical, Scott Nearing (1972)

    March 20, 2020 at 5:23 pm #112713
    wv
    Participant
    Zooey wrote:

    Re: “Lifting people out of poverty.”

    I think the mistake people make
and it’s really dead easy to see why they make it
is that capitalism is obviously good because we have cars, air conditioning, microwave ovens, and smartphones.

    Of course they attribute those products to capitalism because we didn’t have them prior to capitalism, and communist countries did not have widespread consumer goods available.

    Why on earth would it ever occur to anybody that those things could have
WOULD have
been developed under another economic system. By and large, very few humans question the facts of their existences. You know
we have the entire human mindset to go up against (zn might disagree with that), but I just see humans as very limited creatures.

    I was at a store yesterday purchasing a snake because my drains are clogged and we can’t shit or shower at home until I fix it, and I’m sick of renting them every year or two. Tree roots get in my lines, and as expensive as snakes are, long term it makes more sense to just buy one of ’em. Anyway, the 40-year old checker was talking to the 30-year old guy right in front of me in the checkout line, and they are both talking about how coronavirus is overblown and shutting down the country is a panic-stricken over-reaction.

    And I’m just looking at two physically-fit single males with no dependents, and maybe no parents they care about, just believing that their world view is universal.

    My musical director was under chemo last year, and has a heart something-thingie plugged into her chest. One of her sons has a respiratory weakness, and one of her daughters has immune deficiency. Three people in one house who could die if they catch covid-19 if the hospitals are full because the two fuckfaces in line in front of me won’t alter their behavior in any way.

    Then there is all the doublethink and hypocrisy that is so common in humans. People just don’t think straight. They don’t question their assumptions. They are not even aware they HAVE assumptions. So
how are we supposed to get around when the entire culture shares an ideology and believes that they don’t?

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

    Every single time I’m in a store the conversations i overhear are all about how “people are panicking” and the shoppers all congratulate themselves on being brave consumers and “not giving in to panic.”

    Part bravado, part whistling-in-the-dark, part ignorance of the carrier aspect,
    part american-self-absorption….shall i go on 🙂

    I’m developing panic into an art, myself. I put hand-sanitizer on my pansies this morning. Who knows where they’ve been.

    w
    v

    March 21, 2020 at 8:42 am #112735
    Billy_T
    Participant
    Zooey wrote:

    Re: “Lifting people out of poverty.”

    I think the mistake people make
and it’s really dead easy to see why they make it
is that capitalism is obviously good because we have cars, air conditioning, microwave ovens, and smartphones.

    Of course they attribute those products to capitalism because we didn’t have them prior to capitalism, and communist countries did not have widespread consumer goods available.

    Why on earth would it ever occur to anybody that those things could have
WOULD have
been developed under another economic system. By and large, very few humans question the facts of their existences. You know
we have the entire human mindset to go up against (zn might disagree with that), but I just see humans as very limited creatures.

    . . . .

    Then there is all the doublethink and hypocrisy that is so common in humans. People just don’t think straight. They don’t question their assumptions. They are not even aware they HAVE assumptions. So
how are we supposed to get around when the entire culture shares an ideology and believes that they don’t?

    I mention this too in my discussions about capitalism elsewhere. Most people hear the critique and immediately assume Venezuela!! The USSR!! And see this as some kind of personal attack on Mom, Apple Pie and the Flag.

    I know you guys know this . . . but I tells ’em capitalism’s just one possible mode of production among a host of them, and its record of outright evil is unsurpassed. It’s also never mentioned in the “founding” docs.

    I try to use this analogy (and usually fail):

    1. You make custom chairs for a living. No employees. You do all the work yourself and receive compensation for your labor, per customer. You’re not a capitalist.

    2. However, if you hire a bunch of people to make those chairs FOR you, appropriate the surplus value they generate for yourself, as if you did all the work, you are.

    The first example, of course, scales up as far as we want to scale it up. It remains non-capitalist (and leftist) if we share the fruits of our labor, make our production decisions (what, when, where, why, how much, etc), together, democratically. This pretty much guarantees that everyone makes more than they could possibly make as rank and file workers under the capitalist system, and cuz it’s non-profit, we can charge far, far less per item.

    In short, there’s nothing we have now that couldn’t be made in a non-capitalist, leftist way. Nothing. And in virtually every case, workers, consumers and the earth would be a thousand fold better off. As leftists, we’d start out with vastly different rationales for production. We wouldn’t produce garbage for its potential exchange-value. We’d produce what society needs as use-value. We’d solve problems together and work for the public good.

    We’d also create tons of free time.

    That latter aspect is key, obviously. Capitalism doesn’t do that because all of its “labor saving” innovations go toward profits for ownership. They never go to reduction of labor hours, per person, unless they’re unpaid.

    A non-profit, non-capitalist, leftist mode could reduce them and maintain salaries as is. We wouldn’t have any incentive to redistribute the gains upward.

    etc. etc

    March 21, 2020 at 8:52 am #112736
    Billy_T
    Participant

    Quick note on that creation of free time.

    This is yet one more proof that the USSR was never “socialist.” It was state capitalist. They did create more free time via production innovations, but that was folded back into the drive for more and more and more production. Workers didn’t work less. They often worked more after those “innovations.”

    So the powers that be in the USSR ignored Marx (and 99% of leftist tradition) on the subject, cuz Marx thought a ton of extra time would be the norm for a socialist society, and that achieving that free time was baked in as part of the goal. A major rationale for changing systems in the first place.

    Keynes thought a well-regulated capitalist system would eventually do this too, ironically.

    Trouble was, he forgot about the purpose of capitalism, and its mechanism for getting there:

    Make capitalists richer and richer and richer, via ever greater collections of unpaid labor hours. You can’t do that if you hand labor savings back to workers. In the USSR, this just took the form of a political party acting as the capitalist commandeers.

    March 21, 2020 at 8:53 am #112737
    Billy_T
    Participant

    WV,

    Even more great quotes.

    I’ve added Nearing to my personal pantheon of leftist greats.

    March 22, 2020 at 9:16 am #112796
    nittany ram
    Moderator

    The story of Hostess and why/how it busted its union is always the first thing that pops into my mind when I think of capitalism…

    Link: https://www.alternet.org/2012/12/twinkie-ceo-admits-company-took-employees-pensions-and-put-it-toward-executive-pay/

    Twinkie CEO Admits Company Took Employees Pensions and Put It Toward Executive Pay
    Written by December 11, 2012
    1
    Twinkie-maker Hostess continues to screw over its workers. The company is in the process of complete liquidation and 18,000 unionized workers are set to lose their jobs. More troubling – they could lose their pensions.

    According to a report by the Wall Street Journal, Hostess’ CEO, Gregory Rayburn, essentially admitted that his company stole employee pension money and put it toward CEO and senior executive pay (aka “operations”). While this isn’t technically illegal, it’s another sleazy theft by Hostess executives – who’ve paid themselves handsomely while running their company into the ground. Just last month, a judge agreed to let Hostess executives suck another $1.8 million out of the bankrupt company to pay bonuses to CEOs.

    ADVERTISING

    If there’s no way to recover the money for the Hostess pension plans for workers, then the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corp. will have to foot the bill to make sure workers get at least some of the retirement money they paid in.

    Hostess shows us clearly what Bain-style predatory capitalism is all about: big bucks for the very few rich executives, layoffs and poverty for the workers and their communities.

    And don’t mourn the loss of Hostess brands – they’ll be back, as the company is currently negotiating with over 100 potential buyers right now to bring Twinkies, Wonder Bread, and Ding Dongs back into the marketplace.

    00:00
    00:37

    The Hostess story has nothing to do with unions, and everything to do with the Enron-ization and Bain-ization of the American economy.

    In classic Enron style, back in 2005 Hostess sent out a letter saying they’d just had a very, very profitable quarter. Their stock jumped up. The CEO, Charles Sullivan, and many of the senior executives sold chunks of their stock. The CEO and senior executives were making out big, and the workers were making a decent living.

    At that time, one of the hostess workers – Mike Hummel, blogging as bluebarnstormer over at Daily Kos – noted that he was making $48,000 a year, a bit over the US median household income, and had insurance and a pension.

    Then, a few weeks later in 2005, came the letter saying that, oops, all of that profit had really been just an accounting error – the company was actually in trouble. Although the CEO and the top guys had all made a nice killing selling the stock when it was high, and paying a maximum income tax on it of 15 percent because they used the Capital Gains loophole that Mitt Romney used to become a multimillionaire, they now wanted the workers to take a big pay cut.

    Report Advertisement
    Hummel notes that the “oops” letter became the justification for asking the workers to take a pay cut, which they agreed to, and his pay dropped from $48,000 a year in 2005 to $38,000 a year last year. But every year, $3 an hour of his compensation showed up in the worker’s pension fund instead of his paycheck. Year after year. With 18,000-plus workers, it was millions and millions of dollars. Dollars that the workers had paid in, at the rate of $3 per hour.

    Then came the Bain-style takedown. In order to strip the company down to its individual brands and sell them off, piece by piece, the company needed to bust the union. The union said, “No,” so the company went to bankruptcy court – a method Bain and other vulture capitalists often use to kill off unions.

    In the meantime, the CEO and senior executives were paying themselves handsome salaries and big bonuses. And where was that money coming from?

    On August 12 of 2011, the employees got a letter that said that the company was going to “temporarily suspend payments” to its pension funds. That would be the $3 per hour that this worker had negotiated as part of his compensation – instead of paying it to him by putting it into his pension fund now, the company said they were going to put it in later.

    As the letter said, “I want to be clear that this temporary suspension of payments to the pension fund will not affect your pension benefits.”

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    Workers believed management, and kept on working.

    But, it turned out, as we learned from that interview in today’s Wall Street Journal, that the senior management wasn’t just “borrowing” the pension funds – they were using them to fund ongoing operations. Including big paychecks to the fatcats.

    Hostess CEO Gregory Rayburn wanted to make it clear that he wasn’t around when that particular thing happened. “Whatever the circumstances were, whatever those decisions were, I wasn’t there,” Rayburn told the Wall Street Journal. After all, Rayburn isn’t a baker – he’s a bankster. He’s the owner of Kobi Partners, a company that tells corporations how to “restructure.” Think Mitt Romney. And he’s going to make out very well on all this – the bankruptcy court just okayed $1.8 million in Christmas bonuses for the new fatcats at Hostess.

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    Ironically, if you borrow money to pay for your education, you can’t get rid of that debt through bankruptcy – one of the “reforms” of the bankruptcy law during the Bush era. But if you’re a CEO or a buyout bankster and you borrow money from your employees’ trust fund to be able to cover your own paycheck and million-dollar bonuses, and then take your company into bankruptcy, neither you nor the company have to pay those employees back even a single penny. Part of their pension is picked up by federally-run pension insurance, and the rest is just lost.

    There used to be a time in America when businesspeople had at least a modicum of ethics. Mostly it was because the majority of businesses were small- or medium-sized and locally owned, so the owners and managers had to look the employees in the eye. Or the unions were strong enough to keep the CEOs honest.

    Reagan put an end to all that when he stopped enforcing the Sherman Anti-Trust Act, wiping out most of America’s small and medium-sized businesses, and when he kicked off the modern war on unions by firing the PATCO union strikers. You can see the result most clearly at any shopping mall or any downtown in America. What used to be locally owned business are now big chains, from food to jewelry to clothing.

    It used to be that CEOs shared the pain. Lee Iacocca famously took a dollar a year as pay when he was working to turn around Chrysler. Steve Jobs did the same when Apple was in trouble. Pretty much everybody who’s ever started a small business knows what it’s like to make payroll for workers while taking little to nothing themselves during the early years of the company.

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    But in today’s post-Reagan, Bain-model American capitalism, there’s never any risk for the CEO class. Instead, all the risk is borne by the workers.

    Karl Marx famously wrote that capitalism contains within itself the seeds of its own destruction. If true, the young, green shoots of that destruction may well be the corporate and billionaire excesses, ranging from the Hostess debacle to the billionaire oligarch Koch Brothers funding anti-union efforts by Rick Snyder and Republicans in Michigan.

    This article originally stated that taxpayers would have had to foot the bill for the lost pension funds through the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corp. (PBGC), but in fact PBGC does not receive taxpayer funds on an annual basis. It has been corrected to say that the PBGC will pay out a portion of the lost pension funds, and that the rest of the missing funds will not be recovered by the workers.

    March 22, 2020 at 11:51 am #112807
    Billy_T
    Participant

    Thanks, Nittany

    Did not know about that particular case.

    It fits the pattern, of course.

    But what astounds me is the fierce clinging to a system that does that, routinely, and built its fortunes literally on the bones of hundreds of millions of human beings, their pain, their misery, their lost hopes, and countless wildlife.

    March 25, 2020 at 1:20 am #112919
    waterfield
    Participant
    wv wrote:

    PS — I always have at least one Political Book I’m reading, cuz thats my ‘core’. I’m ‘political’ at my core.

    But the political books almost always infuriate me. I walk around in a quiet Fury for big parts of the day. And if i read the internet and read about Dems, Reps, Trump, Biden — all the swamp-dwellers — it makes me furious.

    So, much of my day is devoted to resisting that fury-feeling.

    I find i have to have non-political books, dvds, nature-walks, etc.
    If I dont, I walk around like Alex-Jones er somethin.

    So I’m reading about Free-Diving and Whales right now. Keeps me sane, in the Madhouse.

    w
    v
    “The mind is its own place, and in itself
    Can make a Heaven of Hell, a Hell of Heaven”
    John Milton, Paradise Lost

    “Free diving” huh? I knew we were friends when it is all said and done. I’ve been involved in that sport since I was 13 yrs old when we won the Pacific Coast Junior Spearfishing Championship in Laguna Beach, Ca. Basically, you are in the ocean for 4 hrs and diving by holding your breath. You are armed with a spear gun and the contest is over which “club” ( In our case “Sea Cubs”) can spear the most fish-which are donated to various charities. Still doing it too -albeit not competing-just not making 60-90 ft free dives anymore. More like floating around waiting for a tuna to swim by-then holding on for dear life by a lifeguard buoy. Afterwards, get in the boat and drink wine. Most trips-no fish-just drinking wine. For youngsters who take chances -your reading will likely speak to “shallow water blackouts”-a very dangerous condition that has resulted in many a “free diver’ drowning.

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