Forum Replies Created
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First of all, I didn’t say the Clintons DID murder Rich. I said quite clearly that I don’t know. Your syllogism doesn’t match anything I said.
And the rush to dismiss conspiracy theories to avoid appearing like a loony sharing a bed with unhinged right-wingers is a bad position.
There are conspiracies. These things DO happen. It is naive to dismiss them all out of hand. Sure, conspiracy theories are dangerous vortexes that people get sucked into, and often get addicted to, but responding to that by dismissing all of them is an erroneous position masquerading as common sense. Be skeptical, sure.
Did it happen in this case? Dunno. Neither do you. And “C’mon, man, they wouldn’t do THAT” isn’t a good argument. It’s an open question, though not one I’m going to waste much time worrying about since the answer to that doesn’t really change anything anyway. Murdering somebody in a political coverup is a drop in the Potomac compared to wiping out Libya and Syria and Iraq etc. It’s a drop in the ocean of corporate/government malfeasance. So I don’t really care. But I certainly do not put it past them. These are people who have made decisions that have killed hundreds of thousands of innocent people…in the millions, probably. And destroyed millions more. But you think they wouldn’t kill a single American in cold blood. Really?
Zooey,
I think we’re talking past each other here. We’re kind of in that “I didn’t say that” mode. Both of us. Take the bolded areas, for instance. I’m not dismissing all conspiracy theories, much less “out of hand.” I’m just dealing with the one raised by Mac.
And it’s not a matter of saying they wouldn’t kill a single American in cold blood. It’s a matter of — to use Mob vernacular — “What’s my percentage?”
How on earth would the murder help the Clintons? How would they benefit from it? See, what Mac did was paint a hypothetical context, which no one has shown existed at all, from which to THEN derive the potential for murder. All of his hypotheticals would have to line up just right in order for it to make any sense at all to even begin to suspect the Clintons. And the biggest one of all? That Rich leaked the info to Wikileaks AND that he was the ONLY person who could bring down the Clinton machine. That defies belief. If there really were fire behind the smoke, a low-level staffer is the only person who can bring everything crashing down? Really? And, there is zero proof that Rich did leak the info.
It’s not a dismissal of all conspiracies. It’s that this particular one is the thinnest of the thin, and it really doesn’t sync up from the point of view of “What’s my percentage?” at all.
Boiled down? I think we need to be honest about ourselves, too. We all need to do some major soul-searching to see how on earth things came to this.
It drives me up the wall to hear Dems refuse to accept ANY responsibility for Clinton’s defeat, as they lash out at “the left,” all too often viciously.
Are we better if we don’t look deep within and question our own methods, strategies, efforts, interpretations?
Doesn’t the traditional leftist call to “question your assumptions” apply to us as well?
I go back to this analogy a lot, when I talk about the difference between capitalism and other forms. But will repeat it here. All too often people, sometimes angrily, assume that an anticapitalist stance is anti-commerce, or anti-trade, or anti-business.
It’s not. And the vast majority of people who misunderstand the distinction do so because they’ve been trained to think of “capitalism” as the same thing as commerce, trade, business. That’s how they can also respond by saying we’ve always had “capitalism,” even though it’s only been dominant in parts of the world since the Industrial Revolution. It didn’t achieve dominance worldwide until after WWI. And it wasn’t even in existence until the late 17th century in Britain.
Okay, so the analogy:
You build chairs with your own two hands. You don’t have any employees. You haul them to your clients, exchange them for cash or another item you value. Or your clients come to your shop. You’re not a capitalist.
However, if you hire workers to build chairs for you, and then take the surplus value for yourself, as if you were still building all of the chairs and working all alone . . . . then you’re a capitalist. Being a capitalist essentially means you legally take the production of others for yourself, and then you decide how much to pay them for that labor. They don’t have any say or control over the fruits of their own labor. The employer/employee split makes you a capitalist. Taking all the revenues of everyone’s production makes you a capitalist. Deciding how much to redistribute back to your workers . . . etc.
And the only possible way to make a fortune from this set up is this: You can’t pay your workforce as much for their individual production as you would yourself for the same production. As in, if you charged your clients $500 per chair when you were on your own, and you kept all of that, minus your costs (say, $400 net), you have to pay your workers less than that $400 net or you won’t increase your own personal wealth in any significant way. The more you want for yourself, the less you can pay your workforce. And if you want to extract huge amounts of wealth, you need to collect as much of that unpaid labor as is possible, from as many of those unpaid laborers as you can keep. Or, go “public,” and massively increase your capital, which forces you to underpay your workers even more. Stock investors want a return on their investment, and the biggest source for underpayments is the workforce.
It always comes back to them. They’re the cash cow for any capitalists — not only because they produce the good or service in question, but because they’re the source for the owner’s own extraction of new wealth, and his or her dividends to his new investors. The bulk of that must come from the amount of unpaid labor hours, one way or another.
A little history:
In pre-capitalist America, most people worked for themselves. They didn’t have employees. They were artisans, small farmers, did their own small scale production at home. They weren’t capitalists. This changed after the Civil War. America changed. But most Americans today don’t even know this happened. All too many actually believe the Constitution endorsed the capitalist system and prevents us from using any other. Not in the slightest. The word never appears. And it wasn’t the dominant economic system in Europe or here at the time of the revolution. It was only edging toward dominance in its place of birth, Britain, which did everything it could to export it to its colonies, because this expanded the power of Capital and capitalists in the homeland.
Best two books I’ve ever read on the history:
The Origin of Capitalism, by Ellen Meiksins Wood
and
The Invention of Capitalism, by Michael PerelmanThe first one is incredibly concise, with no wasted words. It’s easily the single best definition of what makes capitalism different from all previous economic forms, and how it came to be what it is.
The second one is brilliant on historical grounds as well, but it concentrates mostly on “primitive accumulation” and uses the words of the earliest political economists to provide theoretical context. Adam Smith, Ricardo, etc. Their own words. It’s comprehensive, the notes and sourcing are extensive, and he supports what he writes throughout the book.
Also, neither work is polemical. Both are scholarly. They present the evidence and allow the reader to draw conclusions. And, for me, they also provoked a great deal of thought beyond those pages.
I highly recommend them.
I’m probably not expressing myself here well, but wanted to put it in another way:
History used to be taught using a kind of “great man” theory. But in recent decades, that’s been rejected for a much more inclusive approach. More and more histories are being written as the story told from dozens, or hundreds, or thousands of points of view. This history of WWI is an excellent example:
Along with this change, we went from thinking it could only be about kings and queens, to an acceptance of the impact of people once called “the peasants.”
The arts changed along these lines too, paintings started to depict “the common man,” and then the “common people,” as did poetry and literature and so on. No longer did we only witness to the lives of the Aristocracy. Anyone and everyone became a subject.
Brueghel’s Peasant Wedding. 1567To make a long story short, I have a feeling that our focus on single politicians is a remnant from those olden days and the “Great Man” theory. While it’s always essential to trace things back to “leaders” and hold them accountable, it’s also incredibly important to remember it often takes large numbers of people to do horrible things or good to great things . . . . and if we “sack” just one among the many, more often than not, the problem doesn’t go away.
