Is global industrial capitalism desirable?

[Lacan]

I'm a bit new to the smashboards and I'm a little shaky on whether I should be starting out here, but since I'm a debater on the national NFL policy debate circuit, I thought this would be a cool place to be.

Global industrial capitalism is a phenomenon that permeates not only economic systems but the global psyche of humanity. The rise of capitalism arose from a need for control over economics and the working class as economies and monetal value grew.

This creates problems -- global industrial capitalism assigns value to lives based on their monetary value due to the reality and obsession with capital that capitalism dictates. This can lead to hugely detrimental effects such as dehumanization and poverty, as seen in the status quo. Those who are not worth enough capital are able to be discarded due to capitalism's hierarchy.

Brown 2005 , professor of economics and research scientist at the University of Michigan (Charles Brown, UNT accessed ac)http://archives.econ.utah.edu/archives/pen-l/2005w15/msg00062.html,
The capitalist class owns the factories, the banks, and transportation-the means of production and distribution. Workers
sell their ability to work in order to acquire the necessities of life. Capitalists buy the workers' labor, but only pay them back a portion of the
wealth they create. Because the capitalists own the means of production, they are able to keep the surplus wealth created by workers above and beyond the cost of
paying worker's wages and other costs of production. This surplus is called "profit" and consists of unpaid labor that the capitalists
appropriate and use to achieve ever-greater profits. These profits are turned into capital which capitalists use to
further exploit the producers of all wealth-the working class. Capitalists are compelled by competition to seek to
maximize profits. The capitalist class as a whole can do that only by extracting a greater surplus from the unpaid labor of
workers by increasing exploitation. Under capitalism, economic development happens only if it is profitable to the
individual capitalists, not for any social need or good. The profit drive is inherent in capitalism, and underlies or
exacerbates all major social ills of our times.With the rapid advance of technology and productivity, new forms of capitalist ownership have developed
to maximize profit. The working people of our country confront serious, chronic problems because of capitalism. These chronic
problems become part of the objective conditions that confront each new generation of working people. The threat of nuclear war, which can destroy
all humanity, grows with the spread of nuclear weapons, space-based weaponry, and a military doctrine that justifies their
use in preemptive wars and wars without end. Ever since the end of World War II, the U.S. has been constantly involved in aggressive military actions
big and small. These wars have cost millions of lives and casualties, huge material losses, as well as trillions of U.S.
taxpayer dollars. Threats to the environment continue to spiral, threatening all life on our planet. Millions of
workers are unemployed or insecure in their jobs, even during economic upswings and periods of "recovery" from
recessions. Most workers experience long years of stagnant real wages, while health and education costs soar. Many workers are forced to work second and third
jobs to make ends meet. Most workers now average four different occupations during their lifetime, being involuntarily moved from job to job and career to career.
Often, retirement-age workers are forced to continue working just to provide health care for themselves.With capitalist globalization, jobs move as
capitalists export factories and even entire industries to other countries. Millions of people continuously live below the
poverty level; many suffer homelessness and hunger. Public and private programs to alleviate poverty and hunger do not
reach everyone, and are inadequate even for those they do reach. Racism remains the most potent weapon to divide
working people. Institutionalized racism provides billions in extra profits for the capitalists every year due to the unequal
pay racially oppressed workers receive for work of comparable value. All workers receive lower wages when racism succeeds in dividing and
disorganizing them. In every aspect of economic and social life, African Americans, Latinos, Native Americans, Asian a nd Pacific Islanders, Arabs and Middle Eastern
peoples, and other nationally and racially oppressed people experience conditions inferior to that of whites. Racist violence and the poison of racist
ideas victimize all people of color no matter which economic class they belong to. The attempts to suppress and undercount the vote of
the African American and other racially oppressed people are part of racism in the electoral process. Racism permeates the police, judicial and prison systems,
perpetuating unequal sentencing, racial profiling, discriminatory enforcement, and police brutality. The democratic, civil and human rights of all
working people are continually under attack. These attacks range from increasingly difficult procedures for union recognition and attempts to prevent
full union participation in elections, to the absence of the right to strike for many public workers. They range from undercounting minority communities in the census to
making it difficult for working people to run for office because of the domination of corporate campaign funding and the high cost of advertising. These attacks also
include growing censorship and domination of the media by the ultra-right; growing restrictions and surveillance of activist social movements and the Left; open denial
of basic rights to immigrants; and, violations of the Geneva Conventions up to and including torture for prisoners. These abuses all serve to maintain the
grip of the capitalists on government power. They use this power to ensure the economic and political dominance of their
class. Women still face a considerable differential in wages for work of equal or comparable value. They also confront
barriers to promotion, physical and sexual abuse, continuing unequal workload in home and family life, and male
supremacist ideology perpetuating unequal and often unsafe conditions. The constant attacks on social welfare programs severely impact
single women, single mothers, nationally and racially oppressed women, and all working class women. The reproductive rights of all women are
continually under attack ideologically and politically. Violence against women in the home and in society at large remains a shameful fact of life in
the U.S.

But the alternative to global capitalism isn't really something like shifting gears to socialism and communism. Philosophers like Slavoj Zizek and Gilles Deleuze purport that we cannot imagine an alternative to global capitalism because capitalism has permeated every facet of our lives so that we can't even envision a world without capitalism realistically and understand how it would function. The best way to break it down would be to first understand how capitalism and power operates, then move from there.

Herod 2004—James, Faculty at the University of Massachusetts at Bostonhttp://site.www.umb.edu/faculty/salzman_g/Strate/GetFre/06.htm
It is time to try to describe, at first abstractly and later concretely, a strategy for destroying capitalism. This strategy, at its most basic,
calls for pulling time, energy, and resources out of capitalist civilization and putting them into building a new civilization.
The image then is one of emptying out capitalist structures, hollowing them out, by draining wealth, power, and
meaning out of them until there is nothing left but shells. This is definitely an aggressive strategy. It requires great militancy, and
constitutes an attack on the existing order. The strategy clearly recognizes that capitalism is the enemy and must be destroyed, but it is not a frontal
attack aimed at overthrowing the system, but an inside attack aimed at gutting it, while simultaneously replacing it
with something better, something we want. Thus capitalist structures (corporations, governments, banks, schools, etc.) are not eized so
much as simply abandoned. Capitalist relations are not fought so much as they are simply rejected. We top participating in
activities that support (finance, condone) the capitalist world and tart participating in activities that build a new world while
simultaneously undermining the old. We create a new pattern of social relations alongside capitalist relations and then we continually build and strengthen
our new pattern while doing every thing we can to weaken capitalist relations. In this way our new democratic, non-hierarchical, non-
commodified relations can eventually overwhelm the capitalist relations and force them out of existence. This is
how it has to be done. This is a plausible, realistic strategy. To think that we could create a whole new world of
decent social arrangements overnight, in the midst of a crisis, during a so-called revolution, or during the collapse
of capitalism, is foolhardy. Our new social world must grow within the old, and in opposition to it, until it is strong
enough to dismantle and abolish capitalist relations.

The big question becomes, why should we reject capitalism? The answer arises from our deontological categorical imperative to save the lives of those destroyed by capitalism, especially the impoverished. These people are subjugated but simultaneously hidden by the system as consumer chains obscure the source of labor and the oppression of the lower class.

Slavoj Zizek and GlynDaly, Senior Lecturer in Politics in the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences at University College, Northampton, 2004, Conversations
With Zizek, p. 14-16
For Zizek it is imperative that we cut through this Gordian knot of postmodern protocol and recognize that our ethico-political responsibility is to
confront the constitutive violence of today’s global capitalism and its obscene naturalization/anonymization of the
millions who are subjugated by it throughout the world. Against the standardized positions of postmodern culture — with all its pieties con-
cerning ‘multiculturalist’ etiquette — Zizek is arguing for a politics that might be called ‘radically incorrect’ in the sense that it breaks with these types of positions
and focuses instead on the very organizing principles of today’s social reality: the principles of global liberal capitalism. This requires some care and subtlety. For
far too long, Marxism has been bedevilled by an almost fetishistic economism that has tended towards political morbidity.With the likes of Hilferding and
Gramsci, and more recently Laclau and Mouffe, crucial theoretical advances have been made that enable the transcendence of all forms of economism. In this new
context, however, Zizek argues that the problem that now presents itself is almost that of the opposite fetish. That is to say, the prohibitive anxieties
surrounding the taboo of economism can function as a way of not engaging with economic reality and as a way of im-
plicitly accepting the latter as a basic horizon of existence. In an ironic Freudian-Lacanian twist, the fear of economism can end
up reinforcing a de facto economic necessity in respect of contemporary capitalism(i.e. the initial prohibition conjures up the very
thing it fears). This is not to endorse any kind of retrograde return to economism. Zizek’s point is rather that in rejecting economismwe should not lose
sight of the systemic power of capital in shaping the lives and destinies of humanity and our very sense of the possible.
In particular we should not overlook Marx’s central insight that in order to create a universal global system the forces of capitalism seek
to conceal the politico-discursive violence of its construction through a kind of gentrification of that system. What is persistently denied by
neo-liberals such as Rorty (1989) and Fukuyama (1992) is that the gentrification of global liberal capitalism is one whose ‘universalism’
fundamentally reproduces and depends upon a disavowed violence that excludes vast sectors of the world’s population.
In this way, neo-liberal ideology attempts to naturalize capitalism by presenting its outcomes of winning and losing as if
they were simply a matter of chance and sound judgement in a neutral marketplace. Capitalism does indeed create a
space for a certain diversity, at least for the central capitalist regions, but it is neither neutral nor ideal and its price in terms of
social exclusion is exorbitant. That is to say, the human cost in terms of inherent global poverty and degraded ‘life-
chances’ cannot be calculated within the existing economic rationale and, in consequence, social exclusion remains
mystified and nameless

If an alternative is not taken, global capitalism will inevitably collapse in on itself due to self-imposed limits such as oil shocks. What then? Without economic systems, human societies will have a hard time moving forward and this departure from the ever forward growth of capitalism will have terrible outcomes.

Alex Knight 2009 (Is This the End of Capitalism?)http://endofcapitalism.com/about/1-is-this-the-end-of-capitalism/)
Luckily for Earth and all those who call it home, there are limits constraining capitalism from further growth. These limits are both
ecological and social because they originate both from the planet and communities of people. The ecological limits include shrinking supplies
of water, soil, uranium, and fossil fuels like oil, natural gas, and coal. The most important limiting factor is oil,
which fuels much of the capitalist economy, including 95% of current transportation.Global capitalism today could not
exist without oil, but worldwide oil production appears to be near its ultimate maximum, or “peak.” Peak oil doesn’t mean that there is no more oil, just that the
oil remaining underground is deeper, heavier, more remote, and more expensive – so it cannot continue to be pumped at the same rate as before. As demand for oil
continues to grow, this supply limit is creating a shortage that cannot be overcome by existing alternative fuels, which has sent oil prices soaring.And without
the cheap and plentiful fuel it needs to grow, capitalism as a way of organizing society will become obsolete.

I'm not sure if this is the place for conceptual debates over more abstract things like this, but it would be fantastic to have a good discussion with people interested in this.

 

[Budget Player Cadet_]

I don't really have time to go through the whole thing right now, but, uh...

Capitalists buy the workers' labor, but only pay them back a portion of the wealth they create. Because the capitalists own the means of production, they are able to keep the surplus wealth created by workers above and beyond the cost of paying worker's wages and other costs of production. This surplus is called "profit" and consists of unpaid labor that the capitalists appropriate and use to achieve ever-greater profits.

This "profit" is not "unpaid labor", and is not "appropriated". This article seems to assume that the capitalist is somehow just some middle-man, a gate between a laborer and his work. No. Not even close. Even if they were, assigning the correct people to the correct jobs is still a job in and of itself. And beyond that, the "capitalist" invested in the infrastructure necessary. There's a non-trivial element if risk involved here. If I invest thousands of dollars to open a pizzeria and it goes bankrupt, then that starting capital is gone. My workers share no part in that investment - if I go under, all they lose is their jobs.

Not to be mean, but if you're citing guys like this, guys who have learned nothing about economics since they first picked up "Das Kapital", I honestly don't know where to start. There are problems with globalization and capitalism, but this is not one of them - or if it is, he's putting it basically in exactly the wrong terms. I'll read through the rest later.

EDIT: having skimmed the rest, almost none of it actually makes anything resembling a coherent case for the undesirability of global capitalism. Much of it talks about what to do to remove it, but almost nothing actually addresses why we would in the first place.

 

[Braydon]

I don't see how you can really have any system that wouldn't be capitalist, socialist, or a mixture of the two. It seems to me you either redistribute wealth or you don't. Two sides of the coin, and you can theorize there's a third side or more we can't see because we're 3 dimensional beings conditioned to think in 3 dimensions, but I don't really see the point.

It sounds like they just don't want to call it socialism really.

Anyhow, a purely capitalistic system has significant problems, the most easily noticeable would be medical care in a capitalistic system. The high prices of capitalist health care can keep good health care out of the reach of low income people, and ultimately leads to deaths. You see people arguing about socialized health care as un-American, but I don't really understand how, the declaration of independence itself says every man is entitled to "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness." Being denied health care seems to be infringing on the most important fundamental right of poor people, the right to live.

Here's an interesting article comparing being treated in England's government controlled healthcare system to the American system, written by someone receiving treatment through both systems, http://www.washingtonpost.com/
The statistics on price show quite clearly how poorer people can be screwed by the American healthcare system, also consider that this health care is free for locals. You see in America these procedures are often marked up to 3-4 times as much as in England.

Ideally I think the necessities should be government controlled, you wouldn't want to be denied the necessities in life.



Anyway, I don't see most of the problems as inherent to a capitalistic government, there are things that the government could do to make our economy more stable.

Honestly I think out economy would be much more stable if the government handled banking, if they offered loans and held money for people with more competitive rates than banks, and essentially took over banking, the economy would be so much more stable. The 2008 economic crisis wouldn't have ever happened without our ****ty banks now would it? A lot of economic crises wouldn't happen without banking schemes.




Anyway whatever, welcome to smashboards. I see you've met budget, my condolences.

 

[Claire Diviner]

Anyway whatever, welcome to smashboards. I see you've met budget, my condolences.

This last comment was seriously uncalled for.

 

[Braydon]

This last comment was seriously uncalled for.

I'm going to need you to site sources for "uncalled for."

 

[Claire Diviner]

I'm going to need you to site sources for "uncalled for."

http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/uncalled-for

 

[Sucumbio]

as I said in the DH social, enough now. Please... haha.

And actually @ Lacan you should have probably started this up in the Center Stage, but the topic itself seems to be interesting enough, so I'll leave it be.

 

[Lacan]

Thanks for all these fantastic responses. I really enjoy discussing things like this with people who understand it. I'll reply to more stuff as I get to it.

This "profit" is not "unpaid labor", and is not "appropriated". This article seems to assume that the capitalist is somehow just some middle-man, a gate between a laborer and his work. No. Not even close. Even if they were, assigning the correct people to the correct jobs is still a job in and of itself. And beyond that, the "capitalist" invested in the infrastructure necessary. There's a non-trivial element if risk involved here. If I invest thousands of dollars to open a pizzeria and it goes bankrupt, then that starting capital is gone. My workers share no part in that investment - if I go under, all they lose is their jobs.

Thanks for replying coherently :D

I'm not sure if I'm misinterpreting your argument, but you pretty much hit the nail on the head as to what this article is talking about. Seeing as there's not really a warrant as to how the capitalist
isn't the middleman between the worker and their labor, I don't really know why it isn't. It's not so much unpaid labor so much as the capitalist can control profit to turn the worker much less.

And assigning the correct jobs to the correct people is a little bit trivial and just a nuance in the total system of captalism. It doesn't matter how well one is suited to their "jobs" if they're still being bogged down with the oppression that this system upholds. They enter into the market not of their own volition, but because they have no choice. Expanding on your pizzeria metaphor, the idea that the capitalist invests in infrastructure is the totalizing logic that justifies capitalism's control of the working class -- your pizzeria may go down, but the working class has a self-preserving drive to stop it from doing that because then they would be out of a job and that much more susceptible to the impacts of not being adequate to capitalism. Across jobs and across nations, capitalists draw on this self preservation to "capture" workers. There is nowhere for them to turn, really.

Not to be mean, but if you're citing guys like this, guys who have learned nothing about economics since they first picked up "Das Kapital", I honestly don't know where to start. There are problems with globalization and capitalism, but this is not one of them - or if it is, he's putting it basically in exactly the wrong terms. I'll read through the rest later.

You're not being mean, haha. Charles Brown is actually a professor of economics at the University of Michigan, or was in '05. So I guess he knows a little bit more about econ than Das Kapital. What are some of the problems with capitalism, do you think?

as I said in the DH social, enough now. Please... haha.

And actually @ Lacan you should have probably started this up in the Center Stage, but the topic itself seems to be interesting enough, so I'll leave it be.

oops, sorry; it looked like the center stage thread was people who were bringing up their threads? Not sure what to do there, the board rules didn't really say anything unless I misread them.

I don't see how you can really have any system that wouldn't be capitalist, socialist, or a mixture of the two. It seems to me you either redistribute wealth or you don't. Two sides of the coin, and you can theorize there's a third side or more we can't see because we're 3 dimensional beings conditioned to think in 3 dimensions, but I don't really see the point.

Yeah, this is what I think makes a lot of sense. I mean, nobody, including myself can speak in an unbiased fashion about any possible alternative to capitalism. I think recognizing the inefficacy of the capitalist system is the first step in figuring out how to fix its problems, but after that nobody can really say what happens. Socialism in and of itself has a lot of problems, too, seen in the multiple waves of socialism and culminating in communism and how a system like that is completely unable to be realized. I think Zizek says something really great on this, he's a really big political philsopher, too:

http://www.lacan.com/thesymptom/?page_id=1476

[inaudible] “… In 2011, the Chinese government prohibited on TV, film, and in novels all stories that [inaudible -- something about portraying "alternate realities or time travel"]. This is a good sign for China; it means people still dream about alternatives, so attacked and prohibited is dreaming. Here we don’t think of prohibition because [inaudible -- "history"?] has even oppressed our capacity to dream. Look at the movies that we see all the time. It’s easy to imagine the end of the world — an asteroid destroying all of life, and so on — but we cannot imagine the end of capitalism. So what are we doing here? Let me tell you a wonderful old joke from Communist times. A guy was sent to work in East Germany from Siberia. He knew his mail would be read by censors, so he told his friends, ‘Let’s establish a code. If a letter you get from me is written in blue ink, it is true what I say; if it is written in red ink, it is false.’ After a month, his friends get a first letter. Everything is in blue. It says, this letter: ‘Everything is wonderful here. The stores are full of good food, movie theatres show good films from the West, apartments are large and luxurious. The only thing you cannot find is red ink.’ This is how we live. We have all the freedoms we want, but what we are missing is red ink: the language to articulate our non-freedom. The way we are taught to speak about freedom, ‘war on terror,’ and so on, falsifies freedom. And this is what you are doing here: You are giving all of us red ink.

I believe that this really drives home that we can't really conceive an alternative to capitalism because the society in which we live worldwide just drives us down with capitalist epistemology and ontology and facilitates our forms of knowledge making to the point that we can't really escape indoctrination and conceiving an alternate mode that isn't capitalism or socialism.

Anyhow, a purely capitalistic system has significant problems, the most easily noticeable would be medical care in a capitalistic system. The high prices of capitalist health care can keep good health care out of the reach of low income people, and ultimately leads to deaths. You see people arguing about socialized health care as un-American, but I don't really understand how, the declaration of independence itself says every man is entitled to "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness." Being denied health care seems to be infringing on the most important fundamental right of poor people, the right to live.

Here's an interesting article comparing being treated in England's government controlled healthcare system to the American system, written by someone receiving treatment through both systems, http://www.washingtonpost.com/
The statistics on price show quite clearly how poorer people can be screwed by the American healthcare system, also consider that this health care is free for locals. You see in America these procedures are often marked up to 3-4 times as much as in England.

This is really true, I agree completely. Capitalist greed and monopoly over "big pharma" really drives up these prices because of the exploitation of the poor and the injured. I don't know if socialized health care is necessarily the viable alternative for this, because the state isn't completely infallible and private-public sectors really interact a lot and ideologies mix. Conceiving socialized health care post-capital still may have a lot of problems.

Anyway, I don't see most of the problems as inherent to a capitalistic government, there are things that the government could do to make our economy more stable.

I think that capitalism is a lot more than just an economic system. I think that capitalism, and by extension, imperialism and neocolonialism, are products of ideology that arose from what was originally just an efficacious system of government. Capitalism was borne of governments, so I don't really believe that putting a lot of faith in the government can do anything to fix these sorts of problems that they created in the first place. Even in the US, there's a lot of stasis within the governmental system because of political factions and internal conflicts. Much of politics is lip service while the oppressed suffer.

Thus, capitalism can create a lot of things not through just economic power but from the power of capitalist ideology.

In fact, capitalism may be the root of things such as environmental degradation:

MIM 96, (Maoist Internationalist Movement, 3/1996, Prison Censorship, “On Capitalism and the Environment”, http://www.prisoncensorshi p.info/archive/etext/mt/mt12capenv.html )

The root cause of environmental problems is capitalism, the private ownership of the means of production by a relative handful of people. This essence of capitalism is one reason why capitalism creates environmental problems: while the majority of the world's people have a material interest in maintaining a healthy planet, the small capitalist ruling class is not accountable to this majority, except in the indirect sense that the ruling class seeks to co-opt the demands of the majority in order to maintain the capitalist system. A second reason why capitalism creates environmental problems is that although the world's resources are controlled by a relative handful of people, planning is not centralized under capitalism. Instead, production is anarchic; it is centered around making profits, not around meeting basic human needs in the short or long runs. Much of what is produced by the capitalist system is unnecessary and wasteful, and the system is not fundamentally capable of incorporating long-term human survival as a need. Finally, the capitalist system does not distribute resources equitably. Under capitalism, many people do not have adequate resources for survival. Many environmental problems stem from this root problem. Furthermore, capitalism is not static. It has changed since Marx's day. Today, it has developed to its highest stage: imperialism.(1) Under imperialism, the capitalists carve and recarve the world. The unequal distribution of resources takes on a distinctly national flavor, with a division of the world into imperialist countries on the one hand and colonies and neocolonies on the other hand. Imperialism exploits both the natural and the human resources of its colonies and neocolonies.

Or even racism arising from capitalism, specifically anti-blackness, and may have even contributed to the rise of slavery:

Selfa ‘2

(Lance, writer for the International Socialist Review, International Socialist Review, Issue 26, November-December 2002, http://www.isreview.org/issues/26/roots_of_racism.shtml, acc. 7/4/14, arh)

Racism is a particular form of oppression. It stems from discrimination against a group of people based on the idea that some inherited characteristic, such as skin color, makes them inferior to their oppressors. Yet the concepts of “race” and “racism” are modern inventions. They arose and became part of the dominant ideology of society in the context of the African slave trade at the dawn of capitalism in the 1500s and 1600s. Although it is a commonplace for academics and opponents of socialism to claim that Karl Marx ignored racism, Marx in fact described the processes that created modern racism. His explanation of the rise of capitalism placed the African slave trade, the European extermination of indigenous people in the Americas, and colonialism at its heart. In Capital, Marx writes: The discovery of gold and silver in America, the extirpation, enslavement, and entombment in mines of the indigenous population of the continent, the beginnings of the conquest and plunder of India, and the conversion of Africa into a preserve for the commercial hunting of black skins are all things that characterize the dawn of the era of capitalist production.2 Marx connected his explanation of the role of the slave trade in the rise of capitalism to the social relations that produced racism against Africans. In Wage Labor and Capital, written twelve years before the American Civil War, he explains: What is a Negro slave? A man of the black race. The one explanation is as good as the other. A Negro is a Negro. He only becomes a slave in certain relations. A cotton spinning jenny is a machine for spinning cotton. It only becomes capital in certain relations. Torn away from these conditions, it is as little capital as gold by itself is money, or as sugar is the price of sugar.3 In this passage, Marx shows no prejudice to Blacks (“a man of the black race,” “a Negro is a Negro”), but he mocks society’s equation of “Black” and “slave” (“one explanation is as good as another”). He shows how the economic and social relations of emerging capitalism thrust Blacks into slavery (“he only becomes a slave in certain relations”), which produce the dominant ideology that equates being African with being a slave. These fragments of Marx’s writing give us a good start in understanding the Marxist explanation of the origins of racism. As the Trinidadian historian of slavery Eric Williams put it: “Slavery was not born of racism: rather, racism was the consequence of slavery.”4 And, one should add, the consequence of modern slavery at the dawn of capitalism. While slavery existed as an economic system for thousands of years before the conquest of America, racism as we understand it today did not exist.

Or, from capitalism's artificial division of the postmodern world and the unmodern world, new forms of imperialism not physically constrained to just invasion but to interference in foreign nations to introduce them to the new world economy which is not too far removed from the realities of imperialism.

Cole 9 Research Professor in Education and Equality, Head of Research and Director of the Centre for Education for Social Justice at Bishop Grosseteste University College Lincoln, UK (Mike, “Critical Race Theory and Education A Marxist Response”, chapyer 6, pgs 103-104, 2009//SRSL)

In Cole, 2008d, pp. 98-100, I also discussed the 'postmodern fantasy' of Robert Cooper (2002, p. 5).3 Briefly, Cooper argues that postmodern impe- rialism takes two forms. The first is the voluntary imperialism of the global economy, where institutions like the IMF and the World Bank provide help to states 'wishing to find their way back into the global economy and into the virtuous circle of investment and prosperity' (ibid.). If states wish to benefit, he goes on 'they must open themselves up to the interference of international organizations and foreign states' (ibid.) (my emphasis). Cooper (ibid.) refers to this as a new kind of imperialism, one which is needed and is acceptable to what he refers to as 'a world of human rights and cosmopol- itan values': an imperialism 'which, like all imperialism, aims to bring order and organisation' [he does not mention exploitation and oppression] 'but which rests today on the voluntary principle'. While '[w]ithin the postmod- ern world, there are no security threats' ... 'that is to say, its members do not consider invading each other' (p. 3), that world, according to Cooper has a¶ right to invade others. The 'postmodern world' has a right to pre-emptive attack, deception and whatever else is necessary.¶ The second form ofpostmodern imperialism Cooper calls 'the imperial- ism ofneighbours' (Cooper has in mind the European Union), where insta- bility 'in your neighbourhood poses threats which no state can ignore'. It is not merely soldiers that come from the international community; he argues, 'it is police, judges, prison officers, central bankers and others' (my empha- sis). Between 1999 and 2001, Cooper was Tony Blair's head of the Defence and Overseas Secretariat, in the British Cabinet Office.

Thanks for the fantastic reply, you bring up some great points.

 

[Sucumbio]

oops, sorry; it looked like the center stage thread was people who were bringing up their threads? Not sure what to do there, the board rules didn't really say anything unless I misread them.

Not at all. The forum rules are a guideline and to create precedent for administrative purposes. As it reads, new debaters should first attempt a debate ergo a topic, before making a stand alone thread. We do this so that, as stated, should someone obviously be spamming the DH, correction may be swift. This thread is fair enough.

 

[Budget Player Cadet_]

Thanks for replying coherently :D

I'm not sure if I'm misinterpreting your argument, but you pretty much hit the nail on the head as to what this article is talking about. Seeing as there's not really a warrant as to how the capitalist isn't the middleman between the worker and their labor, I don't really know why it isn't. It's not so much unpaid labor so much as the capitalist can control profit to turn the worker much less.

Sure he can. He can also not invest, and not start a business, and not hire workers. If the workers feel they're being ripped off, they're free to protest, unionize, or find other jobs. To a certain degree, the market does adjust for this.

They enter into the market not of their own volition, but because they have no choice.

True. In the same way that we all have no choice. We're not (neither now nor in the foreseeable future) part of a post-labor society. You wake up and you go to work. It's been that way pretty much for all of mammalian existence, and I'd like to think it's become somewhat easier in the last few hundred years. But the market is one of those unfortunate realities. What's the alternative? Not working? Getting everything handed to you on a silver platter? Only some of us get to do that (isn't that right, Paris?), and we hate those people.

Expanding on your pizzeria metaphor, the idea that the capitalist invests in infrastructure is the totalizing logic that justifies capitalism's control of the working class -- your pizzeria may go down, but the working class has a self-preserving drive to stop it from doing that because then they would be out of a job and that much more susceptible to the impacts of not being adequate to capitalism. Across jobs and across nations, capitalists draw on this self preservation to "capture" workers. There is nowhere for them to turn, really.

This doesn't make a whole lot of sense to me. Yeah, they have an incentive in their workplace not failing. "Full employment" allows for a 5% buffer even in the best of times. So what? Is this somehow an excuse for why an investor should not reap the benefits of a successful investment?

And once again, what's the alternative? So we make it so that investors can't turn a profit, so they stop investing. What happens then? What's our option? Where are we going with this?

I hate arguing this position. On other forums, I'm the one stuck arguing the position that unions, worker's protection laws, and high minimum wages are necessary due to the horrible power imbalance between an employee and his employer. But the stuff Professor Brown is saying seems nonsensical. It seems like incredibly un-nuanced Marxism. (And for possibly the first time ever, you get to hear this buzzword thrown around where it actually applies.)

 

[Lacan]

[

Not at all. The forum rules are a guideline and to create precedent for administrative purposes. As it reads, new debaters should first attempt a debate ergo a topic, before making a stand alone thread. We do this so that, as stated, should someone obviously be spamming the DH, correction may be swift. This thread is fair enough.

I see! Thank you for clarifying. I'll post in another topic next time before I make a big rambling post like this.

 

[Lacan]

edit: i think i may have double posted :^(

Sure he can. He can also not invest, and not start a business, and not hire workers. If the workers feel they're being ripped off, they're free to protest, unionize, or find other jobs. To a certain degree, the market does adjust for this.

I think that worker unions are really effective at giving workers more rights on the small scale. You're right in saying that workers have certain courses of action they can take in order to escape being ripped off and such. But protests, unions, they can only do so much. From the rise of capitalism to the reactionary rise of workers' unions in the 19th century, they haven't really done much in terms of alleviating the oppression of capitalism. Things that really changed the economic systems were things like revolutions, such as in WWI Russia -- not that revolutions work in the modern day, but trade unions don't really have a force, and neither do protests.

This doesn't make a whole lot of sense to me. Yeah, they have an incentive in their workplace not failing. "Full employment" allows for a 5% buffer even in the best of times. So what? Is this somehow an excuse for why an investor should not reap the benefits of a successful investment?

Having workers within the capitalist system working for their own self-preservation is something that can be taken advantage of is what I'm trying to point out. This self-preservation is latched on to by the capitalist power and business owners and used to stretch the willpower of the working class. "Reaping the benefits" of a successful investment, is, I believe, a really manipulative form of rhetoric that rationalizes this same manipulation of the working class. People are seen and nothing more than investments to be reaped, and attaching monetary worth to workers is a bit dehumanizing in the long run. What happens when they can't turn a profit due to some circumstance including disability or mental hurdle? Not just talking about one business in particular, those who can't turn profits are excluded from the capitalist system and set to be dehumanized.

And once again, what's the alternative? So we make it so that investors can't turn a profit, so they stop investing. What happens then? What's our option? Where are we going with this?

I think I brought this up in an earlier post that I edited, maybe you didn't see it:

Yeah, this is what I think makes a lot of sense. I mean, nobody, including myself can speak in an unbiased fashion about any possible alternative to capitalism. I think recognizing the inefficacy of the capitalist system is the first step in figuring out how to fix its problems, but after that nobody can really say what happens. Socialism in and of itself has a lot of problems, too, seen in the multiple waves of socialism and culminating in communism and how a system like that is completely unable to be realized. I think Zizek says something really great on this, he's a really big political philsopher, too:

I believe that this really drives home that we can't really conceive an alternative to capitalism because the society in which we live worldwide just drives us down with capitalist epistemology and ontology and facilitates our forms of knowledge making to the point that we can't really escape indoctrination and conceiving an alternate mode that isn't capitalism or socialism.

http://www.lacan.com/thesymptom/?page_id=1476

[inaudible] “… In 2011, the Chinese government prohibited on TV, film, and in novels all stories that [inaudible -- something about portraying "alternate realities or time travel"]. This is a good sign for China; it means people still dream about alternatives, so attacked and prohibited is dreaming. Here we don’t think of prohibition because [inaudible -- "history"?] has even oppressed our capacity to dream. Look at the movies that we see all the time. It’s easy to imagine the end of the world — an asteroid destroying all of life, and so on — but we cannot imagine the end of capitalism. So what are we doing here? Let me tell you a wonderful old joke from Communist times. A guy was sent to work in East Germany from Siberia. He knew his mail would be read by censors, so he told his friends, ‘Let’s establish a code. If a letter you get from me is written in blue ink, it is true what I say; if it is written in red ink, it is false.’ After a month, his friends get a first letter. Everything is in blue. It says, this letter: ‘Everything is wonderful here. The stores are full of good food, movie theatres show good films from the West, apartments are large and luxurious. The only thing you cannot find is red ink.’ This is how we live. We have all the freedoms we want, but what we are missing is red ink: the language to articulate our non-freedom. The way we are taught to speak about freedom, ‘war on terror,’ and so on, falsifies freedom. And this is what you are doing here: You are giving all of us red ink.

 

[Budget Player Cadet_]

edit: i think i may have double posted :^(

Blech, double posting rules are dumb anyways.

I think that worker unions are really effective at giving workers more rights on the small scale. You're right in saying that workers have certain courses of action they can take in order to escape being ripped off and such. But protests, unions, they can only do so much. From the rise of capitalism to the reactionary rise of workers' unions in the 19th century, they haven't really done much in terms of alleviating the oppression of capitalism. Things that really changed the economic systems were things like revolutions, such as in WWI Russia -- not that revolutions work in the modern day, but trade unions don't really have a force, and neither do protests.

Actually, protests in much of the west led to the implementation of a great many improvements for workers. Things like the aforementioned minimum wage. Workplace safety regulations. Laws against firing people for unionizing. Those sorts of things. And I have no problem with commonsense regulation. What I have a problem with is what happened in the wake of the late 19th-century revolts. It did not end well for Russia, I can tell you that much.

Having workers within the capitalist system working for their own self-preservation is something that can be taken advantage of is what I'm trying to point out. This self-preservation is latched on to by the capitalist power and business owners and used to stretch the willpower of the working class.

Okay, so what? The guy with resources is better off in our economic system. This is not news and it's not particularly interesting. This particular power imbalance is the source of much of the legislation we have, and legislation currently being drafted which we need.

"Reaping the benefits" of a successful investment, is, I believe, a really manipulative form of rhetoric that rationalizes this same manipulation of the working class.

Once more - what's the alternative. I keep coming back to this same problem. This "manipulation" as you call it is nothing more than one person saying, "I need job X done for Y amount of money" and another person saying, "Sure, I'll do that". Does that second person need to have some job? Sure. Are people often trapped in unfortunate situations as a result, doing jobs they hate? Sure. Is there a way to solve this?

...

...Well, is there?

People are seen and nothing more than investments to be reaped, and attaching monetary worth to workers is a bit dehumanizing in the long run. What happens when they can't turn a profit due to some circumstance including disability or mental hurdle? Not just talking about one business in particular, those who can't turn profits are excluded from the capitalist system and set to be dehumanized.

Yeah, this is a problem. Seeing humans as workers or customers, as capital, is mildly dehumanizing. It's also something that's phenomenally hard to do away with. If you have people working for you in your business, you're forced to, at a business level, see them as people second, tools first. This is baked into the system, because the bottom line is, well, the bottom line.

My dad runs a stoneworking company, and we had to let one of our workers go. He's one of my best friends, and my dad thought highly of him as well... But he was having personal problems that were getting in the way of work, and there's not a huge margin in our business. It sucks, but what's the alternative? Should we keep him on? Well, that costs money, and if he's not worth his pay (or we could do considerably better for the same pay), then he's not worth his pay.

No matter what system you have, if you have one person hiring another to do a job, this dehumanization is necessary. If the Bob can't fix my roof, I don't care how great a guy he is, I hired someone to fix my roof and he's not getting the job done. Sorry Bob, you're fired. And it doesn't matter if our metaphorical Bob is a thousand workers in a plant in Flint, Michigan, or Bob the guy from the neighboring tribe who I offered a goat to fix my thatch roof.

And the alternative is, well, what? See, here's the thing - for all its evils, Capitalism has brought us some pretty impressive goods as well. We can't just do away with it - partially because it appears to me to be an emergent property of a free market which you could only do away with by removing the free market entirely (and boy have we seen that go horribly wrong), and partially because we reap the benefits of it on a near daily basis.

I think I brought this up in an earlier post that I edited, maybe you didn't see it:

I believe that this really drives home that we can't really conceive an alternative to capitalism because the society in which we live worldwide just drives us down with capitalist epistemology and ontology and facilitates our forms of knowledge making to the point that we can't really escape indoctrination and conceiving an alternate mode that isn't capitalism or socialism.

Alternatively, we can't conceive of an alternative because there really isn't one. Either you have a free market, or you plan your economy, or you do something in between. There's not really much else in terms of dimensions going on there. Got a free market? Congratulations, capitalism is an emergent property thereof. Want to get rid of it? You're going to have to plan every market interaction in advance from some centralized source to prevent it. It's an interesting theory that you have, but I just don't see any merit to it, or any way to test it short of someone providing the alternative. I'm not convinced it's possible, personally.

 

[Lacan]

Actually, protests in much of the west led to the implementation of a great many improvements for workers. Things like the aforementioned minimum wage. Workplace safety regulations. Laws against firing people for unionizing. Those sorts of things. And I have no problem with commonsense regulation. What I have a problem with is what happened in the wake of the late 19th-century revolts. It did not end well for Russia, I can tell you that much.

Haha, it did not end well for Russia indeed. I'm not saying that the revolution was necessarily a good thing, but it had the power to change Russia, for better or for worse. I'm a firm believer that things like minimum wage, safety regulations, lack of unionization consequences, are things that are used to appease the working class into continued subsistence under the capitalist system. Sort of like "gifts" so that they are distracted from the perils of their situation. Even so, these small appeasements are not nearly the large-scale movements that would allow for equal treatment of the working class.

Okay, so what? The guy with resources is better off in our economic system. This is not news and it's not particularly interesting. This particular power imbalance is the source of much of the legislation we have, and legislation currently being drafted which we need.

I think this is particularly pressing because this power imbalance, however terrible, fails to spur legitimate legislative action that has enough power to in a sense "save" the working class from the throes of enterprising business owners. People talk about poverty and exclusion from capitalism but the government doesn't really do anything large-scale.

Once more - what's the alternative. I keep coming back to this same problem. This "manipulation" as you call it is nothing more than one person saying, "I need job X done for Y amount of money" and another person saying, "Sure, I'll do that". Does that second person need to have some job? Sure. Are people often trapped in unfortunate situations as a result, doing jobs they hate? Sure. Is there a way to solve this?

See, the problem with this is that a lot of people thinking that it's just services in exchange for pay as an isolated condition. What people fail to see is that this system of service-and-pay has evolved past the point of someone paying someone else for doing something. Capitalism has taken this necessarily humanized and non-exploitative interaction and commodified it, monopolized it to the point where this human interaction is gone. The conscience that should arise from employing another and the drive to be fair is wiped away by the unethical standards of capitalism. The rise of factories in the 19th century facilitated depersonalization. The current standard of thousands of minimum wage workers at fast food chains is distancing from worker reality. At the head stands the monopoly, the elite. This is the real representation of industrial capitalism. Things have moved from "I'll do what you pay me to do" to "I'm forced into this exploitative system to survive. Big business pushes me to get a job in big business only to latch on to what I need to do to survive and place me as an investment." This human interaction and payment has essentially been morphed by the greed of capital.

I'm going to reply to the rest of your post here because I think a lot of what goes on after this paragraph really flows with a sort of "alternative to capitalism" debate. I'm going to stick with my original point that recognizing flaws in capitalism and continually rejecting it in everyday life (as stated by Herod in the first post). Things like this have actually worked in real life and in the modern day. Take the example of Venezuela, who solved a lot of racism and problems with capitalism by simply opposing capitalism: (it's a fantastic read, really)

Cole 9 (Mike Cole, Mike Cole is a Professor in Education, and is also an Emeritus Research Professor in Education and Equality at Bishop Grosseteste University. His duties at UEL include research and publications, PhD supervision and occasional doctoral and undergraduate teaching. He also has a PhD in Philosophy. June 9, 2009, “Critical Race Theory comes to the UK: A Marxist response,”http://etn.sagepub.com.proxy.lib.umich.edu/content/9/2/246.)//ky

MARXISM AND WAYS FORWARD Marxists would agree with Mills (1997: 127) that ‘the aim is . . . ultimately to eliminate race (not as innocent human variety but as ontological superiority and inferiority, as differential entitlement and privilege) altogether’. However, Marxists, as I have indicated, would most definitely not go down the path advocated by John Preston. Elsewhere, I have argued, at length, that I see the 21st-century socialism advocated by President Hugo Chávez in Venezuela as an excellent example of a way forward. In the context of Mills’ concerns about ‘white Marxists’, it is worth noting that Chávez was the first Venezuelan president ever to claim and honour his indigenous and African ancestry. Anti-racist/anti-imperialist 21st-century socialism Like the rest of Latin America, Venezuela’s history is scarred by colonialism and imperialism’s racist legacies. Only now, with the gains being made by the socialist government and the growing mass revolutionary movement, is Venezuela beginning to grapple in earnest with how to confront this racist legacy. The rights of Venezuela’s indigenous people were first entrenched in the 1999 Bolivarian constitution (Chávez came to power in 1998), which was ratified by 71 percent of voters. For the first time, indigenous land rights were identified as being collective, inalienable and non-transferable, recognizing the: . . . rights of the indigenous peoples over the land they traditionally and ancestrally occupied. They must demarcate that land and guarantee the right to its collective ownership. (cited in Harris, 2007) As Harris points out: Article 9 stipulates that while Spanish is Venezuela’s primary language, ‘indigenous languages are also for official use for indigenous peoples and must be respected throughout the Republic’s territory for being part of the nation’s and humanity’s patrimonial culture’. The 1999 constitution also affirms that ‘exploitation by the state of natural resources will be subject to prior consultation with the native communities’, that ‘indigenous peoples have the right to an education system of an intercultural and bilingual nature’, that indigenous people have the right to control ancestral knowledge over ‘native genetic resources’ and biodiversity, and that three indigenous representatives are ensured seats in the country’s National Assembly (these were elected by delegates of the National Council of Venezuelan Indians in July 1999). Since 1999, the confidence of the indigenous rights movement has exploded. The multitude of social problems that persist as a hangover of previous, capitalist policies has led to a culture of Chávista activists who support the revolution and lobby the Chávez government to demand attention to their particular issues (Harris, 2007). At the forefront of the anti-racist movement is the Afro-Venezuelan Network, headed by Jesus ‘Chucho’ Garcia, which is lobbying for recognition of Afro-Venezuelans in the next round of amendments to the Bolivarian constitution. The Network successfully campaigned for the creation of a presidential commission against racism in 2005, the inclusion of Afro- Venezuelan history in the school curriculum, the establishment of a number of cocoa-processing plants and farming cooperatives run by black Venezuelans and for Afro-Venezuelan Day on 10 May each year (Harris, 2007). As Harris (2007) explains, the ambitious land and agrarian reforms embedded in the 1999 constitution have been especially beneficial to indigenous and Afro-Venezuelan communities. The constitution declares that idle, uncultivated private land over a certain size can be transformed into productive units of land for common social benefit. ‘By prioritising socially productive land use over monopolistic private land ownership and re distributing idle land to the landless, Chávez has promoted independence, food sovereignty and local agricultural development’ (Harris, 2007). Such developments are not confined to Venezuela. Chávez has also been building alliances with other marginalized communities in the Americas, including providing food, water and medical care to 45,000 Hurricane Katrina victims in areas surrounding New Orleans, and supplying discounted heating and diesel oil to schools, nursing homes and hospitals in poor communities in the US (Harris, 2007). Harris (2007) concludes: . . . in Venezuela the space for frank discussion about how to move forward in the context of a mass movement has been opened up by the ongoing revolutionary process, and genuine gains have been made by indigenous and Afro-Venezuelan movements to eliminate the systemic nature of racism from Venezuelan life.

Note that this talks about socialism a lot, but the big thing is that movements against capitalism helped to solve for a lot of the problems. Apart from socialism as an alternative to capitalism, I'm still going to stick to the idea that we can't really understand what can fill the void of capitalism until we break it down. Venezuela has done so, and is beginning to realize what can be done in its stead. I can't really define a efficacious alternative because we simple have no idea what it is. All we know is that capitalism gives big problems, and alternatives are worth pursuing post-capital.

Also, capitalism has given us a lot of good things, but focusing on the past too much really staticizes forward movement. I believe we've gotten all we need out of capitalism and that it's beginning to do more harm than good in its age of decadence.

Thanks for these great points, too -- it's amazing to have someone outside of organized debate who can keep up with this sort of stuff.

 

[Braydon]

I'm not trying to say we should put to much faith in our government, our congress is basically the worst it's ever been right now, what I'm saying is that there could be ways to fix the system without switching off of a primarily capitalistic system, other solutions than moving away from capitalism. I don't see the ideology of today as a result of capitalism but simply a product of human greed, I don't think capitalism caused it but rather has been bent to serve it.


Socialized healthcare seems to work fine in Britain and other European countries, so I do see it as a viable alternative, superior even to what we have now. The administration of health care is really not the kind of thing I see the government screwing up, they already dictate most the standards for modern healthcare, I think they'd control it in much the same way, I don't think quality of care would be significantly diminished.

I don't see it as problematic as long as medical research remains independent, it takes a far more scientific approach than comes naturally to a bureaucratic government.



Anyway I think it's good when discussing employers, to bring up the wealth divide, what you see is that the top 1% makes incredibly vast amounts of money, enough to show that the reward to the risks they take is far more than it needs to be for it to be worth their while.
http://equitablegrowth.org/research/exploding-wealth-inequality-united-states/

 

[Budget Player Cadet_]

Haha, it did not end well for Russia indeed. I'm not saying that the revolution was necessarily a good thing, but it had the power to change Russia, for better or for worse. I'm a firm believer that things like minimum wage, safety regulations, lack of unionization consequences, are things that are used to appease the working class into continued subsistence under the capitalist system.

There seems to be a disconnect here. You seem to be under the impression that there's a better way. I keep on asking you about this, but you keep on not giving me one. We cannot take a system which works but has problems and replace it with nothing. When your workplace is 10 miles away and your bike chain keeps on jumping off, the correct solution is not "walk", it's "oil your bike". I still have yet to see anything resembling a viable alternative from you. And this is where this disconnect comes in. The very concept of these things being used to "appease" the working class just seems completely foreign to me. This is not what we do to be able to keep abusing the workers, this is what we do to try to fix the system.

I think this is particularly pressing because this power imbalance, however terrible, fails to spur legitimate legislative action that has enough power to in a sense "save" the working class from the throes of enterprising business owners. People talk about poverty and exclusion from capitalism but the government doesn't really do anything large-scale.

Well, what is there to be done? A "living wage"? Feasible, I could get behind that. But it would still force people to work. See, this is the problem. In any system, people are going to be forced to do some kind of productive labor. This problem cannot be avoided, short of a utopian society wherein all the jobs are taken over by computers. Even in communism, work has to get done. It's just that you had considerably less choice on what work you would do, or often the work just wouldn't get done, and everyone would suffer as a result.

See, the problem with this is that a lot of people thinking that it's just services in exchange for pay as an isolated condition. What people fail to see is that this system of service-and-pay has evolved past the point of someone paying someone else for doing something. Capitalism has taken this necessarily humanized and non-exploitative interaction and commodified it, monopolized it to the point where this human interaction is gone. The conscience that should arise from employing another and the drive to be fair is wiped away by the unethical standards of capitalism.

To a certain degree? Yes. To the degree that it matters? No. It has always been the case that if you hire someone to do a job for you, and they don't do it satisfactorily, you fire them. Hasn't it? How is that wrong?

The rise of factories in the 19th century facilitated depersonalization. The current standard of thousands of minimum wage workers at fast food chains is distancing from worker reality. At the head stands the monopoly, the elite. This is the real representation of industrial capitalism. Things have moved from "I'll do what you pay me to do" to "I'm forced into this exploitative system to survive.

No it hasn't. It's always been "I have to work and produce something or I won't survive". The musicians have changed somewhat, but the song remains the same. That old-school "I'll do what you pay me to do"? If you didn't do that, and I didn't pay you, guess what happens: you starve to death. And sure, maybe if you're friends with your boss, you can put off being fired for a while. But sooner or later, he's gonna get sick of your ****, at which point now you've lost your job and a friend.

This human interaction and payment has essentially been morphed by the greed of capital.

Purified, certainly; stripped of its sentimental value; but morphed? I don't think so. The only difference is that now, your boss has gone from not necessarily caring about you as a person to almost certainly not caring about you as a person.

I'm going to reply to the rest of your post here because I think a lot of what goes on after this paragraph really flows with a sort of "alternative to capitalism" debate. I'm going to stick with my original point that recognizing flaws in capitalism and continually rejecting it in everyday life (as stated by Herod in the first post). Things like this have actually worked in real life and in the modern day. Take the example of Venezuela, who solved a lot of racism and problems with capitalism by simply opposing capitalism: (it's a fantastic read, really)

Rejecting it in favor of what? Simply "rejecting capitalism" is not an alternative. It's an alternative in the same way "not moving" is an alternative to "having a car". "You don't want to have a car any more? How do you move around?" "I don't know, but I reject having a car". That's nice, your rejection isn't going to get you from point A to point B, though.

As for your fantastic read, it says nothing about the economic realities of Venezuela. It says nothing about what effect, economically, Chavez's policies had. It talks about racism, and the exploitation of indigenous peoples, neither of which is part and parcel with capitalism, but is rather an unfortunate abuse thereof which needs to be stamped out, but it does not offer us an alternative. Also, it apparently doesn't believe in paragraphs, which makes it a bit of a pain in the ass to read.

Note that this talks about socialism a lot, but the big thing is that movements against capitalism helped to solve for a lot of the problems. Apart from socialism as an alternative to capitalism, I'm still going to stick to the idea that we can't really understand what can fill the void of capitalism until we break it down. Venezuela has done so, and is beginning to realize what can be done in its stead.

You know what the recent news on Venezuela's been? Gas prices have dropped by a fairly significant margin, and because their entire economy relied on their oil exports (making them a bit of a fringe case to begin with when talking about economics), they're undergoing a massive economic meltdown.

And "we can't really understand what will fill the void of capitalism"? Sure we can. More capitalism. As I said, capitalism is an emergent property of the free market. We cannot get rid of it without being rid of the free market.

I can't really define a efficacious alternative because we simple have no idea what it is. All we know is that capitalism gives big problems, and alternatives are worth pursuing post-capital.

Capitalism has also led to the greatest increase in wealth this world has ever seen. People have more, can do more, and need to do less than ever before in history. This idea of an 8-hour work day is a pretty novel thing.

Also, capitalism has given us a lot of good things, but focusing on the past too much really staticizes forward movement. I believe we've gotten all we need out of capitalism and that it's beginning to do more harm than good in its age of decadence.

Can you back that up? More importantly, can you support the idea that replacing it with some unknown system is an improvement when we don't even know what that system could possibly be?

Also, I realize this is a little late, but those "middlemen" we talked about earlier, the ones who pocket the profit of their workers? They're not sitting on their asses. The amount of work involved in running and managing a successful business, even a very small one, is insane.

 

[Desu_Maiden]

Industrial capitalism isn't desirable because it exists only because of fossil fuels. If you take away the oil, you take away capitalism. Watch the following movie to find out why capitalism will cease to exist after peak oil. What will happen after peak oil? Industrial capitalism will cease to exist because it only exists because of oil.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oVzJhlvtDms

Besides, capitalism isn't responsible for the wealth and prosperity we experience these days. Petroleum is the only reason why developed nations are so prosperous and wealthy and not capitalism. Virtually all products nowadays exist only because of petroleum because virtually everything in our economy is either made of or transported by petroleum. Virtually every invention and technological innovation since 1859 (since the first petroleum well was drilled by Edwin Drake in Pennsylvania) was made possible only because of petroleum. For example, the computer you are using to read or type information was constructed using ten times its own weight in fossil fuels. So if the computer you are using weighs 5 lbs, about 50 lbs of fossil fuel energy was used to construct it. It is virtually impossible to find something in your possession that isn't made of or transported to you using petroleum. Petroleum is ubiquitous. We are living in the petroleum age.

But within the next couple of decades, world oil extraction rates will steadily drop until there isn't oil left for society to function. Contrary to popular belief, none of the so-called alternatives to oil pack anywhere near the power and versatility oil provides. The end of the oil age quite literally means the end of industrial civilization or industrial capitalism.

What comes after capitalism is debatable. According to Richard Heinberg, we might go back to a simple barter economy where there is much less economic activity going on. Or we might go back to a medieval feudal social-political system.

Either way, capitalism's endless exploitation of the world's natural resources cannot be sustained for much longer due to the resource constraints of this planet. There is only so much stuff on this planet, and once you use it all up, you can't make more products.

 

[Braydon]

@ Desu_Maiden
...

No.

Capitalism is not a product of oil, capitalism vastly predates oil, and will continue after we quit using oil.

Why would we go back to a barter system? The dollar predates oil as well, oil did not cause capitalism, and capitalism is not dependent on it, there will be other things to buy and sell long after the oil industry is dead and gone. There is no reason to believe capitalism ends at oil.

And don't link to a 2 hour video and not explain it, I'm not watching for 2 hours to find out what you're basing this off of.

 

[Budget Player Cadet_]

Industrial capitalism isn't desirable because it exists only because of fossil fuels. If you take away the oil, you take away capitalism. Watch the following movie to find out why capitalism will cease to exist after peak oil. What will happen after peak oil? Industrial capitalism will cease to exist because it only exists because of oil.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oVzJhlvtDms

Don't do this. Don't use a documentary as a source. Documentaries are, at a fundamental level, ****ty sources. They pack massive amounts of often very poorly-sourced information into a package which is a huge pain in the ass to dissect. They almost always combine this with emotional appeals and various other tools to form a cohesive narrative which may or may not have anything to do with reality. Is it any wonder that they've become the avenue of choice for conspiracy theorists and fearmongers? Youtube is chock-full of amateur film productions that tout everything from the claim that HIV does not cause AIDS to Obama being the Antichrist to global warming being a scam. But even beyond that, they require a massive investment of time to just watch; never mind examining the sources and making sure that everything checks out. I learned my lesson with What The **** Do We Know and Explosive Evidence, thanks.

In the case of peak oil, we've been hearing about this issue for decades, and it's alway right around the corner. I'm not entirely sure how we're sure now, especially given that now we've got new ways of extracting oil that open up new pathways to us and are focusing far more on other sources of energy that help bolster the grid.

What comes after capitalism is debatable. According to Richard Heinberg, we might go back to a simple barter economy where there is much less economic activity going on. Or we might go back to a medieval feudal social-political system.

Why would we when capitalism is essentially an emergent property of society as a whole?

 

[Braydon]

Youtube is chock-full of amateur film productions that tout everything from the claim that HIV does not cause AIDS to Obama being the Antichrist to global warming being a scam.

Global warming is a scam. Irregardless of whether or not the carbon dioxide is heating up the earth, global warming as commonly taught is a scam. If carbon dioxide is making the earth hotter, the best choice to stop it would be planting more plants, as they take in carbon dioxide, but you will never hear this mentioned as a counter measure to carbon dioxide pollution, it's a scam to sell energy efficient ****.

If global warming was really about preserving the planet it would be about reforestation and cutting down on paper products and usage of wood.

Also I'm not sure, Obama may be the antichrist, he's the first president to ever use his power to try and murder a US citizen. (Edward Snowden, apparently not entitled to a trial by the constitution)

 

[Budget Player Cadet_]

Global warming is a scam. Irregardless of whether or not the carbon dioxide is heating up the earth, global warming as commonly taught is a scam. If carbon dioxide is making the earth hotter, the best choice to stop it would be planting more plants, as they take in carbon dioxide, but you will never hear this mentioned as a counter measure to carbon dioxide pollution, it's a scam to sell energy efficient ****.

If global warming was really about preserving the planet it would be about reforestation and cutting down on paper products and usage of wood.

If I make a thread about this, will you participate? Alternatively, you could. I'd love to get into this, but this is not the topic for that.