Enablers
" Capitalism is only kept going by this army of anti-capitalists who constantly exert their powers to clean up after it, and at least partially, compensate for it's destructiveness."
Rebecca Solnit
In a long essay the intelligent Ms. Solnit points out how those in the non-profit world and those doing "social" work ( "daycare, nursing home aid workers" etc) as well as an "army of the unpaid" (working as volunteers in soup kitchens, food pantries, etc) make it possible for capitalism to do it's dirty work while avoiding social unrest. The disturbing thing is ,nowhere does she call for abolishing this gross system. Instead she calls for ever more volunteers. She wouldn't abolish slavery but she would like to see the slaves treated better.
You only have to look at her choice of words. For instance, "compensate". Who actually receives any compensation within this system she promotes? Capitalists of course.( although altruists get to feel joy,peace,less guilt as well) And notice as well that the compensation is only partial, meaning tens of thousands still starve to death each day and so the "army" will be required to do more and more (endlessly).
I will agree here with Glen Beck when he includes George Soros and the other give-with-one-hand-take-with-the other "socialists" in this milieu. They could be forgiven for thinking this new form of capitalism, where the slaves lock themselves up every night, is indeed the "end of history". It is far beyond mere co-dependency, it is Stockholm Syndrome on crack and yet Ms. Solnit ( who I pick on mercilessly though she is but one such left intellectual among hundreds)offers hope in the form of innate goodness in human nature.
For example she cites the facts that "polar bears got some protection". In other words, "another world isn't just possible, it's here." Even on Christmas morning I can't buy such glass-half-full, rose colored sentimentality because it ignores such a crucial point, displaying either a terrifying blindness or simple human weakness (along with intellectual laziness).
Those pantry workers, volunteer bird scrubbers, trash picker uppers, etc. do not themselves possess an anti-capitalist critique. They have no coherent philosophical system to explain history. They can not articulate an alternative vision in part because these leftist intellectuals are condescending, comfortable and afraid to use their own stunted imaginations.
posted by troutsky @ 8:34 AM
24 comments
24 Comments:
I'll tell you why they can't articulate an alternative vision. It's because there is none that is viable that does not include capitalism in some form or another, and in a prominent role at that.
Lenin of all people even figured that out.
If revolution was an act by the most desperate or poor, India would have revolution daily.
Revolution is a process of conservatism, not radicalism. Its about protecting your home, family and job.
Actually neither abundance or extreme poverty cause change. Its the transition period.
If Bullshit were gold Ren would be loaded.
The followers of the genocidal failed philosopher and war criminal messiah are not amusing.
Pqgan: That's exactly what I mean about the death of imagination. You can't imagine an alternative and yet you won't articulate how this "form" of capitalism you speak of deals with the issues we are talking about here.
This default position of yours is de-facto support of the status quo.Regardless of what Lenin might or might not have said.
Ren: I wouldn't dismiss the revolutionary struggles of the poor and dispossessed, especially in Latin America. ( but also in India and Asia) There are plenty of ignorant reactionaries around here "protecting their home. families and jobs" from the Other. Which includes leftists.
Dispossession, exclusion and enclosure takes many forms and can include the theft of imagination, something I see a lot of in better off populations.
Troutsky-
You're the one who's supposed to articulate this grand vision that doesn't include capitalism. Let's see it. Put that imagination on full display. Just remember that the world's greatest visionaries, before they made any groundbreaking discoveries, started out on a groundwork of reality. You're going to have to come up with something in the way of an economic system that answers the needs of the people better than capitalism. Don't expect me to do it. I'm fine with reforming the system. I'm not a throw the baby out with the bathwater kind of guy.
You made me slip in Godard's "Weekend" when I read this, trout.
It's a very pessimistic point of view and I'm trying to avoid it but he pretty much dumps on everyone left or right as pretty self satisfied and devoid of any serious radical intent.
We aren't going to devolve to cannibalism as he symbolizes but we are going to have to reach bottom before anything changes.
Pity it's out of print. Great film. If you ever get a chance take it in. It's one of those obscure movies that I know you'd like, Beak. Check out the coming attractions at Film Forum, it still gets screened.
Pagan, do you mean capitalism or a market economy?
Market economies and worker ownership aren't contradictory.
I mean a market economy AND an ownership society, with free market principles and property rights. I'm not necessarily meaning Ayn Rand style libertarian capitalism by that.
This is a familiar, circular, and somewhat debilitating argument. You ask for a "viable" vision, no one agrees on viability and around we go.
The problem is: despite your best efforts at "reform", we have a barbaric, undemocratic system. Is it "viable"?
I'm happy to propose alternative visions, the number of which are limited only by our imaginations. The "viability" is limited not just by logic or reason but by entrenched power.
Ducky: I'm certainly willing to struggle for worker ownership but find markets especially onerous when extended to labor. I'm not convinced they are good at allocation and when profit is the incentive, ( is there another form?) we have problems with hierarchy and alienation. Private property creates inequity in terms of power.
This is why Pagan's reforms have proven historically to be such a failure and Ayn Rand's ghost never goes away.
"The number of which (alternative visions) is limited only by our imaginations".
What in God's name does that even mean? That's like telling the fattest, ugliest girl in town she's "beautiful on the inside where it counts." It doesn't hold up to reality, which is the ultimate limitation on our "imaginations".
What's viable about my system is, for one thing, it made this whole conversation we are having now possible. After it made it possible, it went even further. It made it permissible. Somewhere in between, it made it profitable for people, private citizens, to create the different tools and apps to make it work as well as possible, and for myriads of different business entities to profit from it, which resulted in their expansion and hiring of different technicians, programmers, accountants, graphic artists, writers, advertisers, sales clerks, store managers and owners, etc.
It has done so well, with a bare minimum of government regulation, that I dare say it was the driving force behind the economy in the nineties, and continues to be the driving force behind the US economy today.
Again, with a bare minimum of government regulation, otherwise known as intrusive, oppressive interference. It's the only thing that's kept this sorry, government riddled and oppressed economy afloat.
The minute you answer this post of mine, you will have proven my point, regardless of how you answer it. Any questions?
Pagan,
Is capitalism natural law? Was it or is it inevitable?
Trout, I agree that the profit motive is not going to distribute very well. Therefore it should be eliminated from essentials like education, health care and energy.
Tough to eliminate it from housing.
It would be a good exercise for people to remind themselves that during the Enron rape of California, municipal energy districts did not suffer the gouging.
Food is the real problem as we've seen with so much of our agriculture and ranching going to high profit low nutrition corn and inefficient beef production.
As for consumer goods, the market may well serve a necessary pricing function.
Pagan, the first computer spreadsheet program, Visicalc, which kicked off the whole industry was developed and given away.
Yup, given away. There has always been a free software movement. For all its profit gouging Microsoft has been extremely poor at innovation. The industry could have dne quite well without them.
Che Bob-
I don't know, I'm not familiar with natural law, or an adherent to it the way it is followed, or libertarianism. But I would say that the drive to possess property would be a natural outgrowth of "natural law", such as it is. So I guess by extension you could say capitalism would be. That doesn't mean there shouldn't be any common sense rules and regulations. I just think rules and regulations should be limited, otherwise they constitute a regime in their own right, and are the cause of most of the problems of capitalism.
Ducky-
The point was, the internet has grown, thrived, and prospered because the government has not tried to hinder its growth unduly with a flurry of rules and regulations. Too many regulations isn't protection from abuse, its slavery to a different form of abuse.
Well, let's take Facebook, Pagan. It starts as an almost incidental project and now it's what?
An indispensable aspect of modern life or a marketing tool that will diminish choice?
My concern is film. Clearly online streaming is the goal and if we had fast Internet like Europe we'd probably be there. Now, will that promote choice? I don't think so. You'll have the bandwidth devoted to the major studios and the proles will stay well anesthetized sitting up with Beak watching Shreck. Now that's fine, but not at the exclusion of choice and that is exactly how a capitalist distribution system is going to operate.
As Jean-Luc "Cinema" Godard said, you can always get the film made, the trick is getting it screened. What the online streaming will do is put us back in the days when neighborhood movie houses were contractually locked in to select Hollywood studios.
Until Janus films opened things up at the Brattle in Cambridge foreign films were virtually unknown in America. They flourished in the 60's and now we are back to SAW 3D despite the technology.
I got into an interesting discussion with someone about the new True Grit. My take is they shifted the emphasis from a story about heroism to one about grace and I mentioned Robert Bresson. Blank stares and indeed Bresson's singular work on the nature of grace and fate is largely out of print. There's more going on here than meets the eye.
Lot of those 60's French guys are out of print and I am not convinced the Internet will bring them back. Fucking Sony is sitting on the distribution rights to Satyajit Ray, a top 10 director, even though a complete restoration of his catalog was done by UCal Irvine, a PUBLIC institution. So a decent print of the magnificent Apu Trilogy is unavailable for viewing.
It's like I told you once before, Ducky. The popular films make it profitable enough for the studios to finance higher quality films. That's the way it works in television as well. Everybody bitches about reality shows, including me, but let's face it, they make a shitload of money, and that makes it possible for the television studios to make television dramas with higher production values than they used to be able to.
Plus, people are what they are and they like what they like. If you did away with all the Shrek type movies, people aren't going to suddenly appreciate higher quality film, but as long as that lower common denominator is profitable, you can keep making them for the audience that appreciates them. The onus is on that audience to promote them. That's how the market works, through advertising.
Facebook is one of those things that's a passing fad. It's main attraction is to help you catch up with old friends you've lost track of from years past, and maybe make new ones from far and wide. But it won't last. I remember when MySpace was all the rage, now I don't think its even in the top twenty web-sites.
Pagan : "that's how the market works , through advertising" "People like what they like"
If you understand advertisings ability to create desire you'll see how contradictory your thesis is.
Che Bob: I think modern proponents of capitalism use a strange amalgam of Natural Law ( Laws of Nature and of nature's God, such as is found in Declaration of Independence) and von Hayekian "cosmos" or spontaneous order. This was Smith's "invisible hand" and is opposed to "taxis", or purposeful organization.
These guys (Pagan?) believe in an unintended yet coherent web of relations within which individual agents pursued their different ends and order is miraculously created. Not unlike our discussion of certain free school philosophies and, I would argue, guides certain anarchist and World Social Forum type thought.
It is anti-organization and principled conservatives (all three of them!) believe it should guide economics while taxis guides social policy.
Ducky: The problem I see is in trying to define "essentials" and what logic separates the them from those deserving market allocation.
You find art essential (film anyway) I think food and housing are essential and from there?
All Hail Che Sponge Bob noble Asstec
God of Human sacrafice. Sorry, but genocidal failed philosophers need to
be placed on the trash heap of history.
Marxism is a form of mental illness.
Troutsky-
You have something against advertising now? It doesn't "create desire", it appeals to the desire that is already there, sometimes successfully, sometimes not. The caveat is, once you make the pitch, you have to deliver the goods. "The sizzle sells the steak", but if the steak is rotten and maggoty, or old and stale, nobody's coming back for a repeat performance.
I don't know where you get your ideas of capitalism, but you take Ayn Rand far too seriously. Capitalism without controls would be chaotic, and if it did eventually settle into some semblance of order, there would be bodies and blood in the street, figuratively and maybe even literally. Nobody wants to go back to the days of the Wild West. Nobody wants to totally do away with regulations and some semblance of control. We just want them to do what they are supposed to do, and no more.
I'll give you an example. Recently a well-beloved small cheese producer was forced out of business through the machinations of a run-amok FDA. They made high quality cheese that won awards and was a regional favorite. The reason they were shut down?
This business, a small family operation that made cheese, was inspected, and the inspectors found-gasp! the horror!-bacteria!!
Now you tell me, who did this hurt? It certainly didn't hurt Kraft foods, did it? One might say the giant food producers suddenly received a larger share of the market.
Pagan, if you don't think advertising stimulates desire then what the bleep are they pending the money for?
I would trump Troutsky and say that mass consumer advertising is the most dangerous force in the nation. I can't think of much that does more to prevent any kind of even progressive consciousness, let alone revolutionary.
Your point about small businesses being run out of town is ell taken. I have thousands of feet of footage of before and after the franchises and WalMarts came into my neighborhood and turned people into minimum wage greeters so they could enjoy "everyday low prices" and eat shitty food. Not much of a deal.
Trout, I certainly don't diminish the need for people to have the basics and it sure ain't happening in a lot of places. Why would I be concerned about art? Because I do honestly believe that the ability to express artistically is empowering and we desperately need an antidote to the noise machine. Art is currently just as constricted by Kapital's control of distribution as are food and housing.
Beak, do you ever have anything useful to say?
Rush Limbaugh is more cogent, and , no, that isn't a compliment.
I'll tell you why Walmart got so big and powerful. Its for the same reason Toyota came here and gobbled up such a huge share of the automobile market. It's because Americans got sick and tired of buying shitty products "made in America". Nobody wants to pay big bucks for crap, and that's what they were doing in the seventies and eighties with American automobiles, and increasingly throughout other areas of the domestic market.
My first blame of choice is the unions. Sorry, but that's just the facts. It's one thing to pay a janitor thirty dollars an hour. It's something else again to insist that he never do anything but push a mop or broom eight hours a day when he could receive training for other things, and would probably do so gladly if it wasn't for a bunch of union thugs limiting his potential.
That's cutting into company profits, along with the taxes and regulations. The constant growth of intrusive government regulations is the next villain on the list, and the worst one.
If it weren't for them, the cheese makers I alluded to would not only be in business, their product would be a lot more affordable. You could buy packs of high quality cheese for pretty much what you pay now for a stinking box of Velveeta. Thank you, feds.
And then along comes Ducky and Troutsky insisting business should not advertise to try to reach a broader market and make up some of that lost profit.
I'm going to clue you guys into a little secret, one you don't seem to be aware of. When the company you work for does good, and makes big profits, that is good for you too. Not bad for you.
Happy New Year.
Well, I see it differently, Pagan. After Word Wr II we were the last economy standing, we were it. Now the profits were so enormous that management figured they could do whatever they liked and they could stay on the gravy train forever.
They managed to let everything fall apart in a couple decades as they neglected to invest in production and Japan built state of the art plants.
Of course, never blame Kapital. Always blame labor. With an outlook that lopsided you can't expect to be give much consideration.
I blame the government, the feds, more than I blame labor, but labor is a significant part of the problem. By labor I mean labor leaders, not the actual workers.
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