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Post by Admin on Apr 2, 2022 22:17:54 GMT
"The world's present industrial civilization is handicapped by the coexistence of two universal, overlapping, and incompatible intellectual systems: the accumulated knowledge of the last four centuries of the properties and interrelationships of matter and energy; and the associated monetary culture which has evolved from folkways of prehistoric origin. The first of these two systems has been responsible for the spectacular rise, principally during the last two centuries, of the present industrial system and is essential for its continuance. The second, an inheritance from the prescientific past, operates by rules of its own having little in common with those of the matter-energy system. Nevertheless, the monetary system, by means of a loose coupling, exercises a general control over the matter-energy system upon which it is superimposed. Despite their inherent incompatibilities, these two systems during the last two centuries have had one fundamental characteristic in common, namely exponential growth, which has made a reasonably stable coexistence possible. But, for various reasons, it is impossible for the matter-energy system to sustain exponential growth for more than a few tens of doublings, and this phase is by now almost over. The monetary system has no such constraints, and according to one of its most fundamental rules, it must continue to grow by compound interest." - M. King Hubbert
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Post by Admin on Apr 8, 2022 20:03:52 GMT
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Post by Admin on Apr 9, 2022 9:59:01 GMT
Capitalism normalizes death: From COVID-19 to the threat of nuclear war Andre Damon@Andre__Damon 6 hours ago In 1963, Barry Goldwater, the future Republican Party nominee for President of the United States, published a book entitled Why Not Victory? which argued that the United States was insufficiently aggressive in confronting the Soviet Union because the American population was too fearful of nuclear war. www.wsws.org/en/articles/2022/04/09/pers-a09.html
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Post by Admin on Apr 14, 2022 21:30:41 GMT
APRIL 14, 2022 The Role of Capitalism in the War in Ukraine BY RICHARD D. WOLFF www.counterpunch.org/2022/04/14/the-role-of-capitalism-in-the-war-in-ukraine/To the motives for war in human history, capitalism added another: profit. That motive drove technological advancement and created a genuine world economy. It also built new capitalist empires such as the Spanish, Dutch, British, French, Belgian, Russian, German, Japanese, and American empires. Each of these countries built its empire by various means including wars against prior systems operating on their own territories, in their colonies, and in foreign “spheres of influence.” Wars likewise characterized interactions among empires. Global warfare (“world wars”) accompanied the globalization of capitalism and its profit motive. The war in Ukraine is the latest chapter in the history of capitalism, empire, and war. Capitalism means enterprises run by small groups of people—employers—who preside over large groups—hired employees. Employers are driven to maximize profits: the excess of the value added by hired workers over the wages paid to them. Employers are likewise driven to sell outputs at the highest price the market will bear and buy inputs (including workers’ time) at the lowest possible market price. Competition among capitalist enterprises pressures all employers to plow profits as much as possible back into the business to help it grow and to gain market share as means to maximize profits. They each must do this in order to survive because competition’s winners tend to destroy and then absorb the losers. The social result of this competition among enterprises is that capitalism as a system is inherently driven to expand quickly. That expansion, inside every capitalist nation, inevitably overflows its boundaries. Capitalist enterprises seek, find, and develop foreign sources of food, raw materials, workers, and markets. As competition becomes global, competing capitalist enterprises seek help from their nations’ governments to expand. Politicians quickly learn that companies in their nations that lose in global competition will blame those politicians for insufficient support. Meanwhile, companies that win in the global competition will reward such politicians for their help. The social result of this is that capitalism entails national competition alongside enterprise competition. Wars often punctuate capitalism’s national competition. The winners in those competitions thereby often tended to build empires, historically. For example, in the 17th and 18th centuries, wars helped British capitalism to build a global empire. In the 19th century, more wars punctuated the completion and consolidation of that empire. Empire growth had itself stimulated all manner of challenges and competition, eventuating in more wars. For example, as capitalism took root and grew in Britain’s American colony, colonial enterprises eventually encountered obstacles (limited markets, taxes, and limited access to inputs). These obstacles eventually grew into a conflict between them and their colony’s leaders, on one side, and Britain’s capitalists and King George III, on the other. The war of independence resulted. Later, British leaders went to war against the United States in 1812 and also considered siding with the enslavers in the South against the capitalist North in the American Civil War. The 19th century saw countless efforts by other nations to compete with, challenge, undermine, or reduce Britain’s empire. Competitive capitalist enterprises engendered competitive colonialism and many wars. The United States and Germany grew into the major national competitors for Britain. Wars punctuated the growth of capitalism across the 19th century, within the United States and Germany, as well as elsewhere across the globe. As capitalist enterprises combined, centralized, and grew—resulting from the competition among them—so too did many nations consolidate into fewer numbers of nations. Wars became larger too, culminating in the devastating first of the two world wars. The British Empire fought the German Empire in World War I. That destroyed them both as contenders for global dominance. Having been far less damaged by World War I, U.S. capitalism grew fast in replacing the global capitalist positions that Britain and Germany had lost because of the war. World War I also established capitalism’s responsibility for the tens of millions who died, were injured, and were made refugees in what was then considered the worst war ever. Germany tried to regain its global dominance a few years later, allied with the newest capitalist empire, Japan, to undo the results of World War I. It failed, as the United States defeated Germany and Japan to demonstrate its economic and military (nuclear) superiority. A consolidated U.S. global empire prevailed from 1945 until recent years. The United States then learned what the British had discovered earlier. Building and consolidating a capitalist empire provokes an endless succession of challengers. Among capitalist enterprises, competition’s losers’ employees move to work for the winners; the winners’ enterprises grow, and the loser’s decline. Winners’ growth often entails still greater profits and more competitive victories. That growth invites and promotes new competitors. Fended off for a while, eventually one or more new competitors discover how seriously to challenge the older dominant firm and displace it. Capitalist empires and their challengers exhibit parallel histories. As the competitive new enterprise destroys the old, the same happens with empires. That has been capitalism’s history, and that is what is now being seen in Ukraine. Britain, after the end of the reign of Napoleon Bonaparte, won a century of global dominance. The United States after World War I did so too. Both empires provoked endless challenges. Nations large and small developed enterprises, industries, and political leaders who wanted to make changes or move in directions that differed from/challenged the U.S. global capitalist hegemony after World War I. For example, across Latin America, references to “manifest destiny” resulted in small wars to remove competing challenges in the region. Likewise, when Iran’s prime minister in the early 1950s, Mohammad Mosaddegh, or Patrice Lumumba, the first democratically elected prime minister of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, showed signs of breaking away from the U.S. empire’s control, both were removed. The one repression attempt by the U.S. that failed was in Cuba. The United States then isolated and economically hobbled Cuba via sanctions and embargoes. Warfare could be economic as well as military. Ukraine is another example, but with a peculiarity: U.S. support for Ukraine is an effort to repress another country that challenges U.S. hegemony, namely Russia. And repressing Russia too is a peculiar indirect way to get at the greatest threat to the U.S. capitalist empire, namely China. The USSR’s survival after 1917, its World War II victories, and its development of nuclear weapons after 1945 created a potential challenger for the U.S. capitalist empire that had to be confronted. Former U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt and former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom Winston Churchill had accommodated the USSR’s control in Eastern Europe after 1945, but that represented a “loss” for U.S. global dominance. Thus, Eastern Europe quickly became the site of an ideological or “cold” war that pitted freedom and democracy against communism and totalitarianism in the USSR and its “satellite states.” It had to be a “cold” war because the consequences of a nuclear war would have been extreme. Before World War II, U.S. wars against other communist challengers of its empire had not demonized them as “evil communists.” During World War II, the United States even allied with the USSR to jointly defeat the immediate challengers (Germany and Japan). But after 1945, that was the preferred ideological terminology used for the USSR to justify protecting the U.S. empire. Then, when the USSR and its hold on Eastern Europe collapsed in 1989/1990, the old terminology faded in favor of a new terminology, used to begin a new war on a new challenger: Islamic terrorism. The 30-plus years since 1989/1990 have changed both the U.S. empire and its challenges. Russia proved too weak to hold on to most of Eastern Europe. The United States reintegrated much of that region into Western capitalism via EU and NATO memberships, trade agreements, and Western investments. Slowly, over the last 20 years, Russia overcame some of its post-1989 weaknesses. The meteoric rise of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) brought new challenges for the U.S. empire, including a Russia-China alliance. Russia is now a capitalist economic system allied with the PRC (whose economy has a larger private capitalist sector than at any time since the Chinese Revolution of 1949). These two powerful capitalist economies are the largest globally by geography (Russia) and by population (China). They present a major problem for the U.S. global empire. Russia evidently felt finally strong enough and allied with a much larger economic entity so it could hope to challenge and stop further “losses” in Eastern Europe. Thus, it invaded Crimea, Georgia, and now Ukraine. In stark contrast, the U.S. empire’s ability to suppress challenges to its global dominance shrank. It lost wars in Vietnam, Afghanistan, and Iraq, as well as its intervention in Syria’s civil war. Its global economic footprint decreased in relation to that of the PRC. It proved unable to bring nations like Venezuela and Iran to heel despite trying hard for many years. In Ukraine, on one side is an effort led by nationalists who would bring another nation further back into the U.S.-led global capitalist empire. On the other side is Russia and its allies determined to challenge the U.S. empire’s growth project in Ukraine and pursue their own competitive agenda for part or all of Ukraine. China stays with Russia because its leaders see the world and history in much the same way: They both share a common competitor in the United States. Ukraine, per se, is not the issue. It is tragically a war-ravaged pawn in a much larger conflict. Nor is the issue about either Russian President Vladimir Putin or U.S. President Joe Biden as leaders. The same history and confrontation would prevail upon their successors. Meanwhile, former U.S. President Donald Trump’s effort to force change on the PRC by imposing the biggest sanctions action in history (i.e., a trade war and a tariff war) utterly failed. Trump was caught up in the same history as Biden, even if each focused on attacking the Russian-Chinese alliance differently. Eventually some compromise will end the Ukraine war. Both sides will likely declare victory and blame the war on the other among propaganda blizzards. The Russian side will stress demilitarization, denazification, and protection of Russians in eastern Ukraine. The Ukraine side will stress freedom, independence, and national self-determination. Meanwhile, the tragedy goes beyond Ukraine’s suffering. The entire world is caught up in the decline of one capitalist empire and the rise of yet another. Conflicts between the capitalist empires can occur anywhere where differences between them flare up. Perhaps the greatest tragedy lies in not recognizing the responsibility of the capitalist system with its markets of competing enterprises run/dominated by the minorities we call employers. That system lies at the root of these historic repetitions. The minority employer class controls or is the leadership of the nations that have absorbed and reproduced the competition that capitalism entails. The majority employee class pays most of the costs on both sides (in dead, wounded, destroyed properties, refugee lives, and taxes). A different economic system not driven by a profit motive offers a deeper solution than any on offer at present. Perhaps the war in Ukraine can awaken an awareness of its capitalist roots and teach people to explore alternative systemic solutions. If so, this war and the resulting devastation from it could lead to an important turning point that eventually results in some positive outcomes in the future. This article was produced by Economy for All, a project of the Independent Media Institute. Richard Wolff is the author of Capitalism Hits the Fan and Capitalism’s Crisis Deepens. He is founder of Democracy at Work.
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Post by Admin on Jun 9, 2022 15:48:09 GMT
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Post by Admin on Jul 4, 2022 22:19:26 GMT
Characteristics of an Unhealthy Culture Posted on July 2, 2022 by Dave Pollard howtosavetheworld.ca/2022/07/02/characteristics-of-an-unhealthy-culture/A while back, Tema Okun published (and continues to curate) a fascinating list of the qualities of a White Supremacist Culture. When I read it, I realized that she was at the same time identifying the characteristics of an unhealthy culture. If you study past collapsed cultures, they had many of these attributes. Drawing on Tema’s list, here’s my list of the qualities of an unhealthy culture headed for inevitable collapse: chronic and pervasive physical and emotional stress and anxiety widespread malnutrition (notably in ‘affluent’ nations), chronic and pervasive physical and emotional illness, and lack of resilience and fitness prevalence of casteism — control and hoarding of wealth and power by a patriarchy, hierarchy, oligarchy or other unrepresentative, privileged, ‘qualified’, ‘exclusive’ group disconnected from and not responsive or responsible to the rest widespread use of fear to oppress and suppress people and ideas prevalence of exceptionalism, arrogance, and failure to appreciate the lessons of history large-scale infighting and divisiveness among and between groups extreme disconnection from the land and the more-than-human world rabid individualism — belief that our success or failure is up to us, not dependent on others, and that the individual, not the community, bears ultimate responsibility a mentality of scarcity, and creating scarcity artificially through inequality to enforce obedience prevalence of simplistic, absolutist, binary, “one-right-way” thinking high level of change resistance, and nostalgia for what never was belief that more is always better, and growth is always good, regardless of cost intolerance for conflicting or uncomfortable ideas and beliefs perfectionism — criticizing rather than learning from mistakes, averseness to risk-taking, experimentation and innovation in favour of conservatism and incrementalism predominant short-termism, prioritizing the urgent, and never allowing time for reflection, listening and true dialogue before decision-making defensiveness and/or denial of the truth in the face of a compelling preponderance of evidence a competitive, adversarial zero-sum game mentality rather than one of collaboration and sharing lack of coherent values — a preoccupation with what is easily measurable over what is actually important lack of a cohesive, articulate and inclusive story of the culture, employing instead an ideology, a false myth, or an antagonism (what the culture is against rather than what it is for) rampant and unrealistic future-oriented idealism (eg about space travel, perpetual life, techno-utopias, ‘perfect’ markets, or infinite growth) endless civil, cultural, genocidal, resource- and land-driven wars reliance on propaganda, censorship, and disinformation to suppress civil disobedience Looking at our current civilization culture, the diagnosis would appear to be grim. How did we get to this stage? My sense is that our collective conditioning over the past few millennia has inevitably led to this, the result of billions of people doing their best to make things better for themselves and those they love. We can rant and rave all we want about all of these emergent, unhealthy qualities of our civilization, but it’s sheer hubris to think we can ‘reform’ it. This hasn’t happened because we were stupid, or evil, or allowed evil people to come into power. The human experiment on this planet has been a fascinating one, but we didn’t do anything wrong. The way it, and we, have evolved couldn’t have taken any other course. All systems, and all civilizations, do and must eventually crash, despite what those espousing the myth of progress would like us to believe. This — the way we live now — isn’t how humans, or any creatures, are meant to live. When I say ‘meant’ I’m referring to how we are biologically made up. Like our cousins the bonobos, we emerged as a species suited to a slow, peaceful, low-stress, uncrowded existence. For whatever reason, probably involuntarily, we migrated to very different, hostile environments, and used our large mental capacity to try to control and manage in these new environments. But the systems we created to do this controlling and managing were maladaptive and unnatural, and they have been continually and inevitably coming apart since we created them. And now, as David Ehrenfeld predicted, they are collapsing on a massive scale. These systems, and this civilization culture, no longer serve us. We are right to be fearful of the struggle and hardship that collapse is already starting to impose on many of us, but we should not mourn this culture’s collapse. We cannot know whether there will be any human survivors as this collapse accelerates through the rest of the century. But just as our species’ emergence came about as an accident — the aftermath of the fifth great extinction 65 million years ago — we cannot even guess what will emerge from the current sixth great extinction, the one our species, in its ‘wisdom’, unleashed a mere blink in time ago. All we can know is that, if future cultures have many of the characteristics of the list above, nature will not allow them to continue for long. Thanks to Kavana Tree Bressen for pointing me to Tema’s site. This entry was posted in How the World Really Works, Our Culture / Ourselves, Preparing for Civilization's End. Bookmark the permalink.
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Post by Admin on Aug 1, 2022 18:19:09 GMT
"The bad news: soaring inflation is leading to massive rises in mental stress, chronic anxiety, instability, uncertainty, and hopelessness. The President of the Royal College of Psychiatrists last month warned that “the cost-of-living crisis poses a threat of pandemic proportions to the nation’s mental health.” Yet people are currently actually getting priced out of therapy due to increasing rates or needing to spend money on other things. "A recent study found that 48% of people would be unable to pay for therapy if the rate increases, and 38% have required help from someone else to pay for their therapy" ('High Inflation Rates Impact Almost Every Aspect of Our Lives, Including Mental Health', July 2022)
The good news: it’s all avoidable. There is actually plenty of money washing around in the economy. The problem is that it’s all washing around in the top echelons of it: British Gas has just announced £1.3bn profits in the first six months of this year, a five-fold increase, and an increase of a billion pounds from the same time last year.
Shell’s profits hit record $11.5bn (announced last week) - a fourteen-fold increase in quarterly profits; in February this year the UK’s ‘Big Six’ energy companies raked in more than a billion pounds of profit ahead of this year’s record hike in bills.
Because of the relationship between corporations and power - as Naomi Klein has expertly shown, not so much a revolving door as a knock-through extension (she calls our current political system a 'Corporatist State', see her chapter 'A Corporatist State: Removing the Revolving Door, Putting in an Archway’, in The Shock Doctrine) - those in charge of the economy are also those benefitting from keeping it exactly the way it is. That is, there is no real division between political parties and corporations any more. Rishi Sunak is living on top of a private fortune of £730million, and his wife’s family has a £900 million joint venture with Amazon in India; chancellor Nadhim Zahawi’s property holdings stood at £83.7million as of June last year; in the States, Jeff Bezos has an estimated net worth of $144 billion, Bill Gates has $123 billion, and Elon Musk - the world's richest man - has a net worth of $224 billion.
$224 billion is $224,000,000,000.
The average UK nurse’s pay is £33,384 or $40,667. How much do you like SpaceX? As Krishnamurti once said, “it is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society.” Jungian analyst James Hillman has called this a "sick world". The sickness starts at the top, and slowly seeps down - trickle down sickness.
The richest Americans became 40% richer during the pandemic (Guardian, 2021) - the top 400 richest added an astonishing $4.5tn to their wealth last year, a 40% rise, even as the pandemic shuttered large parts of the US, according to Forbes magazine’s latest tally of the country’s richest people. $4.5tn is 4,500,000,000,000. That's just in one year. And added to their existing trillions. These are people who take private jets to go shopping.
Meanwhile, in the UK “Britain’s super wealthy have grown their combined fortunes by a record £710 billion in just 12 months” (May 2022). It’s a grotesque system of mass exploitation and chicanery - designed to keep us impoverished, distressed, stressed and fractious for the rest of our lives.
In 2020-21, the UK's military spending - that is, our spending on war and bombing other countries - amounted to £42.4 billion, a nominal increase of £2.5 billion. That is 42,400,000,000. Magic money trees? Military money trees.
In 2009, following the 2008 financial crash, journalist Matt Taibbi famously described Goldman Sachs as a “great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money”. The only thing that has changed since then is that the squid has massively ballooned in size. Why? Because we keep feeding it, and have done nothing to abate its rapacious appetite - indeed we keep voting for political parties and systems that seek to maintain and strengthen the squid - that ARE the squid. We don’t need trendy new mental health apps, cheap Zoom sessions, or meditation classes to help us cope with and bear these grotesque systems of distress and damage - we need to get rid of those grotesque systems of distress and damage. This requires structural change. “We will never solve the major global problems we face”, psychiatrist Iain McGilchrist notes, “by tinkering with the current model” (in 'The Political Self', 2016). As psychotherapist Nick Duffell similarly remarks, this need for a complete shift in perspective also applies to our educational and political structures. “British elitism supports an out-dated leadership style that is unable to rise above its own interests, perceive the bigger picture and go beyond a familiar, entrenched and unhealthy system of adversarial politics”.
Why keep addressing the effects and not the causes? Why keep band-aiding the effects of this toxic system and not analysing its roots? It is, I suggest, utterly irresponsible of mental health practitioners to keep this system in place and simply promote cheap, technological, utterly inadequate “mindfulness” placebos for it or publish books and promote "worthy" conferences that merely offer individualistic sugar pills without ever acknowledging the truth of what is going on - and their complicity in it.
In my talk to the Institute of Psychoanalysis in 2017 I suggested “that capitalism is in many respects a mental-illness-generating system”, noting the chronic raft of misery that follows in its wake, and citing the established evidence of the social determinants of mental distress. I cited Richard Bentall, the President of the British Psychological Society: "It’s not just that there exist social determinants, they are overwhelmingly important.” I cited George Monbiot: “What greater indictment of a system could there be than an epidemic of mental illness?” I suggested that the shocking extent of this “epidemic” is made all the more disturbing by the knowledge that so much of it is preventable: precisely because of these powerful and intrinsic links to the environment and social determinants. During the pandemic we saw the biggest wealth transfer in history - from the poorest 90% of humanity, whose livelihoods were hit, to the richest handful of billionaires who saw their fortunes double and in some cases triple. Global economics, and the political and media system that support it - yes BBC I’m looking at you - are all a massive con, to keep us distracted (Commonwealth Games anyone? - a vanity project costing us in itself an eye-watering £778 million) and enslaved to those economics - what the late great Mark Fisher called ‘Capitalist realism’ - i.e. the sort of realism in which, as he starkly put it, "it is easier to imagine an end to the world than an end to capitalism” (see also Fredric Jameson and Slavoj Žižek).
We need change - not the sort of change that politicians, invested in keeping the system exactly as it is but only putting themselves at the figurehead of it, talk about. We need real change - the removal of the system of abuse and damage that constitutes modern capitalism, and the sort of politicians it produces and who are utterly invested in it - up to their privileged necks in it. We need a system modelled on and structured around and rooted in cooperation and care, the bedrock of our social and neural networks as fundamentally inter-dependent, inter-relational animals. As I noted in the introduction to The Political Self, “we need a new integrated model for mental health, and a new politics: we need a new dialogue between the political and personal worlds, and a recognition of how psychotherapeutic practice and the psyche both shape and are powerfully shaped by existing structures and interests.” Now is the time to do this, while we still can."
The Political Self
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Post by Admin on Sept 2, 2022 21:42:36 GMT
The Collapse of Capitalism www.politicalscienceview.com/the-collapse-of-capitalism/April 7, 2021 by politicalscience The Collapse of Capitalism.The major purpose of Capital, therefore, was to show that capitalism in destroying itself must give rise to socialism, its antithesis. The plan of Marx’s argument was to accept the labor theory of value, which Ricardo had made the central principle of classical economics and which Mar regarded as an authentically scientific theory of capitalism, and then to show dialectically that it is logically incoherent. The basic concept of Mar’s analysis was “surplus value.” The classic defense of capitalism had been the argument that in a system of free exchange everyone would, in the long run, receive back a value equivalent to that which he brought to the market and would thus receive his equitable share of the social product. Against this Marx sought to show that in an industrial system in which capitalists own the means of production, labor will always be forced to produce more than it receives and more than is required to keep the system going. Wages, on the average, will lie close to the subsistence minimum, not as Malthus had argued because of the pressure of population but because of the system of private ownership, and the capitalist’s monopolistic position in the system will enable him to sequestrate the surplus in the form of profits and rents. This argument, with its almost endless ramifications and its excessive technicalities, led to a long controversy which was celebrated in its day but which was outmoded even before it came to an end. For the Ricardian theory of value from which it started became obsolete for non-Marxian economists while the controversy was still in progress. Marx’s economics in general and the theory of surplus value in particular, therefore, belong properly to the history of economic theory. It is indeed taken for granted by present-day Marxists, yet an ardent Marxist like Lenin rarely referred to it. For Marx, however, surplus value was the keystone of the argument, since it provided the ground of his conclusion that a capitalist system must ultimately he self-destroying. The theory left in its train two propositions that remain articles of faith for later Marxists, first, that capitalism must inevitably collapse, and second, that its collapse must inevitably give rise to socialism. Marx’s economic analysis, therefore, produced a number of predictions about the course that a capitalist society will run through in its way to ultimate failure. Because of the competition of capitalists among themselves, industry will tend to be concentrated in larger and larger units of production. These will tend to become monopolistic, and wealth will be concentrated in fewer and fewer great fortunes. Competition to keep up profits will make exploitation more severe, and the working class will become more and more impoverished. Because labor is chronically unable to consume all that it produces, a capitalist economy will be subject to periods of overproduction, depression, and unemployment. Small businessmen, farmers, independent artisans-the petty bourgeois remnants of a handicraft economy will more and more be reduced to the level of wage earning proletarians, and a capitalist society will tend to be polarized between capitalists, with satellite sub classes, on one side and the proletarian masses on the other. In the end, Marx argued, this must bring about a revolutionary situation in which the expropriators will be expropriated, and the means of production will be socialized. All these predictions were subjects of prolonged controversy, and judged in the light of what happened after Marx wrote they had widely different values, which suggests that they were not deduction, from sound theory but, when correct, were penetrating guesses about, the way capitalist industry would work. The tendency of industrial and business units to combine and grow in size and the tendency toward recurring cycles of prosperity and depression were verified, though corporate organizations tended to spread ownership and to divest it of the implications of control that Marx attached to it. On the other hang the prediction that the working class would be progressively impoverished was wide of the mark, for industrial. societies indubitably raised their standard of living. The prediction that the lower middle class would be absorbed into the wage-earning proletariat also proved to be wrong, for industrialization greatly increased the so-called white-collar class, which in Marx’s classification must be called petty bourgeois, Though capitalism assumed international proportions, as Marx-ed, the working class of the more highly industrialized countries showed no tendency to unite for an international class struggle, as Lenin in 1914 confidently expected them to do. Nor does it appear that capitalist industrialism sharpened class antagonism. If this kind of broad comparison is to be made, it seems nearer the truth to say that industrial societies are less stratified than handicraft societies, that their class lines are easier to cross, and that they are extraordinarily stable, Social revolutions occurred in Russia and China, not in England or Germany. Marx’s certainty about the validity of his method induced a readiness to predict that revolution and the collapse of capitalism were imminent, and these predictions were usually mistaken because the revolutions either did not occur or occurred in the wrong places. The other half of Marx’s prediction-that the collapse of capitalism would be followed by a socialized or collective economy-was a speculation that depended wholly on the dialectic. Behind it there was, to be sure, a perfectly justified mood of revulsion against the brutalities of early capitalism. But the dialectic made it impossible for him to think of this as criticism; it must be prediction, and what is predicted must come about. Development must lead to the opposite of that from which it starts, and the opposite of capitalism is communism. For no substantial reason Marx believed that all the evils of capitalism were concentrated in the private ownership of the means of production, and hence he could believe that the abolition of private ownership would cut off the evil at its root. The anarchy of privately owned and competitive production will be succeeded by a planned and harmonized economy, an association of free individuals who work with jointly owned means of production and wittingly expend their several labor powers as a combined social labor power. The first step to this end is to bring production under the conscious and prearranged control of society, or in short, public ownership. By reason of this change the whole class structure supported by privately owned industry will be undermined and ultimately destroyed, and a classless society will eventuate in which coercion will no longer be necessary. The state in Engels famous phrase will wither away, since it is an organ of repression in a society based on exploitation, and in some inexplicable way specialization and the division of labor will no longer be necessary. Again as Engels said in a famous sentence borrowed from St. Simon, The government of persons is replaced by the administration of things and the direction of the process of production. This was Marx’s repayment for all the scorn that he had heaped on the utopian socialists, or perhaps it was the apocalyptic vision required to make any theory of social revolution convincing human relationships that throughout history had been governed by force and exploitation are at some point to be supplanted by relationships that will be wholly idealized and cooperative. The classless society is the myth of the future which compensates for the disillusionment of the present and the disappointments of the revolution itself. Coupled with the idea that history has an inevitable end, however, the myth of the future may be a very dangerous kind of moral philosophy. For the future is the one thing that never arrives, and if the present is the domain of sheer force, force will always be morally justified if it leads toward history’s predestined goal, which in practice means, if it succeeds. Marx had in fact, like Hegel, something very like contempt for moral scruples and convictions and ideals, and both temperamentally and by conviction, he believed that reform is impossible. Society as it is must be ‘‘smashed” to make a fresh start, and though the revolution must be planned, what is to follow the revolution can be left to the new order. The social morality of the apocalyptic vision is fanaticism, but beyond the vision there is a possibility which Marx’s experience never forced him to consider, namely, that the revolution might occur. The social morality of a realized utopia can quite easily be cynicism. Read More Related Topics :- The Proletarian Revolution Dialectical Materialism Economic Determinism of Dialectical Materialism Ideology and the Class Struggle of Dialectical Materialism Marx’s Summary In Dialectical Materialism Engels on Dialectic in Economic Determinism Dialectical Materialism and Politics Capitalism as an Institution The Strategy of the Social Revolution
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Post by Admin on Sept 2, 2022 21:44:14 GMT
The Collapse of Capitalism... What now? hemptemple.org/blogs/news/the-collapse-of-capitalism-what-nowCapitalism has failed as a social system, but then again, it was never meant to succeed. It did was it was intended to do, separate, by means of money and power. We live in a world in which ‘forty-two billionaires now enjoy as much wealth as half the world’s population’, the good old 1%. Even though this crevasse in materiality still exists between the have’s and the have nots, whether by corporate copulation or divine design; these systems are revealing their fragility and I wager an inevitable collapse. For capitalism relies on this divide for its very survival and that gap in consciousness is closing. Capitalism must be regarded as an economy of unpaid costs (K. William Kapp). The debt of multinationals and governments have accumulated beyond repayment manifested in the multifaceted climate collapse of an environmental, economic, social and deeply psychological nature. Those who we have elected into positions of power, voted in by political fabrications or by consumer choice, were never going to claim responsibility for the destructive effects of a system they are suckling on. We may compartmentalise these left brained ideological structures as distant relatives we prefer to forget, yet these value systems are deeply woven into everything that comprises our relational existence. Economic systems are social systems, are political systems, are educational systems. We live within the energetic field of those damaged value systems in every moment. No matter where we sit on the scale of privileges disproportionately distributed by this system, we are all bound by one grand pulsating collective consciousness. While others suffer we will suffer, there will be no freedom until we are all free. Capitalism is a world system of work, a world system by which we relate. We buy, we trade, we meet and from relationship, it is an integral vein in our lives. Our unique work lives within larger bodies of work, these circles of exchange, trade and conversation so often occur within the very expression of these systems. Perhaps your lover was a bartender, your best friend an entrepreneur you admired, your elders friendly folk from the local shops. These spaces of connection are capitalist by nature. Our relationships within the landscapes of work reveal just how interwoven our lives are by the values of the unified economic, social systems. Whilst inequality and separation are mirrored between them, these same issues are in the underbelly of our conscious minds. And though these systems are rotten, we are at once comfortable and uncomfortable within the known and familiar edges of their bubbles. As a loving species with polluted minds, we all want the world to be a better, kinder, more peaceful place, only possible by means of drastic change. But what does that change really look like? How does it affect our work? What comforts must we sacrifice for change? A pendulum conversation of money and power. Let it swing. Systems were born of a fundamental need to organise, delegate and define the roles within them. The primal origin, the drive behind cultivating systematic intelligence was the longing of human freedom. Freedom that bore fruit of vision, insight, spiritual and social connection; the quality of our relationship to the living world. Ultimately these demands implied equality, community, human development and sustainability. Though we may have gone astray, these are the fundamentals that will guide us home. Firstly, there are our basic human needs (rights). Health care, housing, education, clean water, clean food and clean air. These are ecosystems, a chain of human generations, little circles of community, local, regional, global networks of co-habitation. All of these are run on communication, transport & energy. Jeremy Rifkin American economic and social theorist, writer, public speaker, political advisor, and activist, has passionately deconstructed these ideas to reveal some basic prophetic happenings. Essentially, with a minimal amount of energy, capital, materials and labour technology is going to liberate the excess fear and scarcity of these aspects of our lives. We’re talking 3D printed cars, renewable energy, even better and cheaper communication systems; accessible for everybody. Thought intellectuals may argue that this will give rise to even greater consumption, this activist genius believes over consumption will actually disappear along with the fear of scarcity mindset plus the void left by the fall of major corporations will be filled by the heart filled philanthropy of the nonprofit sector. Which is actually growing faster than the GDP, this ‘social capital’ is hardly recognised within the voice of capitalism so we can hardly recognise all of the integrity and whole hearted humans rising to alleviate humanity. Essentially, it is an epochal shift. And the fear that may arise in these times of collapse is natural, yet overwritten. For there are much better times on the horizon we just have to keep our chin up, our hearts open and trust that on the other side is fresh air, clean water and more peaceful life.
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Post by Admin on Sept 2, 2022 21:45:11 GMT
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Post by Admin on Sept 2, 2022 21:46:00 GMT
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Post by Admin on Sept 12, 2022 17:55:08 GMT
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Post by Admin on Sept 12, 2022 17:56:50 GMT
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Post by Admin on Oct 13, 2022 15:42:56 GMT
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Post by Admin on Oct 22, 2022 18:01:56 GMT
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