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Post by Admin on Sept 19, 2019 17:25:13 GMT
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Post by Admin on Sept 22, 2019 19:02:52 GMT
// let’s not lose sight of the root cause of this crisis: rampant capitalism. Capitalism has steamrolled this planet and its organisms, gouging out mountains, overexploiting fish stocks, and burning fossil fuels to power the maniacal pursuit of growth and enrich a fraction of humanity. Since 1988, 100 corporations have been responsible for 70 percent of greenhouse gas emissions.// www.wired.com/story/capitalocene/
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Post by Admin on Sept 25, 2019 18:20:08 GMT
MAY 31, 2018 Seniors Are More Conservative Because the Poor Don’t Survive to Become Seniors By Ed Kilgore “Political participation of the poor is overall lower because of poverty, bad health and many other factors, but millions of impoverished Americans across the country also die prematurely. For instance, in 2015, research funded by the National Institutes of Health and the Social Security Administration revealed that, since 1990, among the bottom quarter of Americans with the least education, life expectancy has either stagnated or decreased. That’s for well over 40 million people. Add to this negative trend the fact that mortality among the poor increases during middle age — which is when citizens generally get more involved in politics. The premature disappearance of the poor, then, occurs precisely at the moment when they would be expected to reach their “participatory peak” in society. But they don’t live long enough to achieve that milestone. Since white people suffer proportionately less from poverty than nonwhite people, they do tend to live longer, and in better health, which is conducive to political and other civic activism. The most politically left-bent demographic racial group, African-Americans, has made progress recently in reducing the gap in life expectancy with white peers, but still lags in both lifespans and health, as a 2017 CDC study showed: “For blacks 18 to 64, the data showed that they were at a higher risk of early death than whites. “These findings are generally consistent with previous reports that use the term ’weathering,’ which suggests that blacks experience premature aging and earlier health decline than whites and that this decline in health accumulates across the entire lifespan and potentially across generations. This happens as a consequence of psychosocial, economic and environmental stressors,” said Leandris Liburd, director of the CDC’s Office of Minority Health and Health Equity.”” nymag.com/intelligencer/2018/05/poor-people-often-dont-survive-to-become-seniors-who-vote.html
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Post by Admin on Sept 27, 2019 12:44:23 GMT
"The society exists for the lowest because it exists for the mass, the mob, the crowd. The society is a herd-phenomenon. Whenever there is somebody who is a little more intelligent, has a slightly higher I.Q., has some more potential for love and for poetry, he will feel a little maladjusted. He will not feel at home. Seeing the beggar on the street, he will suffer; seeing all kinds of exploitations going on, he will suffer; seeing the state of humanity and its degradation, he will suffer – and all this will become too much. He will start cracking underneath this burden"
-OSHO
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Post by Admin on Sept 28, 2019 17:36:22 GMT
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Post by Admin on Sept 30, 2019 15:30:16 GMT
Capitalism is inseparable from the central banking system, which is a system of slavery that originated in ancient Babylon. It is a means of owning the future labour of people via a fraudulent system of money creation.
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Post by Admin on Sept 30, 2019 15:33:23 GMT
Capitalism is inseparable from the central banking system, which is a system of slavery that originated in ancient Babylon. It is a means of owning the future labour of people via a fraudulent system of money creation. what's going to happen very soon when human labour is no longer needed? www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Pq-S557XQU
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Post by Admin on Oct 4, 2019 11:52:37 GMT
Part of the Lies & Delusions of Capitalism. “If some of us grow rich in our sleep, where do we think this wealth is coming from? It doesn’t materialise out of thin air. It doesn’t come without costing someone, another human being. It comes from the fruits of others’ labours, which they don’t receive.” evonomics.com/unproductive-rent-housing-macfarlane/
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Post by Admin on Oct 10, 2019 18:32:34 GMT
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Post by Admin on Oct 16, 2019 15:25:22 GMT
OCTOBER 15, 2019 BY DANDELIONSALAD How Do We Rent Our Lives? by The Anti-Social Socialist dandelionsalad.wordpress.com/2019/10/15/how-do-we-rent-our-lives-by-the-anti-social-socialist/"Capitalism is based off depriving people of the right to control their own lives. To look at the birth of industrial capitalism we must first understand Enclosure. Enclosure was a measure passed by the state legally barring people from their land. Denying peasants access to communal resources meant the ability of workers to own their own means of production decreased over time and eventually they had nothing to sell but their labor. The free people resisted the conversion to wage slavery preferring even vagrancy to the this new form of slavery. So the new moneyed classes then turned to the state to criminalize poverty and not allow the public to use land without paying the ruling class in the form of permits and/or taxes. We are still feeling the effects of Enclosure today. It’s one of the reasons there has been a long history of criminalizing marijuana while tobacco has been legal or, why our society is powered by fossil fuels instead of renewable energy. Tobacco and oil are difficult to cultivate and extract. They take upfront investment, capital, machinery and networks of distribution. In other words, a lot of people can extract wealth from the process even though they contribute nothing to it. Meanwhile, marijuana is a weed you can easily grown on your own property and once solar panels are on your roof, the sun’s energy is yours to harness. The reason these things are not allowed is because the ruling class cannot make money off of them. The capitalist version of the free market, which isn’t free at all, deprives the population of their own means of subsistence and creates a web of sophisticated forms of control where one must pay rent to in order to survive. If people didn’t have to rent their lives to enrich others, if our basic needs were met, if people had access to the means of their own survival, if there was positive liberty, imagine the great leaps forward we could make as a species by great minds that are currently preoccupied with their own survival."
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Post by Admin on Oct 18, 2019 8:38:00 GMT
Published on Monday, September 09, 2019 by Truthdig The Capitalists Are Afraid They know the reigning ideology of neoliberalism no longer has any credibility. Its lies have been exposed. They also know they are to blame. by Chris Hedges “Capitalism, because it is such a socially destructive force, saturates the media landscape with advertising to misinform and manipulate the public.” www.commondreams.org/views/2019/09/09/capitalists-are-afraid
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Post by Admin on Oct 24, 2019 15:23:02 GMT
Brilliant. "Far from representing rationality and logic, capitalism is modernity’s most beguiling and dangerous form of enchantment. Perhaps the grandest tale of capitalist modernity is entitled ‘The Disenchantment of the World’. Crystallised in the work of Max Weber but eloquently anticipated by Karl Marx, the story goes something like this: before the advent of capitalism, people believed that the world was enchanted, pervaded by mysterious, incalculable forces that ruled and animated the cosmos. Gods, spirits and other supernatural beings infused the material world, anchoring the most sublime and ultimate values in the ontological architecture of the Universe. But as Calvinism, science and especially capitalism eroded this sacramental worldview, matter became nothing more than dumb, inert and manipulable stuff, disenchanted raw material open to the discovery of scientists, the mastery of technicians, and the exploitation of merchants and industrialists. Discredited in the course of enlightenment, the enchanted cosmos either withered into historical oblivion or went into the exile of private belief in liberal democracies. As Marx put it, all that was solid melted into air, and the most heavenly ecstasies drowned in the icy water of egotistical calculation. Since the 17th century, much modern history has provided good reasons to show that ‘disenchantment’ is more of a fable, a mythology that conceals the persistence of enchantment in ‘secular’ disguise. Capitalism, it turns out, might be modernity’s most beguiling form of enchantment, remaking the moral and ontological universe in its pecuniary image and likeness. Weber’s intuition that the gods had assumed a modern, ‘secular’ façade – especially in the ‘laws’ of the market that had acquired something like a divine status – suggests that the hegemonic version of ‘disenchantment’ is at least partly mistaken, if not fallacious. Though renowned for describing religion as ‘the opium of the people’, Marx was emphatic that enchantment had also taken refuge in the capitalist marketplace. While in the Communist Manifesto (1848) Marx identified capitalism as driving disenchantment – immersing those ‘heavenly ecstasies’ in the gelid whirlpool of ‘egotistical calculation’ – he also referred to the capitalist as ‘a sorcerer, who is no longer able to control the powers of the nether world he has called up by his spells’. In his ‘1844 manuscripts’, and in the Grundrisse (1857) and Capital (1867) – Marx called attention to the enchantment of money and commodities under capitalism. Having drowned traditional religion, money morphed, he asserted, into ‘the almighty being’, ‘the god among commodities’, ‘the truly creative power’. This is more than literary grandiloquence; for Marx, money is, in effect, the ontological leaven and foundation of the capitalist world: ‘If I have the vocation for study but no money for it, I have no vocation for study – that is, no effective, no true vocation.’ (In economics, it’s called ‘effective demand’: if I’m thirsty but have no money for water, my thirst doesn’t exist.) Money is not just a medium of exchange; like the God who creates ex nihilo, out of nothing, it becomes the source and arbitrator of ontological validity under capitalism. Marx expanded on the ontological sorcery of money when he wrote, in Capital, on commodity fetishism. The commodity, he writes, abounds in ‘metaphysical subtleties and theological niceties’. Those ‘subtleties’ and ‘niceties’ arise from the very nature of commodities themselves, divided between their ‘use-value’ – the qualitatively different purposes and uses of goods (shoes for feet, cups for drinking, etc) – and their ‘exchange-value’ – their status as commodities produced for sale to make money and accumulate capital. Money is what anthropologists might call the mana of capitalism: the spirit that inhabits all material things, and whose departure decrees oblivion. Purchase, sale and investment become acts of mercenary divination; Marx describes ‘all the magic and necromancy that surrounds the products of labour’. Commodity fetishism is the equivalent, in capitalism, of the Roman Catholic sacramental system: where the latter conveys divine power and grace through material objects and rituals, the former channels the power of money through the pecuniary transubstantiation of objects. By reducing the world to inanimate stuff that could be understood and manipulated only by experts, ‘disenchantment’ or ‘objective consciousness’ served the interests of business and professional elites – ‘the technocracy’, in Roszak’s shorthand. It allowed them to establish what he called a deadly ‘monopoly of the sacramental powers’. …The restoration of a ‘sacramental vision of nature’ would discredit disenchantment and ‘the technocracy’, and usher in a more humane, democratic and green political economy. As one of Roszak’s visionary vanguard, the economist E F Schumacher, wrote in Small is Beautiful (1973), ‘the task of our generation … is one of metaphysical reconstruction.’ With ecological as well as economic calamity looming today, understanding and addressing the ontological assumptions of capitalist modernity is imperative. Indeed, ‘metaphysical reconstruction’ must lie at the basis of any revolutionary struggle in our day – in fact, it’s necessary for the survival of the species." - Aeon As the article suggests, Gerrard Winstanley, Simone Weil, and William Blake were right: Marx in a sense was not materialist enough - as quantum mechanics and modern phenomenology are now suggesting, the abstract bifurcation of matter and mind or spirit is nonsense: every atom, as Shelley noted 200 years ago, is living spirit - is a restless, radical, self-transformative spirit of imminent self-realisation and self-integration. The ideas were taken up by the 'red evolutionists in the early19th century: “visionaries who see life marching inexorably upward, powered from below”. These new firebrands were later to cause the reactionary Charles Darwin and many others a good deal of concern in the 1830s and 1840s with their vision of nature evolving “from below” and their belief that for human society to progress it must follow a similar path. We need to recapture their flair and their acumen. ‘Matter’ is far more interesting, and revolutionary, than the old, left brain materialists ever dreamed - as indeed Niels Bohr, David Bohm, Carl Jung, and Iain McGilchrist are again drawing our attention to. The dissociation of the material from the spiritual has been the great weakness of atheistic class struggles: the dissociation of the affective and intuitive right hemisphere systems from the maniulative and instrumental left. aeon.co/essays/capitalism-is-modernitys-most-beguiling-dangerous-enchantment
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Post by Admin on Oct 24, 2019 15:54:06 GMT
“Capitalism degenerates into fascism when the precarious ally with the powerful to dominate the powerless. Those who feel entitled to, but deprived of, power — instead of reforming a society so that everyone has more, and truer powers, rights, freedoms — lick the boots of the powerful, in order to dominate and subjugate the powerless. ...We have found that the sudden, violent turn of young white men, towards fascism, is driven by a kind of relative collapse in social rank, status, and power. It is in that sense they are losers — they are not living the lives they expected to live.” eand.co/why-capitalism-implodes-into-fascism-a06273a68dc9
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Post by Admin on Oct 25, 2019 8:57:55 GMT
A Massive Revolt Against Capitalism And Colonialism Has Begun “Once you view our situation from the perspective of the Third World and colonized people who have been struggling against capitalism and imperialism for centuries, you see that the true class struggle isn’t taking place within bourgeois elections. It’s taking place in the jungles where Maoist guerrillas are fighting to win territory from India’s corporate fascist government. It’s taking place in Bolivia’s anti-imperialist military school, which is training Bolivians to defend their country’s socialist, indigenous-led government from an escalating American regime change attempt. When true class struggle happens in America, it takes the form of road blockades and the kinds of protests that happened three years ago at Standing Rock. In circumstances of intense systemic oppression, like during the racism and poverty that the Natives at Wounded Knee experienced before they took up arms to occupy their town in 1973, American class struggle truly comes to resemble what’s happening throughout the Third World. “As we First Worlders look to the Third World rebellions for revolutionary inspiration, we need to honestly examine the material conditions which have brought about these developments. Marxism-Leninism is all about scientifically applying the realities of a given region or nation in order to bring about class liberation, and we must recognize the constraints that America’s current material conditions put upon our ability to mobilize the masses. It’s no wonder why most Americans aren’t coordinating an armed anti-government uprising like the people at Wounded Knee did; while things are bad for Americans, most aren’t in quite such a desperate situation, and most haven’t been properly educated about colonialist oppression and class exploitation.” seeyouin2020.blogspot.com/2019/10/a-massive-revolt-against-capitalism-and.html
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Post by Admin on Oct 27, 2019 1:49:27 GMT
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