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Post by Admin on Sept 13, 2020 21:50:48 GMT
“We were told that we would see America come and go. In a sense America is dying, from within, because they forgot the instructions of how to live on earth.Its the Hopi belief, its our belief, that if you are not spiritually connected to the earth, and understand the spiritual reality of how to live on earth, its likely that you will not make it.Everything is spiritual, everything has a spirit, everything was brought here by the creator, the one creator. Some people call him God, some people call him Buddha, some people call him Allah, some people call him other names. We call him Tunkaschila... Grandfather.We are here on earth only a few winters, then we go to the spirit world. The spirit world is more real then most of us believe. The spirit world is everything.Over 95% of our body is water. In order to stay healthy you've got to drink good water. ... Water is sacred, air is sacred. Our DNA is made out of the same DNA as the tree, the tree breaths what we exhale, we need what the tree exhales. So we have a common destiny with the tree. We are all from the earth, and when earth, the water, the atmosphere is corrupted then it will create its own reaction. The mother is reacting. In the Hopi prophecy they say the storms and floods will become greater. To me its not a negative thing to know that there will be great changes. Its not negative, its evolution. When you look at it as evolution, it's time, nothing stays the same.You should learn how to plant something. That is the first connection. You should treat all things as spirit, realize that we are one family. Its never something like the end. Its like life, there is no end to life”
-Floyd Red Crow Westerman
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Post by Admin on Sept 13, 2020 21:52:53 GMT
Koyaanisqatsi en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KoyaanisqatsiKoyaanisqatsi (English: /koʊjɑːnɪsˈkɑːtsiː/[3]), also known as Koyaanisqatsi: Life Out of Balance, is a 1982 American experimental film produced and directed by Godfrey Reggio with music composed by Philip Glass and cinematography by Ron Fricke. The film consists primarily of slow motion and time-lapse footage of cities and many natural landscapes across the United States. The visual tone poem contains neither dialogue nor a vocalized narration: its tone is set by the juxtaposition of images and music. Reggio explained the lack of dialogue by stating "it's not for lack of love of the language that these films have no words. It's because, from my point of view, our language is in a state of vast humiliation. It no longer describes the world in which we live."[3] In the Hopi language, the word Koyaanisqatsi means "unbalanced life".[4] The film is the first in the Qatsi film trilogy: it is succeeded by Powaqqatsi (1988) and Naqoyqatsi (2002).[5] The trilogy depicts different aspects of the relationship between humans, nature and technology. [6] Koyaanisqatsi is the best known of the trilogy and is considered a cult film.[7] However, because of copyright issues, the film was out of print for most of the 1990s.[8] In 2000, the film was selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress for being "culturally, aesthetically, or historically significant".[9]
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Post by Admin on Sept 19, 2020 18:28:14 GMT
People no longer believe working hard will lead to a better life, survey shows By James Purtill Monday 20 January 2020 5:33pm www.abc.net.au/triplej/programs/hack/2020-edelman-trust-barometer-shows-growing-sense-of-inequality/11883788A growing sense of inequality is undermining trust in both society's institutions and capitalism, according to a long-running global survey. The 2020 Edelman Trust Barometer - now in its 20th year - has found many people no longer believe working hard will give them a better life. Despite strong economic performance, a majority of respondents in every developed market do not believe they will be better off in five years' time. This means that economic growth no longer appears to drive trust, at least in developed markets - upending the conventional wisdom. "We are living in a trust paradox," said Richard Edelman, CEO of Edelman. "Since we began measuring trust 20 years ago, economic growth has fostered rising trust. This continues in Asia and the Middle East but not in developed markets, where national income inequality is now the more important factor. Fears are stifling hope, and long-held assumptions about hard work leading to upward mobility are now invalid. Growing 'trust chasm' between elites and the public Fifty-six per cent of the surveyed global population said capitalism in its current form does more harm than good in the world. Most employees (83 percent) globally are worried about job loss due to automation, a looming recession, lack of training, cheaper foreign competition, immigration and the gig economy. Fifty-seven percent of respondents worry about losing the respect and dignity they once enjoyed in their country. Nearly two in three feel the pace of technological change is too fast. Australia recorded one of the largest declines of trust in technology. Australians were most worried about losing their job to the gig economy, followed by recession, lack of training, and foreign competitors. The study also found a growing "trust chasm" between elites and the public that could be a reflection of income inequality, Edelman said. We now observe an Alice in Wonderland moment of elite buoyancy and mass despair," he said. While 65 per cent of the worldwide informed public (aged 25-65, university-educated, in the top 25 per cent of household income) said they trust their institutions, only 51 per cent of the mass public (everyone else, representing 83 per cent of the total global population) said the same. "The result is a world of two different trust realities," the report says. "The informed public - wealthier, more educated, and frequent consumers of news - remain far more trusting of every institution than the mass population. "In a majority of markets, less than half of the mass population trust their institutions to do what is right. "There are now a record eight markets showing all-time-high gaps between the two audiences - an alarming trust inequality." Trust levels among the informed public in Australia were at 68 per cent, far higher than the 45 per cent recorded among the mass population.
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Post by Admin on Sept 20, 2020 20:09:32 GMT
Let's say we accept capitalism's defenders' claims that their system created mass economic growth and pulled countless people out of poverty. Even if that's true, we have clearly reached a point in human development where we can rid ourselves of capitalism's relations of hierarchy and domination — without inviting immiseration. Capitalism Isn’t About Freedom. It’s About Subjugation. BY SHAWN GUDE jacobinmag.com/2020/09/capitalism-freedom-subjugationThree episodes into the fifth season of Billions, the Showtime drama centered on a brash tech billionaire (Damian Lewis) and a hard-charging prosecutor (Paul Giamatti), Lewis’s character shows up at his son’s elite boarding school. He’s furious. The school is punishing his son for taking down a wide swath of the electric grid with a Bitcoin mining stunt, and Lewis can’t believe the headmaster’s temerity. He browbeats the bow-tied leader into dropping the punishment — blackmailing the man over a Syrian refugee program he secretly green-lit — and forces the headmaster to allow him to address the entire student body. Lewis, clad in billionaire-cool-guy attire (jeans, black Nikes, zip-up sweatshirt), speaks from the stage of the school’s auditorium: Your headmaster was kind enough to cede me the mic for this morning’s lesson, and I’m here to give you a little bit about what the school has been holding back from you: the goddamn truth — about Darwin, scarcity, and the world you actually live in. It’s not the warm, swaddled place your headmaster and your parents have told you about. It’s populated by people like me, who will tear you apart. Nature didn’t select me — I selected myself, by harnessing my nature. My son wasn’t pulling a prank. He was trying to earn. And if he broke the school’s code, it’s because the code is wrong, asked him to go against the DNA which is telling each of you to be greedy, yes, be hungry — subjugate and conquer. Because that’s who we are. That’s what we are. Capitalism harnesses that better than any other economic model on earth. Everything we have is because of capitalism, cause someone had an incentive to get up off his ass, to out-invent, to out-earn, yes, and to subjugate others — less capable, less intelligent, less ambitious, less lucky. To make those capitalistic dreams come true. Lewis is an extremely unlikable figure in the show, a modern-day robber baron more apt to humiliate a subordinate than display a nonpsychotic attribute. But as the speech suggests, his character gives us the advantage of clarity, since he personifies capitalism in its most unvarnished form. Capitalism posits a trade-off for workers: relinquish your liberties on the job, forget about having meaningful control over the political process, and we’ll deliver you a bounty. Hierarchy might be your lot, but you’ll have a nicer TV and cheaper food to show for it. The innovators, the business titans, will make their unfettered impression upon the world, bestride the planet seeking “to out-invent, to out-earn, yes, and to subjugate others,” and the rest of us will be materially better-off. Let’s say we accept capitalism’s defenders’ claims, acknowledge that, for the first time in human history, capitalism created mass economic growth and pulled countless people out of poverty. The socialist’s wager is that we have nonetheless reached a point in human development where we can rid ourselves of capitalism’s relations of hierarchy and domination without inviting immiseration. Rather than anointing private property king, we can put a different principle at the heart of human relations: the idea that collective endeavors shouldn’t be set up so others are at the beck and call of a single person, or a dominant class. Lewis’s character is right. The world is not a warm, swaddled place. It is populated by people that, to a greater or lesser degree, will lord their power over others. That’s all the more reason to make sure they don’t have the chance.
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Post by Admin on Sept 20, 2020 23:24:38 GMT
Imagine a New Economic System that Benefits Everyone ReplaceCapitalism.com has two goals: To demonstrate the absurdity of Capitalism as an economic system, and allow us to understand the massive suffering that Capitalism causes for billions of people today. To define and explain a new economic system that will Replace Capitalism and benefit everyone on planet Earth. If you have a few minutes, then please… Read Chapter 1 and Chapter 2 – they explain the problem and the solution in just a few minutes Read the explanation of the new economic system that begins at Chapter 16 Objections are addressed in Chapter 22 replacecapitalism.com/
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Post by Admin on Sept 27, 2020 19:12:20 GMT
Germany is today a first-rank power: rich, strong, and efficiently governed. But just over 200 years ago, most of its current territory was a shambolic mess — part of the Holy Roman Empire, which even at the time was recognized as an anachronistic political fossil. More than a thousand years old at that point, the empire was a patchwork of hundreds of different duchies, electorates, principalities, kingdoms, church lands, and so forth, some of them just a few dozen acres (Liechtenstein is one of these relics which still survives), with an exceptionally complicated and illogical tangle of legal institutions overlaying them all. Surpassed by history, the confederation was ripe for the picking by an opportunistic tyrant. The United States today bears an uncomfortable similarity to that doomed empire. The American Constitution is the oldest in the world still operating, and has been obviously out of date for well over a century. Half the basic mechanics of government are either malfunctioning kludges or a gross betrayal of its own founding principles. Countries that fail to maintain themselves to this degree often do not survive. America is the Holy Roman Empire of the 21st century theweek.com/articles/939193/america-holy-roman-empire-21st-century
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Post by Admin on Sept 28, 2020 2:09:05 GMT
Capitalism isn't working anymore. Here's how the pandemic could change it forever edition.cnn.com/2020/09/20/economy/how-covid-changed-capitalism/index.htmlNew York (CNN Business)Capitalism is in crisis. The pandemic could change it forever, in favor of workers and those in greatest need. Covid has put a magnifying glass over the many inequalities of the US economy and society. Millions of Americans are still out of work. Women and minority workers have been hit particularly hard. Many people can't afford child care or the technology their children need for distance learning at school. The playing field wasn't level before, and the virus has shone a new light on the shortcomings of today's economic and social systems, said Paul Collier, economics and public policy professor at Oxford. The World Economic Forum has already called for a "great reset" of capitalism. It's emblematic of today's capitalist society that groups of people get left behind, and it's the job of policy makers to try to fix that. This isn't the first time capitalism is in crisis. In the 1950s — America's so-called golden age — there were concerns about automation eliminating jobs and people falling through the cracks of the government's safety net (sound familiar?). And in 2008, corporate greed came under the microscope following the financial crisis. In modern history, only the Great Depression was more economically devastating than Covid-19. The aftermath of the Great Depression — relief, recovery, and most of all, reform — may once again be necessary to create a better economy for the future, said Larry Glickman, professor of American studies at Cornell. It will be hard to sweep all of America's economic issues under the rug again when the pandemic is over. "We are pregnant with change," said MIT economics professor Daron Acemoglu. Here are three ways the pandemic might change capitalism forever: A new social safety net The pandemic exposed the cracks in America's social safety net. Enter the welfare state 2.0, which could be more attuned to workers' needs, experts said. "We're in a moment where the pendulum is [swinging] towards a more favorable view of what government can do," Glickman said. Better-designed unemployment benefits, programs to help people back into the workforce and more affordable housing could help ease the burden of this crisis for the weakest members of the economy. Millions have lost their jobs in the pandemic, but regular unemployment benefits are often not enough to make ends meet, while rents eat up a large chunk of incomes across the country. As the pandemic drags on, hunger is an increasing problem, too. On top of that, workers in mostly lower-paid jobs have found themselves at risk for contracting the virus at their workplace, including casinos, meat processing plants and shipping warehouses. Paying to replace these workers' wages won't come cheap, and will likely mean that taxes will have to rise while still staying low enough not to stifle business, economists agree. It's a tightrope. Globalization and automation challenge the manufacturing sector Globalization goes hand in hand with capitalism. It has changed the way money and people move around the world. A big challenge for policy makers is to deal with how that has affected workers. In today's capitalism, money is, for the most part, considered more important than workers: If moving jobs elsewhere, or using robots saves dollars, it's done. For workers on the wrong side of these trends, things haven't improved, and this has exacerbated inequality, Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell said earlier this year. The pandemic has provided a real-life example that robots don't get sick, but human workers do. Welfare isn't only about benefits. It also extends to education and health care. In a world where machines increasingly take over people's jobs, educating the next generation so their skills match what's needed is important. More debt than ever before Capitalism isn't only about how a country treats its people and workers, it's also about how it treats its money. Covid has brought on government spending like never before and deficits are burgeoning around the world. The Congressional Budget Office predicts the US federal budget deficit will be $3.3 trillion at the end of the year — more than triple of what it was in 2019. Debt might be one of the most prominent characteristics of today's capitalism, said Christine Desan, professor of law at Harvard. In the post-pandemic world, policy makers will either have to accept living with enormous debt burdens or address a complete overhaul of the system in place.
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Post by Admin on Oct 6, 2020 11:38:59 GMT
Quote by Peter Joseph -
“Our entire system, in an economic sense, is based on restriction. Scarcity and inefficiency are the movers of money; the more there is of any resource the less you can charge for it. The more problems there are, the more opportunities there are to make money.
This reality is a social disease, for people can actually gain off the misery of others and the destruction of the environment. Efficiency, abundance and sustainability are enemies of our economic structure, for they are inverse to the mechanics required to perpetuate consumption.
This is profoundly critical to understand, for once you put this together you begin to see that the one billion people currently starving on this planet, the endless slums of the poor and all the horrors of a culture due to poverty and pravity are not natural phenomenon due to some natural human order or lack of earthly resources. They are products of the creation, perpetuation and preservation of artificial scarcity and inefficiency.”
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Post by Admin on Oct 8, 2020 11:44:01 GMT
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Post by Admin on Nov 5, 2020 23:04:40 GMT
Terrific new book, 'The Enchantments of Mammon: How Capitalism Became the Religion of Modernity' by Eugene McCarraher, exploring the religious structures of thought that underlie and actually drive modern forms of materialism and capitalism, and "how capitalism is a new, perverse form of enchantment”. "Far from being an agent of 'disenchantment,' capitalism, I contend, has been a regime of enchantment, a repression, displacement, and renaming of our intrinsic and inveterate longing for divinity. There is more than mere metaphor in the way we refer to the 'worship' or 'idolatry' of money and possessions. Even if many (if not most) of us believe in a disenchanted, desacralized cosmos—a universe devoid of spirits and other immaterial but animate beings—capitalism has assumed, in its way, the status of an enchanted world. Like the blood-sacrificial rites of nationalism that sanctify the modern state, capitalism represents what the theologian William Cavanaugh has called a 'migration of the holy,' a forced march of sanctity and devotion toward new, putatively secular objects of reverence. To be sure, enchantment can take a variety of forms: magic; animism; the myriad shapes of the occult; or at its most elaborate, religion. Although Weber showed that capitalism, while an agent of disenchantment, had nonetheless received the sanction of Calvinist Protestantism, Walter Benjamin suggested almost a century ago that capitalism is a religion as well, a 'cult' with its own ontology, morals, and ritual practices whose 'spirit ... speaks from the ornamentation of banknotes.' I take this as a point of departure and argue that capitalism is a form of enchantment—perhaps better, a misenchantment, a parody or perversion of our longing for a sacramental way of being in the world. Its animating spirit is money. Its theology, philosophy, and cosmology have been otherwise known as 'economics.' Its sacramentals consist of fetishized commodities and technologies—the material culture of production and consumption. Its moral and liturgical codes are contained in management theory and business journalism. Its clerisy is a corporate intelligentsia of economists, executives, managers, and business writers, a stratum akin to Aztec priests, medieval scholastics, and Chinese mandarins. Its iconography consists of advertising, public relations, marketing, and product design. Its beatific vision of eschatological destiny is the global imperium of capital, a heavenly city of business with incessantly expanding production, trade, and consumption. And its gospel has been that of 'Mammonism,' the attribution of ontological power to money and of existential sublimity to its possessors." More info about the book is available here: www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674984615It's an absolutely beautifully written book - it's very rare to find this level of insight and analysis combined with such lucidity, and breathtaking in its reach and scope - from "the fraudulent paradise depicted in advertising" and the "aura" generated by new commodities to the idea that "salespeople were missionaries" in a project that (in America especially) was constantly being promoted and presented in religious terms and a sanctioned framework of "Providence", "manifold destiny", and "the divine mission of America". These people were basically selling hoovers. McCarraher reveals how astonishingly "religious" this whole financial project - "Mammonism" - actually was and is: "the fetishism of technology", God as Market and Market as God, a belief system saturating not only the original Puritan roots of the capitalist enterprise there, and the "prosperity gospel" of Mormonism, to the role of the new priestly elites - the Harvard economists and Goldman Sachs Masters of the Universe - in affirming "the capitalist ways of God to humanity" ("The Lord is my Banker" sings one devoted capitalist acolyte in Brooklyn). It's part of its enchantment to present itself as un-enchanted I think: as a sort of secular project. While all the time it constantly draws on - relies on - this sense of the special magic and aura of its products (the commodity fetishism of iPhones that drives this whole sham), and the underlying sense of divine entitlement - the moralisation of wealth and the self-attribution myth (the fallacy that people at the top deserve to be there – money as the “accusation of sin”, as Blake notes), the myth of the heroic ‘individual’, and the myth of entitlement. Above all, perhaps, the absolute belief in the Market as a quasi-divine agency and arbiter of fate, distribution, judgment, salvation. It's much more than a metaphor for the CEOs on Wall Street and in the City, and McCarraher shows where that comes from, and how it sustains this show. I also think his research dovetails in many remarkable and provocative ways with Iain McGilchrist's analysis of the brain hemispheres, the left hemisphere being in many senses a sort of literalised 'mockery' of the values and ways of relating of the right hemisphere - "the creating of a world in the left hemisphere’s own likeness", as McGilchrist notes (see 'Left hemisphere as parody of the right hemisphere' in my book The God of the Left Hemisphere). I think this helps explain the very weird - rather "occult' - nature of the capitalist "enchantment" - like an empty corpse or ghost kept animated artificially and mechanically: so we don't actually access or acquire purity by buying a soap, or power and self-belief by purchasing an Aston Martin - it's all curiously hollow and vacuous, while still drawing on these deep animistic and archetypal symbols and suggestions (see Max Jakob Lusensky's excellent 'Brandpsycho: The hidden psychology of brands').
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Post by Admin on Nov 6, 2020 18:41:09 GMT
Our Lives Under Capitalism Are Tragically, Maddeningly, Permanently ImpermanentBY MARIANELA D’APRILE Our work lives are so fissured, our ability to survive requiring such constant and Herculean efforts, that even fantastical narratives portraying the hunt for a steady job as swirling, maddening, operatically dramatic, degrading, bizarre, and never-ending feel just as real as life itself. jacobinmag.com/2020/11/capitalism-impermanence-hilary-leichter-temporary-book-reviewIwork as a freelance writer. After losing my full-time job in April after the coronavirus pandemic exploded and spending several months applying to and not getting all kinds of “regular” jobs, I got a couple of leads for “anchor gigs” — steady, reliable sources of freelance income that can pay the bills, leaving me with some time to also write other, usually more enjoyable, things. There are no guarantees to any aspects of my life as a freelancer. Some weeks, I have a steady stream of commissions or ideas for pitches for stories. Other weeks, my inbox is quiet: a relief in some ways, completely dreadful in others. My anchor gigs do just what their moniker implies: hold my life down. They relieve my worry that I won’t be able to pay rent. Still, there is no guarantee that this month won’t be my last at any given one of them. I have to court them, prove my worthiness, convince them to stay. Millions of workers are like me, not to mention the huge number of at-will employees who have a bit more job security than me, but not much. Freelance work is particularly precarious, but virtually all jobs are now. We bounce around, looking for a job that fits, a job that pays, or, ideally, “a job that stays.” That’s how the protagonist of Hilary Leichter’s debut novel, Temporary, puts it. Immediately, I found her desire relatable. Her zeal for her job hunt is frightening — first because it seems misplaced, and then because it mirrors how the contemporary pursuit of a livelihood has practically become a way of life, forcing us to continuously do things like “be active on LinkedIn” and “network.” Our narrator approaches her quest with the kind of manic, frenetic energy we might typically save for, or find sparked by, a new lover. This reversal of work and life — specifically, love life — is established early in the novel: “When you know, you just know,” the “lucky” temps tell her of finding her dream job. This is perhaps how characters in a romance novel would describe true love, but Temporary forces us to pose the question: aren’t we past that kind of sentimentality? For decades, we have been fed the idea that work is from where we’ll derive satisfaction and meaning; that if you “love what you do, you won’t work a single day in your life.” We know, of course, that that’s not true — we are stressed, stretched thin, left with little to no time after work or on weekends to live our lives in whatever way we find pleasing, and our constant state of precarity is driving us mad. Temporary takes that edict, to love your job, to its logical conclusion: letting the job become the sole and defining factor of a life.
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Post by Admin on Nov 20, 2020 12:38:14 GMT
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Post by Admin on Nov 26, 2020 16:29:38 GMT
"The perverted dreams of western modernity and capitalism may be exhausting themselves, says author Eugene McCarraher. Hs latest book, 'The Enchantments of Mammon: How Capitalism Became the Religion of Modernity', is a deep dive into the history of a perverted love story and a false religion — the western worship of money and markets. The author testifies against a creed that has dominated our lives since the 17th century and offers an imaginative look at what can help us break the spell. Critics of the disenchantment narrative have long noticed that if you look closely at western modernity, this ostensibly secular and rational regime, you find it pretty much teeming with magical thinking, supernatural forces, and promises of grace. Maybe the human yearning for enchantment never went away; it just got redirected. God is there, just pointing down other paths. As scholars like Max Weber have noted, capitalism is a really a religion, complete with its own rites, deities, and rituals. Money is the Great Spirit, the latest gadgets are its sacred relics, and economists, business journalists, financiers, technocrats, and managers make up the clergy. The central doctrine holds that money will flow to perform miracles in our lives if we heed the dictates of the market gods. In distinction to some like-minded thinkers, McCarraher holds that capitalism is not a 'dis'-enchantment, or even a 're'-enchantment, but rather a misenchantment, a “parody or perversion of our longing for a sacramental way of being in the world.” He sees the condition peaking at beginning of the 21st century, followed by calamitous years of economic crises, political and social unrest." The Gospel of Capitalism is the Biggest Turkey of AllBy Lynn Parramore NOV 25, 2020 | CULTURE www.ineteconomics.org/perspectives/blog/the-gospel-of-capitalism-is-the-biggest-turkey-of-all
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Post by Admin on Dec 30, 2020 23:34:24 GMT
A new study, published in the Journal of Epidemiology, links exploitation to mental illness. The authors, Seth Prins and colleagues at the Columbia University in New York City, go beyond the link between socioeconomic status and mental disorder to investigate the role of abusive power dynamics fostered by an economic system that enables overwork and wage theft. “Focusing on exploitation rather than its consequences (e.g., socioeconomic status) shifts attention to a structural process that may be a more appropriate explanatory mechanism, and a more pragmatic intervention target, for mental illness,” Prins and his co-authors explain. The article, ’The Serpent of their Agonies’: Exploitation as A Structural Determinant of Mental Illness,” is titled after the following quote found in Marx’s Capital. “For protection against ‘the serpent of their agonies,’ the laborers must put their heads together, and, as a class, compel the passing of a law, an all-powerful social barrier that shall prevent the very workers from selling, by voluntary contract with capital, themselves and their families into slavery and death.” Overwork and Exploitation Linked to Psychological Distress Researchers connect economic exploitation, overwork, and wage theft to increased rates of mental disorders.www.madinamerica.com/2020/12/overwork-exploitation-linked-psychological-distress/Prins, S. J., McKetta, S., Platt, J., Muntaner, C., Keyes, K. M., & Bates, L. M. (2020). “The Serpent of their Agonies”: Exploitation As Structural Determinant of Mental Illness. Epidemiology.
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Post by Admin on Jan 22, 2021 11:08:33 GMT
MARTIN LUTHER KING’S RADICAL ANTICAPITALISMBy Keeanga Yahmahtta-Taylor, The Paris Review. January 21, 2021 | EDUCATE! popularresistance.org/martin-luther-kings-radical-anticapitalism/In a posthumously published essay, Martin Luther King, Jr. pointed out that the “black revolution” had gone beyond the “rights of Negroes.” The struggle, he said, is “forcing America to face all of its interrelated flaws—racism, poverty, militarism and materialism. It is exposing the evils that are rooted deeply in the whole structure of our society. It reveals systemic rather than superficial flaws and suggests that radical reconstruction of society itself is the real issue to be faced.” But it had not started out that way. Over the course of a decade, the black struggle opened up a deeper interrogation of U.S. society, and King’s politics traversed the same course. Indeed, in the early 1960s, the Southern movement coalesced around the clearly defined demands to end Jim Crow segregation and secure the right of African Americans to unfettered access to the franchise. With clear targets and barometers for progress or failure, a broad social movement was able to uproot these systems of oppression. King was lauded as a tactician as well as someone who could articulate the grievances and aspirations of black Southerners. But despite the successful example of nonviolent civil disobedience across the South, it appeared to have little, if any, lasting impact on the edifice of racial discrimination that defined black life elsewhere. Indeed, the seeming permanence of black marginalization across the United States produced hundreds of urban uprisings in the middle of the 1960s. If King’s strategic genius in the South was deploying nonviolent civil disobedience to disarm Southern racists while coercing the political establishment into securing first-class citizen rights, it was a strategy that ultimately failed in cities such as Los Angeles, Chicago, Philadelphia, and Washington, D.C. In those places, obnoxious signs of Jim Crow were not the problem; rather, it was the insidious but obscured actions of the real-estate broker, the banker, the employer, the police officer, and other agents that maintained racial inequality. As King’s attention drifted from the South to the entrenched northern ghettos, he faced denunciations and chastisement from former allies in the North. These people had supported him so long as he confined his demands to ending legal discrimination. Indeed, because Southern racism was rendered as antiquated and regressive, King was celebrated for helping to pull the South toward progress and modernity. But even as the civil rights movement was valorized for its intervention in the South, it was demonized when it brought its call for black power and liberation to the North—a dynamic that continues to the present day. In King’s time, institutions in the North that preached racial neutrality but that were wholly complicit in racial subjugation appeared impervious to tactics that used confrontation and embarrassment to compel change. King was forced to reconceive his strategy. King’s confrontation with the Chicago mayor Richard J. Daley, for instance, was instructive. When King went to Chicago in 1966 to participate in an ongoing campaign to end slums in the city’s black West Side, he was confronted by the obstinacy of patronage-fueled machine politics. African American gatekeepers viewed King as an interloper, and the mayor viewed him as a nuisance. Daley simply denied that there was a ghetto in Chicago, and the black political machine exhorted that the ghetto’s existence was proof positive of racial progress. They deprived King of the spectacle of confrontation that had exposed the Southern establishment. It was this foray into the tough political environment of residential segregation and political machines that provided the momentum for King’s radicalization. His political maturation prompted him to connect the U.S. war in Vietnam to the deteriorating conditions in U.S. cities, and of even more consequence, it prompted him to search for more effective tactics in confronting the legal menace of segregation in the North and the attendant crises: slum conditions, unemployment, and police brutality. Within this context, King began to publicly articulate an anticapitalist analysis of the United States that put him in sync with rising critiques from the global revolutionary left of market-based economies. Despite the “affluence” of the United States, it was, nevertheless, wracked by poverty and entrenched in an endless war. King masterfully tore down the wall that the political and economic establishments used to separate domestic policies from foreign policies. He debunked the lie at the core of the Johnson administration that they could deliver both guns and butter, and he pointed out how the Vietnam War made it impossible to satisfy the deep need that existed on the home front. Moreover, any society invested in the evisceration of the Vietnamese people could not truly be a society committed to developing the human potential of its own people. King’s realization was the need for even greater forces to be recruited into the movement to achieve social transformation within the United States. By the end of his life, King recognized the coercive power of other forms of disobedience. In planning a Poor People’s March in Washington, D.C., he called for extralegal protests not aimed at undoing unjust laws but in the name of political and economic demands that represented the interests of the majority. In Memphis, during the sanitation workers strike in 1968, he called for a general strike to shut down the entire city. In a story published a week before his assassination, King told Jose Yglesias in the New York Times magazine, “In a sense you could say we are engaged in the class struggle.” The civil rights movement had not cost a dime, he said, but the movement to uproot poverty and inequality throughout the country would “be a long and difficult struggle, for our program calls for a redistribution of economic power.” Even as King recognized the need for a broader, multiracial struggle to successfully engage in a “radical revolution of values,” he still understood the dialectic connecting the black movement to a larger reckoning in the United States. He was cut down before he could see the fulfillment of his new strategy in Memphis or in Washington, D.C., and the “interrelated flaws” of U.S. society have only intensified in the fifty years since King first invoked them. Indeed, the conditions warranting class struggle have become worse as the wealth within U.S. society has continued to accrue at the top. Yet King’s ability to name the elemental human suffering that is produced by our profit system, while simultaneously demonstrating the centrality of the black movement in unraveling its internal and external logic, remains a powerful political tool. This anniversary offers new opportunities to engage King’s political thought, including his anticapitalism and his repeated call for larger and deeper political struggle. Excerpted with permission from the forthcoming book Fifty Years Since MLK, edited by Brandon Terry. Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, assistant professor in African American Studies at Princeton, is author of From #BlackLivesMatter to Black Liberation.
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