The Problem with Capitalism or

[Pharaoh]

Evolve or die: Can we shed our moral primitivism before it’s too late?






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5/17/08

“As ye sow, so shall ye reap…”

Endless resource wars, globalization, privatization, profits over life, exploitation, raping the Earth, poisoning and irradiating the environment, exponentially criminal levels of unnecessary suffering caused by the concentration of wealth into the hands of a few, Climate Change, alarming rates of species extinction, Peak Oil, a jungle of cronyism and corruption so dense you couldn’t hack your way through it with the sharpest of machetes, and increasingly powerful monopoly entities intensifying their stranglehold on the “free market” are the rotting fruits that comprise the bitter harvest we are reaping by the bushel-basketful.

And our Karma’s not through with us yet. Not by a long-shot. As long as we maintain our jejune, myopic, and infinitely idiotic devotion to capitalism, all but a select few of the Earth’s inhabitants will continue to suffer unnecessarily. Ultimately, our malignant system, premised as it is on infinite growth and the relentless pursuit of profit, will be our undoing and will destroy the planet. While it is true that many of the ills that capitalism has amplified into crises have plagued humanity in some fashion throughout history, and it is clear that we all harbor varying degrees of greed, ruthlessness, and selfishness in our hearts, at what point do we wake up and recognize that we are committing mass homicide, ecocide, and suicide through our monumentally stupid loyalty to a socioeconomic paradigm that essentially ensures that most human beings will frequently manifest the most rotten aspects of their natures?


http://www.bestcyrano.org/THOMASPAINE/?p=713

[HCE SuiGeneris]

1. Put a fucking GRAPHIC WARNING in your headline.

:wtf:

[Pharaoh]

3. sorry I changed the pic

the dog one was too sick, but they do that in China and the east....

[chknltl]

10. Better now that it was changed...I for one was offended...

...I am a dog owner. I know that my tastes in pets as opposed to my tastes in food are cultural...I am quite pleased to live in a culture that does not treat pets as food. That said, I was quite unhappy at the sight of that pic. You chose well to change it before too many of our fellow DUers caught it. This topic, 'capitalism' is a good one and a delightful change from the life and times of three American Senators, it would have been a pity to have marred discussions here because of THAT photo!

[ret5hd]

4. If you are a vegetarian i understand your emotions...

i retract my remark because i didn't (and still haven't) seen the original pic. i didn't know it had been changed.

[Pharaoh]

6. Eating meat is one thing.....

Factory farming is a plague on humanity.

[ret5hd]

8. I agree 100%...but if you partake of the fruits of factory farming...

i don't see what the "beef" is with seeing what you are supporting. I am (again) making a supposition, this one being that your meat is "store bought".

[Pharaoh]

11. I eat less and less meat

I used to eat alot of red meat, Now mostly chicken, and lots more veggies. I try to buy free range. Not always easy or cheap to do.But I am changing my habits as I understand what we are doing to these poor creatures.

[hiaasenrocks]

2. Stop "bacon bits" now!

That stuff is crap on a salad. If you're going to eat bacon, eat the real stuff, you know?

[chknltl]

5. Can democracy function without restricted capitalism?

Is there a better form of governance than democracy? I think not, can a democracy function and grow without some form of capitalism???

[Pharaoh]

7. Capitalism must be regulated

Right now they are stealing raping and pillaging, there is no longer any government over site. The bastards own the government and the media....

[chknltl]

13. I am a bit more optimistic...

(edited for spelling fix)
...lacking an education in economics, I can see from a simplistic view both sides of this. One side has democracy dead, yet it's citizens haven't caught on yet. Mike Malloy would fit here. The other side has HOPE. Thom Hartmann would fit in here.

I am one of the hopeful. I agree, capitalism in a democracy MUST be restricted. Unrestricted capitalism will destroy it's parent democracy. We see that going on today and we have the events prior to, during and after the Great Depression as a lesson from our own history to draw on. History will use these two eras as proof that capitalism requires restrictions if the middle class, (read: We The Majority Electorate), is to survive.

Without a middle class, I don't think we have a democracy anymore. True, our Middle Class is struggling but we are still the largest voting group. My optimism comes from this fact combined with our having someone like Senator Obama yet in the race to be POTUS. I believe that if democracy in America were truly dead, so would have been Senator Obama's chances and the Middle Class would have been utterly disenfranchised from voting.

[jlayson]

9. I love this

Naked pigs standing on end for freedom

[ZombieHorde]

12. Is this a picture of republicans in line to vote?

[Earth Bound Misfit]

18. BWAHAHAHAHAHA!!!!!

Funniest thing I've read or heard all day!! :spray:

[Hippo_Tron]

24. Stop insulting those poor pigs

[Selatius]

14. The problem with capitalists is that they use their wealth to buy favors from the government.

That is the genesis of corporatism. That is exactly what the world does NOT need. You would think the lesson was learned 60 years ago in the ashes of post-war Europe, but the lesson has been lost to ignorance and fear, the kind manufactured by the corporate press.

The government these capitalists buy favors from is supposed to be the same agent that regulates them in the interests of the general public, not the wealthy few.

When corporations and government operate hand-in-hand, that is called corporatism, but you may be more familiar with the older term: Fascism.

If you can't guarantee a government that is free from corporate control, you simply need to find a better way, and maybe we should move towards a democratic market socialism.

[Pharaoh]

15. Simply end the idea

that Corporations have equal rights to people. Corporations may be run by people, but they are not people. Their only purpose is to make as much fucking money as they can and fuck anything else. Fuck the environment, fuck the people,........their profits are their only concern. There are no morals or ethics, although some seem to call themselves Christians....

[Selatius]

16. I believe that'll take a bloody, violent confrontation before such a reform is instituted.

"Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did, and it never will." - Frederick Douglas.

[Pharaoh]

17. Violent Confrontation does not work

Ghandi and MLK, were on the right track.

Gahndi and his followers simply lay down in the streets and the brits horses would not walk over them. They were being peaceful and the government could not just start hacking them up with no resistance.

[Selatius]

19. There's a caveat to that. Non-violent action works on weakened authoritarian regimes.

In Gandhi's case, the British Empire was already bankrupted by WW2 and was then pushed into granting formal independence.

In Martin Luther King's case, the institution of segregation was further and further confined to the rural south, and social attitudes would never have accepted extreme violence to put down Dr. King or the Civil Rights Movement because it was gaining more and more popular support from the people.

The same situation applied to Nelson Mandela, and don't for a moment think the African National Congress was above violence against the pro-Apartheid regime.

Non-violence works up to a certain extent, especially in cases where the government is hesitant to resort to outright slaughter, but in regimes that are not afraid to bring out swords, the pacifists simply get gunned down like Tiananmen Square. In Myanmar, the military dictatorship has proven that it was more than willing to violently crush peaceful pro-democracy protests over the last several years.

[Hannah Bell]

20. Plenty of instances of peaceful resistance ending with hacking.

The effectiveness of non-violent resistance is situational, much like the effectiveness of violent resistance.

American revolution: violent. Probably wouldn't have succeeded had the Brits not been harrassed simultaneously by some of the other European powers.

(PS: not meaning to be spelling police, I normally dislike people who do that, but just for the record: Gandhi. "Gand-hi")

[LeftyMom]

25. There was also violent action in those resistance efforts.

Non-violent resistance only appears to work because power structures choose to negotiate with the moderate and non-violent rather than the radical element. Without the risk of dramatic social change brought about by radical (and violent) resistance, there is no incentive to deal with the non-violent element or to create the changes they demand.

Look at China. There's huge oppression, every now and then there's some demonstration like Tienanmen, but nothing changes, the gov't is still oppressive and corrupt. Why? There were brave people demonstrating and standing in front of tanks, but there was no real risk to the existing power structure.

Bliss ninnies ignore the mailed fist behind the velvet glove. It's self deception, and bad history.

[chknltl]

21. First ever I have heard this term: democratic market socialism.

I did a quick search and found this: http://www.wiu.edu/users/miecon/wiu/yunker/postlang.htm
A very quick skim tells me that this will take awhile but be well worth soaking in. Thanks for prompting me off on this tangent.

[Selatius]

22. If you want a model of a version of market socialism, go here:

Read through the section of Economic democracy entitled: An alternative model. It is one model of market socialism.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_Democracy

David Schweikart's model is further fleshed out here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Schweickart

He christens his model of market socialism "Economic Democracy." There is a link to a fairly lengthy but informative write-up about his model entitled Economic Democracy: A Worthy Socialism That Would Really Work.

He actually builds his example of market socialism using components found in the world from models of Japanese management, to worker self-management in former Yugoslavia, to the Cooperative Mondragon Corporation in Spain, perhaps the largest employee-owned firm in the world.

See how deep the rabbit hole takes you. ;)

[chknltl]

23. Thank you Selatius

I was hoping that you would add to my quick find. Wiki huh? Likely the better speed for me. Bookmarked and off to bed now. thanks again.

[Romulox]

30. The large mass of people watch their standard of living slip away before their own eyes

and will still believe that laissez-faire corporatism/globalism is the only form of economics that makes sense. As if economics, and the values implicit in laissez-faire economics, were a science! :wow:

It is hopeless.

[blindpig]

26. It's Capitalism or a habitable planet, you can't have both.

Capitalism is not sustainable by its very nature. It is predicated on infinitely expanding markets, faster consumption and bigger production in a finite planet. And yet this ideological model remains the central organising principle of our lives, and as long as it continues to be so it will automatically undo (with its invisible hand) every single green initiative anybody cares to come up with.

snip

All hail BP and Shell for having got beyond petroleum to become non-profit eco-networks supplying green energy. But fail to cheer the Fortune 500 corporations that will save us all and ecologists are denounced as anti-business. Many career environmentalists fear that an anti-capitalist position is what's alienating the mainstream from their irresistible arguments. But is it not more likely that people are stunned into inaction by the bizarre discrepancy between how extreme the crisis described and how insipid the solutions proposed? Go on a march to the House of Commons. Write a letter to your MP. And what system does your MP hold with? Name one that isn't pro-capitalist. Oh, all right then, smartarse. But name five.

snip

If we are all still in denial about the radical changes coming - and all of us still are - there are sound geological reasons for our denial. We have lived in an era of cheap, abundant energy. There never has and never will again be consumption like we have known. The petroleum interval, this one-off historical blip, this freakish bonanza, has led us to believe that the impossible is possible, that people in northern industrial cities can have suntans in winter and eat apples in summer. But much as the petroleum bubble has got us out of the habit of accepting the existence of zero-sum physical realities, it's wise to remember that they never went away. You can either have capitalism or a habitable planet. One or the other, not both.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2006/feb/02/energy.comment

[The2ndWheel]

27. Which economic system isn't based on growth? nt

[Romulox]

31. What's wrong with being sexy? *Mindless*, *unending*, *unrestrained* growth.

[BigDaddy44]

28. What does this have to do with Capitalism?

You think communists didn't eat pork?

I drove through Czeckoslovakia in 1991 right after the Communists crumbled. I saw strip mines for miles and foul air that would have curled your hair.

Capitalism isn't destroying the planet. Neither did communism. Neither is socialism. Its man and his need for "stuff". This continues despite what the economic system is.

[blindpig]

29. Capitalism is destroying the planet.

Because of it's requirement of ever increasing profits it cannot help but consume the planet. In it's quest for more and more profit it inevitably over-produces and must use advertising and other psyops to sell its goods. It then cynically declares that it is just meeting market demand, a demand that it created. As the planet is finite this is insupportable.

To be sure, the socialist states of Eastern Europe had some environmentally horrible practices. One must keep in consideration the historical baggage and the heavy, persistent pressure that capitalist states exerted upon these states when examining their environmental record. It is hoped that one learns from history, that subsequent socialist societies will absorb the lessons of the past. Cuba shows that this can be so, it is the leading nation on the planet on the matter of sustainability, an example to us all.

[hiaasenrocks]

32. What are your personal experiences in Cuba?

I'm especially interested in hearing about what it was like when you lived there. Or perhaps you still do? Curious. Thanks.

[blindpig]

33. Visited once

There can be no doubt that the 'Special Period' was the impetus of much of their innovation, which puts to the lie the meme that socialist states are bureaucratic monoliths incapable adequate responsiveness.

They were handed lemons and have made good lemonade. There has been a massive movement towards urban, organic agriculture. Public transit has been very clever, those 'camels' in urban areas and a system whereby state owned vehicles are obliged to take on riders at highway overpasses works well.

There has been a great de-emphasis of commodity agriculture(sugar). I saw small farmers plowing with oxen and mule, they were also used to pull carts. Livestock has the advantage of dunging the soil, far better than chemical fertilizers.

Cuba aims to have not only a sustainable society but a more human one as well, with an emphasis on culture instead of mindless bling and consumerism.They are very family oriented(often noted in Latino culture) and easy going, I even witnessed an encounter between some dudes who seemed a bit drunk and some cops, who showed a lot more restraint and humanity than is common in these parts.

[hiaasenrocks]

34. Interesting. I guess all of that contributes to the wave of

people floating through dangerous waters on rickety home-made rafts to get to Cuba.

Oops. Wait. It's the other way around. Why are they leaving such a paradise? Odd, huh?

[blindpig]

36. Two things

1)Cuban society is not monolithic, there are some attracted to our bling society, no doubt encouraged in this by radio and TV from the US. Cuba would happily let these people emigrate, but the US policy obstructs this in order to reap the propaganda benefits.

2)Then there is US policy once these people reach our shores. No people on earth receive such preferential treatment, it's like hitting the fucking lottery. Guess some find the risk worthwhile, given the reward, it's not as though people don't do crazy/stupid shit in this country for money. If the US had that sort of policy towards Mexican folks crossing the Sonoran Desert the dead would be piling up eyeball high.

[blindpig]

35. Savage Capitalism

From the start Marx’s notion of the alienation of human labour from what it produced was connected to an understanding of the alienation of human beings from nature. Marx pointed out that the commodification of nature under the capitalist mode of production and private ownership led to the “practical degradation of nature”. In his Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts Marx points out that the large towns workers had to endure conditions where light, air and cleanliness were no longer part of their existence but rather darkness, polluted air, and raw sewage, constituted their material environment.

True Marx and Engels saw the issue of ecology as mainly from the point of view of the degradation of the life of the proletariat rather than a major factor in the revolutionary process itself – which is the concept ecosocialists or revolutionary ecologists have to come to terms with today. The goal, as Bellamy Foster puts it, is to “understand and develop a revolutionary ecological view of that links social transformation with the transformation of the human relation with nature in ways that we now consider ecological”.

SNIP

Revolutionary socialists have always been in favour of the development of the economy, on a global and national basis, to meet the needs of humanity. But that doesn’t mean we favour the production of an increasing number of commodities of any type whatsoever. On the contrary, huge swathes of production under capitalism are socially useless, and either redundant or directly harmful. Some products – like cars - harm the environment directly; others are useless and just use up huge amounts of the planet’s resources.

In the past Marxists have acted as though the production of commodities and the use to which they are subsequently put have no impact on the environment. In fact they can have a huge effect on the environment. The profligate waste of the planets resources in pursuit of an unending cascade of commodities, artificially created ‘wants’ generated by the advertising industry, is criminal. It only exists because that’s the way that capitalism functions. The constant stream of ‘new’ commodities is vital to maintain profits and fight off rival firms.

http://www.internationalviewpoint.org/spip.php?article1311