The end of capitalism?

James Adonis contemplates The end of capitalism? He writes that:

Modern-day capitalism is in trouble. Once mighty nations, such as Spain and Greece, are on the verge of collapse. Wealth gaps between the rich and poor are getting bigger. And more people are shouting about the unfairness of the economic system, as evidenced by the Occupy movement. All of which raises the question: is there an alternative?

The conclusion is that the only alternative is to more strictly regulate Capitalism:

“Capitalism will have to be re-regulated again for it to survive,” [Bill Mitchell] says. “Governments will have to mediate the class struggle.”

Professor Stephen King from Monash University agrees on the need for tighter laws. “What the GFC has taught us is that market economies need sensible, strong banking regulation,” he says.

“Unfortunately, here in Australia, we have missed this lesson.”

Emphasis Mine

I love how the apologists for Capitalism always come to the conclusion that there is no alternative (TINA). They say that Capitalism is the only way forward as all other alternatives, Socialism, Communism, etc., have failed.

The highlighted phrase above reveals a fear of the ruling class. They want protection from the class warfare now emerging from the ruled. They are rightly worried.

Or, perhaps they are worried that unrestrained class warfare from the Capitalists could provoke a violent reaction from the workers. They are certainly worried about what directions the Occuppy movement could take.

Adonis lists the major criticisms from critics, such as the Occupy movement, as:

Critics of capitalism are quick to point out its failures. Three of the most common include the promotion of greed and inequality; the unsustainability of perpetual growth; and the overwhelming power of corporations, which now constitute half of the world’s 100 biggest economies.

Yet these are the consequences of the Capitalist system. Greed is not the main driver behind the inequality.

Capitalism is about the reproduction of Capital through investment. Capital has to grow continously — it cannot stand still. And this growth comes about through increased exploitation of natural resources and through the concentration of ownership of Capital as less successful firms are destroyed.

And yet, apologists, like Adonis, wants us to believe that governments are neutral in this process. The state serves the interests of the ruling class. And the interests of the ruling are geared towards to increased capital accumulation instead of survival.

It is time that workers understand the workings of the Capitalist system in order to change it into something that benefits workers instead of Capitalists.

Read more!

The whispering revolution

Ai Weiwei writes about The whispering revolution in China. He describes the terror tactics of the government:

At midnight they can come into your room and take you away. They can put a black hood on you, take you to a secret place and interrogate you, trying to stop what you're doing. They threaten your family, saying: “Your children won't find jobs.”

It could be worse — he could be a Muslim living in the USA, UK, Australia, Canada, etc.. He could be taken to a secret place like Guantanamo Bay Naval Base.

Meanwhile the US Government is spying on its citizens to unprecedent extent by having The NSA Is Building the Country’s Biggest Spy Center (Watch What You Say):

Under construction by contractors with top-secret clearances, the blandly named Utah Data Center is being built for the National Security Agency. A project of immense secrecy, it is the final piece in a complex puzzle assembled over the past decade. Its purpose: to intercept, decipher, analyze, and store vast swaths of the world’s communications as they zap down from satellites and zip through the underground and undersea cables of international, foreign, and domestic networks. The heavily fortified $2 billion center should be up and running in September 2013. Flowing through its servers and routers and stored in near-bottomless databases will be all forms of communication, including the complete contents of private emails, cell phone calls, and Google searches, as well as all sorts of personal data trails—parking receipts, travel itineraries, bookstore purchases, and other digital “pocket litter.” It is, in some measure, the realization of the “total information awareness” program created during the first term of the Bush administration—an effort that was killed by Congress in 2003 after it caused an outcry over its potential for invading Americans’ privacy.

Emphasis Mine

If Ai Weiwei thinks the West is anymore freer than China, he is in for a big shock. The Capitalists are just as paranoid about correct thinking by its citizens as the Chinese government.

Ai concludes that the Chinese state:

…still hasn't come to the moment that it will collapse. That makes a lot of other states admire its technology and methods. But, in the long run, China's leaders must understand it's not possible for them to control the internet unless they shut it off - and they can't live with the consequences of that. The internet is uncontrollable. And if the internet is uncontrollable, freedom will win.

It is amazing how doublethink operates in a supposedly liberal newspaper. One can condemm tyranny and censorship as long as you are talking about an official enemy. Indeed, you are celebrated and feted for doing so. But talk about crimes committed by the US and its allied government, you are cast into the shadows with the possibility of disappearing.

Read more!

A Kid With Skittles

John Howard Kunstler opines about race in A Kid With Skittles. He says that the USA talks:

…about [race] all the live-long day, just not very honestly.

Kunstler believes that the conversation over race is narrow because of the uncomfortable truths in there somewhere:

The reason the race conversation remains so constricted in America is because the central question makes everyone so uncomfortable. That question is: what accounts for the failure to thrive of such a large percentage of black America? It is uncomfortable for whites (especially Progressives) because it implies a failure of the social justice movement itself, and in particular the watershed civil rights struggles of the 1960s. It's uncomfortable for blacks because it stirs up immense anxiety over the stigma of racial inferiority.

Nowhere does Kunstler consider that the structural nature of racism which economically and politically oppresses non-whites. Whites do not see it because they are like fish who do not see the water they are swimming in. Because whites benefit from the current system, there is no need to question or examine the system.

Kunstler blames black separatism for the lack of progress. He does not consider why such a movement should exist at all. It just appeared in a historical vacuum:

The expectation was that the removal of legal obstacles to full citizenship would hasten economic justice and cultural equality, but just then something curious happened: the youth revolt of the late 1960s was underway and young black America immediately opted for separatism.

And, of course, the demon of multiculturalism is to blame. Instead of a single American culture, apparrently anything goes.

I believe the black separatist movement of that time derived largely from anxiety around the issues of cultural assimilation - that is, of black and white America forming a true and complete common culture. In any case, it was at this moment of history that the multicultural movement presented itself as an "out" for white America. Multiculturalism allowed white America to pretend that common culture was not important. It also promoted the unfortunate idea that we could have a functioning civil society with different standards of behavior for different ethnic groups. It has left the nation with the unanswered question of black America's self-evident failure to thrive, and an enormous body of narrative affecting to explain it away as "structural racism."

Kunstler then goes on to blame black men for getting arrested in such large numbers and ending up in gaol. Techers are blamed for not teaching black children to speak proper English.

And, Trayvon Martin was to blame for being shot by being scary:

Do white people fear black males who affect to act as if they are dangerous? Maybe black men should stop trying to scare people. Are these "racist" observations or exercises in reality-testing?

Or, should we consider that blacks act this way in order to stop white people from attacking them?

It is very hard to get people to see something as wrong from which they benefit. White people get better jobs, better housing, better education, and better treatment because they are white. Who wants to be treated as a black person? Why should white people give up these niceties for justice towards a fellow human being.

We can only be fully human when we treat other people as human beings. Isn't that enough to surrender our privileges as white people?

Read more!

Bill Black: Green Slime Drives Our Financial Crises

Yves Smith reposts Bill Black: Green Slime Drives Our Financial Crises .

The reference to the green slime about the pink slime which was secretly added to meat for human consumption.

Black appears to argue that the cycle of financial crises is due to insufficient regulation.

Lenin, in Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism (Penguin UK. Kindle Edition), says that:

Bourgeois scholars and publicists usually come out in defence of imperialism in a somewhat veiled form, and obscure its complete domination and its profound roots; they strive to concentrate attention on partial and secondary details and do their very best to distract attention from the main issue by means of ridiculous schemes for ‘reform,’ such as police supervision of the trusts and banks, etc.

(Kindle Location 1753-1756)

The real problem is the existence of financial Capitalism, itself.

Read more!

Ten Pillars of Economic Wisdom

Barry Ritholtz reposts Ten Pillars of Economic Wisdom. I take issue with three (3) of these pillars, mainly to do with wealth creation.

There are some of these rules I want to take issue with.

The first is about creation of wealth:

4. The only way to create wealth is to move resources from a lower-valued to a higher-valued use. Corollary: Both sides gain from exchange.

Here we have the old canard about wealth being created in the exchange by increasing the use-value. Instead, Marxists believe that value is added by the application of labour-power. People create things of higher value by working on them. A car is worth more than a lump of iron ore, sap of a rubber tree, etc. because human beings worked to turn them into something more usable.

The second is about value again:

7. The value of a good or a service is subjective.

The value of a good or a service is determined by its exchange value. In Marxist terms, there is no profit to be made in exchanging commodities for money. In this way, the exchange value is subjective, but becomes objective through a large number of such transactions.

It is possible for someone to exploit arbitrage by finding people with different subjective exchange values for the same commodities. The free market is supposed to eliminate such discrepancies through the free flow of information.

The third is about wealth creation vesus jobs:

8. Creating jobs is not the same as creating wealth.

Yes and no. There are jobs that do not add to the value of a commodity. These are usually policing roles such as supervisors, managers, regulators, etc.

Read more!

The Solar Envelope: How to Heat and Cool Cities Without Fossil Fuels

The Oil Drum considers how to use The Solar Envelope: How to Heat and Cool Cities Without Fossil Fuels. The problem is to make cities livable once cheap fossil fuels go away.

The current architectural knowledge is quite advanced for solar heating and cooling of individual buildings. The next stage is to design cities with the same attributes:

Designing a single, often free-standing, passive solar house is quite different from planning a densely populated city where each building is heated and cooled using only natural energy sources. And yet, if we want passive solar design to be more than just a curiosity, this is exactly what we need. Modern research, which combines ancient knowledge with fast computing techniques, shows that passive solar cities are a realistic option, allowing for surprisingly high population densities.

The key to designing such low-energy use cities is the concept of the “Solar Envelope”:

[Ralph] Knowles developed and refined a method that strikes an optimal balance between population density and solar access: the "Solar Envelope". It is a set of imaginary boundaries, enclosing a building site, that regulate development in relation to the sun's motion — which is predictable throughout the seasons for any place on Earth.

Buildings within this imaginary container do not overshadow neighbouring buildings during critical energy-receiving periods of the day and the season, and assure solar access for both passive and active solar systems. On the one hand, the solar envelope allows architects to design with sunlight without fear that their ideas will be cancelled out by future buildings. On the other hand, the solar envelope recognizes the need for development and high population densities, by defining the largest container of space that would not cast shadows off-site at specified times of the day.

Anyone who lives in Sydney knows about how inhabitable the CBD is in Winter with the parks always in shadow and therefore cold. And the buildings built right up to teh boundaries so that the streets become wind tunnels in moderate breezes. I suppose it is one way to get the homeless out of the CBD during Winter!

The article concludes with:

Density is a pet subject of environmentalists, who argue that densely populated cities are the solution to lower the energy requirements for transportation. On the other hand, the solar envelope shows that above a certain treshold, density can also raise energy requirements, in particular those of heating, cooling and daylighting buildings.

This means that it would probably be wise to aim for a compromise. If we would take the highest densities reached under the solar envelope as an upper limit, we could create cities where the critical functions of buildings can be met without fossil fuels, while still retaining (more than) high enough densities to make public transportation, bicycling and walking attractive.

Read more!

You Can’t “Grow the Movement” by Dissing the Kids: On Chris Hedges and Occupy

Ted Rall has a post about You Can’t “Grow the Movement” by Dissing the Kids: On Chris Hedges and Occupy from Katherine M Acosta. Chris Hedges is apparrently trying to purge the Occupy movement of Anarchists and other undesirables.

The main issues appears to be:

Central to the dispute between Hedges and the anarchists who helped to found Occupy is the issue of violence versus nonviolence – and how those are defined. In general terms, anarchism refers to the absence of rulers (hence, the “leaderless” Occupy movement). The idea is not lawlessness or general chaos, but rather, freedom from hierarchical authority and ruling power enforced by violence. Anarchism has a long history in the United States and many anarchists were involved in the early labor movement. Then, as now, anarchists sought to push back against police brutality. One contemporary method for doing so is the black bloc.

Emphasis Mine

I find this issue of non-violence comes up every time a movement starts to become successful. Detractors says that violenece by the demonstartors, strikers, or others reduces support among the ‘nice’ people whose support is needed for the movement to succeed.

Fuck these ‘nice’ people! They support a system that is always violent to the less fortunate. They profit from this legalised violence. They do not want to lose their privileges under the current system.

Violence in the exercise of self-defence threatens the system. The system relies on sullen compliance. Once you shake off the shackles of living with the system, the system begins to lose its legitimacy. It is no seen as the only alternative.

And when the system goes, so does the privileges of the ‘nice’ people. This is why they are so concerned about the violence of the oppressed. They seen a lot of lamposts whit nooses hanging from them in their future. They know what awaits them for their class colloboration. They are not going to be part of a movement that deprives them of their ill-gotten gains.

Read more!

Anti-War Means Anti-War

Mickey Z argues that Anti-War Means Anti-War. The whole electoral system supports the war aims of the Capitalist classes.

Mickey Z argues that the high level of spending on the US military is a severe constraint on social services (54% of the US Government discretionary budget by some estimates). The targeting of the US military is seen as essential to developing the occupy movement especially through targeted protests. Mickey Z continues:

While I can understand any concern that such a gesture could alienate some sectors of the general population, I feel it's become far more urgent to drive home the point that anti-war doesn't just mean anti-Republican.

"Anti-war" isn't a useful mask to wear at an election season costume party. This label signifies one as being against all war (except class war) no matter what political party has commenced the invasion, the bombing, the sanctions, or the covert operations.

Therefore, the Occupy movement must remain guided by a deep-seated anti-war sentiment to avoid playing into the hands of the 2012 two-party (sic) game... a game with no long-term winners.

I think the occupy movement needs to develop its class consciousness about the reasons that a large military is required. The reasons are about maintaining the monopoly positions throughout the world. It is a requirement of this stage of Capitalism.

Yet, there is a tension between including everybody in the Occupy movement, and the realisation that extending the movement means the dilution of the aims of the movement. Instead, the movement has to return to its original ideals of forcing change. In doing so, it needs to seek out people who want to change the system. Not everyone of the 99% wants to change the system — a substantial minority is doing quite well out of supporting the system. These people should not be in the Occupy movement.

Read more!