The distinguishing feature of capitalism is not the stock market, or the banking sector. It is private ownership of the means of production. And frankly, in a great many cases, private ownership of means of production make a lot of sense.
Would promoting unionisation, killing off the more noxious corporate structures, trust-busting, enforcing environmental protections and taxing permissible externalities be the demise of capitalism? Not as a feature of the political economy.
Of course, it would be the demise of capitalism as a state religion, and even perhaps as the dominant feature of the political economy. But there is a place for privately owned productive assets in a properly managed economy.
- Jake If you only spend 20 minutes of the rest of your life on economics, go spend them here.
It bugs me that they allow the American version of capitalism feudalism to lay claim to being the only model of capitalism.
left/liberal Jewish-American culture/politics
a communist or socialist
But there is a place for privately owned productive assets in a properly managed economy.
Frankfurt School is a romantic, elitist critique of mass culture with a contrived neo-Marxist guise.
But oh no, do keep enjoying Fight Club and V for Vendetta while feeling "alternative", even while these movies are actually expressions of the (very nice) mass culture they pretend to criticise.
Grrrrr. Peak oil is not an energy crisis. It is a liquid fuel crisis.
"capitalism itself-a mode of economic and social life [...] condemned hundreds of millions of human beings to wretchedness and exploitation, and enslaved billions of other animals in farms that resemble concentration camps."
"capitalism has furnished for itself a world in which one out of two human beings lives on $2 per day or less, and more than one in three still lacks access to a toilet. Most children in the world never complete their education, and most will live out their lives without dependable medical care."
"the hidden indignities and daily humiliations of the working class and the poor"
"the strangulation of daily life by corporate bureaucracies such as the HMOs the telecom companies, and the computer giants"
"the corruption of art and culture by money"
"the destruction of eroticism by pornography"
"the corruption of higher education by corporatization"
"the ceaseless pitching of harmful products to our children and infants"
"the obliteration of the natural landscape by strip malls, highways, and toxic dumps"
"the abuse of elderly men and women by low-paid workers in squalid for-profit institutions"
"the fact that millions of poor children are sold into sexual slavery"
"and millions of others are orphaned by AIDS"
"the fact that tens of millions of women turn to prostitution to pay their bills"
"and the suffering of the 50 million to 100 million vertebrates that die in scientific laboratories each year."
"We might also highlight the dozens of wars and civil conflicts that are directly or indirectly rooted in the gross material disparities of the capitalist system"
"Darfur, Rwanda, Congo, Afghanistan, Vietnam, and Iraq, where millions of wretchedly poor people die"
"the automated battle platforms"
"Capitalism is responsible for all this, and more besides."
Yes, indeed. Why not blame it for lack of sliced bread, the fact that there isn't always a full moon or that the winter is so nasty here in Sweden?
Seriously, this article deserves a massive deconstruction, only that would take several hours adnd several pages.
Ah, one more...
"capitalism's fundamental antagonism toward democracy." Because there are just so many democratic non-capitalist societies out there, and it's not like democracy has developed in intimate parallell with capitalism in every single place it has sprouted.
Argh, argh, argh.
Not only do these people distract themselves with pompous bullshit, they also scare away every sane ordinary voter from any and all progressive politics.
Well done! </snark> Peak oil is not an energy crisis. It is a liquid fuel crisis.
Not colleges for bastard children, but colleges who are themselves the bastard children of American colleges, or rather the intellectual trash they keep sending across the Atlantic.
Well, the Germans sent it to them first, so I guess they just want to spread the pain right back at us. Peak oil is not an energy crisis. It is a liquid fuel crisis.
And mass culture was around, in some scale, since well before the Colosseum I think. The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom - William Blake
