The real vulnerability of AC is identical to its core value: money. Reduce the amount of money that AC gets and you weaken its power to act. Thus if you want to affect the political decision-making component, attack the wallets of the corporates and their media subset.
So I restate what I have proposed before: that the most powerful weapon available against AC is Withdrawal of Purchase. (as well as supportive purchase). This has never been a very effective tool of democracy in the past, but it is becoming so. The Intertubez offer the possibility for thousands if not millions of people to come together and withdraw purchase (or threaten to do so) en masse. Ultimately we are all shareholders in AC, and we should exercise our shareholder rights. You can't be me, I'm taken
To weaken AC I think you need to make its true value system explicit, and then destroy it. You can't do that by shopping elsewhere. Disapproval is still a form of participation and acceptance.
Unless you can make some statements in joint-share-company space which map relatively faithfully to country space. En un viejo país ineficiente, algo así como España entre dos guerras civiles, poseer una casa y poca hacienda y memoria ninguna. -- Gil de Biedma
My use of the subset word 'shareholder' was a 'reframing'. Reframing necessarily involves changing perceptions. And thus challenging definitions.
A shareholder definition may include the following:
Were you laughing when you typed that? I hope so. 'cause we all know "stakeholder" entered the lexicon of polite conversation from the mouths of corporate management consultants attempting to conscript persons having no legal recourse over the governance of corporate operations in intra-industry propaganda wars.
Moreover, shareholders of public- and private-traded corporations most certainly pay "user fees" to own an interest in future income of the corporation, the property right of which to redeem or re-sell.
A joint share company is entirely the wrong metaphor for a country, Magic.
Country? Certainly you meant to type jurisdiction, even nation. Country is passé, déclassé among persons in certain quarters who believe civilized people do not organize themselves according to either their geographical location or boundaries.
When officers of state --an incorporated, formally established trust, continuously operating according to by-laws-- unilaterally declares a person a "citizen" of the state and exercises state "interests" in the social and economic activity, liberty, and life of said person so as to benefit the ongoing concerns of the bureaucracy, then said person most certainly is, voluntarily or involuntarily, and represents a share of the state enterprise.
Presumably, enfranchised citizens, or "shareholders," may exercise their rights to control state governance.
Incarcerated, minor, institutionalized, flora and fauna persons are stakeholders.
Unless you can make some statements in joint-share-company space which map relatively faithfully to country space.
say what? Diversity is the key to economic and political evolution.
I was playing bullshit bingo. En un viejo país ineficiente, algo así como España entre dos guerras civiles, poseer una casa y poca hacienda y memoria ninguna. -- Gil de Biedma
To weaken AC I think you need to make its true value system explicit,
feed the 'good' wolf, and starve the other?
something has to be done to stop wolves clothing themselves as sheep, that's for sure...
teaching people often and early to know how to discriminate between truth and truthiness would be a good start.
would a 'sheep' (harmless) capitalism still be capitalism?
my plan is to survive capitalism, with subgoals of waiting out the time till enough people help change it into some other, better, fairer form of economic game, while attempting to turn some of its less noxious, more whimsically endearing aspects to my advantage.
it is the (mostly shitty) hand we've been dealt, after all...
what really makes discrimination hard is when we have already fallen for the lies we have been told, internalised and tell ourselves, and been conscripted into furthering a dishonest paradigm.
accepting it as is, as a summum bonum is a treacherous ethical minefield we should know better than to inhabit, by now, imo.
if getting the banana out of the bottle represents the wisest goal for our species, or the greatest happiness for the greatest number, we better learn that just grabbing and pulling with a closed fist won't do the trick. that's present capitalism's attitude to the planet's resources, and a lot of broken bottles and bloody hands prove it...
with enough, patience, creativity, and inventiveness, i believe we can make a green version of practically anything, and thereby lose a lot of the grief that living in the middle of the muddle of polluted life has necessitated.
this will pull out and exalt skills much more determinant of a good future for us all than the presently glorified arts of swindling the gullible, aka casino, predator crapitalism. ~"When an inner situation is not made conscious, it appears outside as fate." Karl Jung~
No, because refusal to trade - even though it can be very effective - is too easily subverted as a caste marker and lifestyle choice.
good point, but we must take responsibility for allowing that to happen.
what you said right there is the best definition of 'mediated' i've come across.
we should focus on the 'effective' part, and do some subverting of our own! turn dem tables...
caste markers as a language, for example, there's no real need to go that road any more, especially compared to during our grandparents' generation. still a long way to go... ~"When an inner situation is not made conscious, it appears outside as fate." Karl Jung~
I'd also bet the proportion of people "refusing the rat race" is much higher than usually thought... Un roi sans divertissement est un homme plein de misères
Withdrawal of labour is no longer effective against capital imo, as it is de facto class-based. AC increasingly doesn't need labour, although it still needs staff. But it remains a good way to influence politics, if the numbers are large. You can't be me, I'm taken
AC increasingly doesn't need labour, although it still needs staff.
Translation: AC has largely relegated its labour-intensive tasks to countries in which slavery is culturally acceptable and strikes are broken up with judicious application of machine guns.
- Jake If you only spend 20 minutes of the rest of your life on economics, go spend them here.
