Marxist criticism of the capitalist system says that it’s rife with contradictions. I want to spend a few minutes discussing what I see is one of the biggest, overarching contradictions at the very foundations of capitalism. In short: capitalism has forced us to live in a world in which humans, (who presumedly control society, economy, and business), are expendable chattel.

See, here’s the situation: Under capitalism you are an owner of capital (the richest 1 to 5% of the population), you are a laborer, or you are unemployed. Now, most people in the world are part of the labor class. (This includes those who own their own businesses. Unless you actually own production factories, airlines, a media conglomerate, a bank, you are not a capitalist. You are a laborer.) But here’s the switcheroony: labor costs is the most despised, inconvenient, troublesome cost to those who own and run businesses. All this piles of money handed out to the necessary evil of workers. Business owners (including the bourgeoisie who own small businesses), work and work (ironically) to minimize labor costs–cut benefits, lower pay, decrease the number of employees costing the company money.

Seeing the problem here? The grand majority of human beings in the world are the enemy of business (so long as they’re labor and not consumers). Business grudgingly pays labor, as little as it can get away with, in order to give the masses the means to buy the commodities and services capitalism produces at obscene rates and worthlessness. The majority of the world’s population is the enemy of the very socio-economic base that they live under and serve.

Now, Read the rest of this entry »

First, a little story:

I’ve been a huge fan of SF author Steven Brust since circa 1988 when Taltos came out. (I didn’t know at the time that was not the first in the “Vlad Taltos” series, but it worked out OK.) After becoming a fan, I discovered Brust was a self-described Trotskyist. Being in my teens, early to mid-20s, I really didn’t have any idea what that was but I knew it was somehow connected to GASP! evil Communism! One part of my brain processed this information something like, “Huh, his writing is kick-ass, he seems really cool…perhaps whatever Trotskyism is it’s either a) inconsequential to who he is, or b) it’s not some all-encompassing evilness as my culture leads me to believe.” The other half of my mind processed more like, “LA LA LA LA I’M NOT LISTENING! I SEE NOTHINK! I HEAR NOTHINK! MOVE ALONG, CITIZEN!”

So the cognitive dissonance was dealt with by ardently ignoring it.

Until around 2007 when I started grad school and my first instructor was Dr. William Burling: the most influential professor, and one of the most influential persons, I’d ever met. I had the privilege of being a student of his for three (almost four) fantastic classes. What his greatest influence on me was to introduce me to the idea of questioning culture, society, government, art, everything. Everything is, to a greater or lesser degree, either a product of or a reflector of the socio-economic base of a culture and nearly everything in the culture is in service to those who control the wealth in society. In short, Dr. Burling was a Marxist, and by the fortune of serendipity, happened to come into my life just as I was questioning political structures.

At that time I was moving from Democrat to vague libertarian. It took nearly a year of questioning and study and investigation and debate, but eventually I too became a self-described Marxist. Although I’ve barely scratched the surface still of Marxist theory.

So, at one point as Dr. Burling and I were discussing Marxist theory and SF and fantasy literature, I realized something from the long forgotten recesses of my mind… (See, I kinda stopped reading Mr. Brust’s books by this point–not because I stopped liking them, but I’d pretty much stopped reading for pleasure altogether! I am glad to say I’ve since picked pleasure reading back up and have caught back up with all of Mr. Brust’s “Taltos” books at least.) I recalled that tidbit of info about my favorite fantasy author being a Trotskyist. I asked Dr. Burling, who had introduced me to Stanley Kim Robinson, and China Miéville, and Philip K. Dick, and a Marxist outlook of William Gibson (who, now, I have no idea how you couldn’t read Gibson with a Marxist outlook! My god, the man is postmodern materialist cultural criticism up and down!) if he had read any Steven Brust. He replied, somewhat dismissively that he didn’t have time for any pleasure reading. Then I mentioned Mr. Brust was a Trotskyist and, if I recalled, wrote in a couple of his novels about a peasant uprising in his fantasy world.

Dr. Burling grabbed a pen and asked me what that name was again.

Sadly, Dr. Burling passed away a couple of years later. I never did find out if he started looking into Brust’s writing. Probably not; he was pretty busy, in addition to teaching, editing a book of essays on Kim Stanley Robinson and working with  Miéville on a book of criticism about Marxist SF. *sigh* I still feel acute sense of honor of having been able to know the man and learn from him. He changed my entire way of looking at life and I could have missed it if I’d been a couple of years too late.

Anyway, so now that I’m deep in trying to learn and understand Marxist theory, both as it applies to literature and culture, guess what my favorite Trotskyist fantasy author has started doing? He’s reading and commenting on Karl Marx’s seminal work on socio-economics, Das Kapital.* (Volume 1, I believe, which is the one Marx had worked mostly on before he died, while Engels wrote the other volumes.)

What’s really cool is that just before this he had read through and commented on Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations (arguably the father of and the manual of modern capitalism). This kicked-ass because not only did I learn something from it (unfortunately I came in rather late), it just goes to show that Brust is interested in exploring all the angles of modern socio-economics and doesn’t just surround himself with material that fits his perceptions or ideologies. That’s certainly a quality to admire and emulate.

I’m looking forward to reading what he has to say about the tome. And I’m very glad that one side of my brain stopped being a pest and started paying attention. Marxism is not evil, Trotskyism is not evil, communism is not evil. These are just ideas, concepts, ways of investigating and ideas are never evil. They may not be good or practical ideas, but one should never dismiss a way of thinking, a way of investigating, because authority has proclaimed it verboten, taboo, out of bounds. Question everything, especially authority. There’s a reason why they are in power, and a means by which they stay in power.

* I think he’s moving his blog over to a new location. I’ll try to update this link if I can when it happens.

I have in the past, for several years now, used the terms “corporatocracy” and “oligarchy” in describing the form of government we have here in the United States of America. I’ve used these terms because ever since the Founding Fathers made it so that the New World aristocracy–the white, land owning men–controlled government, we’ve had an oligarchy in effect. And since robber barons in the late 19th, early 20th centuries bought legislation to favor their companies and limit competition, we’ve had a growing corporatocracy.

Well, sadly, I no longer have the joy of saying that with a hint of hyperbole. With the recent Supreme Court ruling in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, wherein the majority judges eliminated regulations that have been put in place preventing corporations (and unions, sure) from buying off elections, we now truly have a corporatocracy. From this moment on, multinational corporations which may have their money in the Camen Islands or Dubai, and major labor forces in China and Mexico, can spend as much money as they want to support the legislators they want and the laws they want.

Supporters of this move say it’s a free speech issue (which, after all, that’s how SCOTUS couched it). So, what this means then, is that money, wealth, now equals free speech. So, let me ask you now that wealth is the same as free speech: do you feel that your amount of speech (real or potential) is as free and equal as that of Haliburton’s? Or KBR’s? Or Phizer?

The best way to put the implications of all this is to let Keith Olbermann spell it out. And don’t worry, this isn’t just a bleeding-heart liberal warning, he points out exactly how this cuts the throats of conservatives and right-wingers alike:

(If you can’t see the embedded video, go here: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/21134540/vp/34985508#34985508 )

This truly is the beginning of the nightmare scifi scenarios of corporate-owned-reality of Philip K. Dick and William Gibson. There’s a reason Thomas Jefferson said the following:

“I hope that we shall crush in its birth the aristocracy of our monied corporations, which dare already to challenge our government to a trial of strength, and bid defiance to the laws of our country.”

He saw even then that the interests of the nascent capitalist, for-profit corporation, lay not in democracy and liberty, but in market dominance and crushing the interests of free markets and free speech and individual choice. Corporations don’t want competition and free markets, they want the advantage against anyone and anything that will stop their drive for profit.

Sure, some corporations are non-profits, or little guys, or special interest groups. But let me ask you this as well: do you think any non-profit or special interest or local home-grown corp will have a sliver’s of a chance buying laws and legislators against multinational, billions of dollars a year in profit, mega corps? Our government in just a few election cycles, will effectively be run by the richest, dynastic multinational corporations which will seek to destroy anything resembling dissent.

After all, they’re already trying tooth and nail to control government in their favor–think now that they can bring the full power of capital gains to bear they’ll stop? Take for example AT&T’s democracy-riddled and free market tactics (sarcasm) of buying charities to support elimination of ‘net neutrality, and a glance at this list of legal cases the Electronic Frontier Foundation is involved in shows a long list of corporations fighting not for truth, justice, and the American way, but to crush competition, stifle free speech of we the people, and twist government regulations to serve their private interests.

This new development simply paves the way for them to just buy all the legislators they want.

Larry Lessig, a Harvard Law professor, has this brief message regarding the implications of this court decision and what can, maybe, be done to fight it:

Lessig on Citizens United: Sign Up to Learn More

Another site attempting to fix this very broken situation, is:

Move to Amend: A Project of the Campaign to Legalize Democracy

We think it can’t end, this great American experiment. I’m sure that’s what the citizens of all the great, fallen empires have thought. We, you and I, have grown up in this “land of the free and home of the brave,” and we can’t possibly imagine it coming to an end. But it can. One day, most certainly, it will. What we’re witnessing this last week is possibly the beginning of the end: the end of (pseudo) democracy and the rise of corporate ownership of life.

When you think about it, it’s been heading that way since J. P. Morgan first bought legislation to favor the United States Steel Corporation. Corporations have been controlling which presidents get to the primaries and the debates. They’ve been buying legislators with lobbying money (a fraction of the money they can now spend on campaigns). Really, when you get right to it, being a true corporatocracy overtly and in the open is really a more honest, forthright way of being what we already are at the very base. All we need now is a new branding to Corporate States of America and a new, fresh logo!

Addendum: A BoingBoing commenter has a great reply to people who still hold that this decision is somehow a win for free speech:

Shareholders are the owners of corporations, and shareholders each have a single vote as citizens (those that are citizens.)

The sum representation of a corporation in America is equal to the portion of its capital that is owned by americans. That is honestly a very fair system already.

What corporations wanted in this ruling is not fair representation, but rather an advantage, which is what businesses crave. Advantage over competition.

In this case, the competition is popular opinion. Corporations want to compete against governance in a 1-person, 1-vote system and are essentially attempting to make their shareholders have more clout than people who do not hold shares.

To not recognize that this philosophy is at odds with egalitarian democracy is a serious crime against your own best interests. You may attempt to see how you yourself could benefit from this if you are a businessperson, but remember that there will always be another, larger company who does not have your best interests in mind and who will gain even more from this than you do. They will not take mercy upon you the way a functional democratic government can be made to.

The Tyranny of the Majority:
If you ever found yourself in a vastly outnumbered minority, and the majority voted that you had to give up something as necessary to your life as water and air, would you comply? When it comes down to it, does anyone really believe it makes sense to accept the authority of a group simply on the grounds that they outnumber everyone else? We accept majority rule because we do not believe it will threaten us – and those it does threaten are already silenced before anyone can hear their misgivings.

[...]

Three wolves and six goats are discussing what
to have for dinner. One courageous goat makes
an impassioned case: “We should put it to a vote!” The
other goats fear for his life, but surprisingly, the wolves
acquiesce. But when everyone is preparing to vote, the
wolves take three of the goats aside.
“Vote with us to make the other three goats dinner,”
they threaten. “Otherwise, vote or no vote, we’ll eat you.”
The other three goats are shocked by the outcome of
the election: a majority, including their comrades, has
voted for them to be killed and eaten. They protest in
outrage and terror, but the goat who first suggested the
vote rebukes them: “Be thankful you live in a democracy!
At least we got to have a say in this!”

–From THE PARTY’S OVER: BEYOND POLITICS, BEYOND DEMOCRACY
http://thecloud.crimethinc.com/pdfs/democracy_reading.pdf

So, I’ve discovered this Web site: CrimethInc. Ex-Workers’ Collective (http://www.crimethinc.com). They have some blog posts on the G-20 protests…and most interestingly, a non-protest that was treated as a violent protest by the police and resulted in more than a hundred arrests (including a great many who weren’t doing any protesting) and many injured. (State Repression at the G20 Protests) From this I started looking over the site. It’s an anarchists’ site, filled with info and publications geared toward helping people find the anarchist within and fight the system.

This is what’s struck me as interesting: Their reason for existing, their criticism of the system, their complaints of capitalism and democracy, I completely agree with–and I’ll explain why in a moment. But their explanation of their remedy, their idea of anarchy, I’m having trouble with. (Note, that anarchy does not mean violence or chaos in the sense of abuse of others, harming people. It simply means no government, no rule of imposed law, no masters.)

Ironically, these anarchists have, from what I can see, I great disdain for socialism, communism, any -ism apparently derived from Marxism. I say “ironic” because their entire criticism of the current state of capitalism and authoritarian democracy comes straight from Marxist criticism, 101. Take for example this page from the book Days of War, Night of Love:

(page image link: “How Does Capitalism Work“)

This is capitalist criticism straight from Marx’s Kapital (not verbatim, of course). Everything this anarchist site decries about the current state of capitalist economy, culture, and the police state used to protect the hegemony and the owners of capital, is Marxism stripped of the Marxist lingo (like “hegemony”). There’s nothing about their critique of capitalism I don’t agree with (my being a Marxist). However, and this is where things get uncomfortable, their ideas of overcoming the system I don’t know if I can support. Well, let me clarify…

At the core, I consider myself an anarcho-socialist. I too believe that the best path for humanity, for human advancement, equality, justice, life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness is the complete lack of government and forced adherence to someone else’s majority rule. However, I also believe that married to that must be a social contract of mutual cooperation, shared resources, publicly owned and operated resources, manufacture, distribution…capital. This is different from anarcho-libertarianism, or Objectivism (vis-à-vis Ayn Rand) which believes that in addition to lack of any forced rules or regulations, private ownership is valued above all. That humans are selfish and greedy by nature, and that we should live to acquire as much for ourselves as we can and help others only so much as we can gain from it ourselves. Pretty much ethically and morally bankrupt, in my opinion.

As I read through the CrimethInc site, most of what they believe (and what they purport anarchists believe) matches up with my anarcho-socialism. They support cooperation, mutually beneficial action, gift economy. Hey, great! But they also support a sort of worship of anti-social behavior, crime, vandalism, activities that make me cringe (e.g.: shoplifting). Although, all the anti-social behavior they support, is all geared toward the state, corporate America, the power structure, and not against other individuals and their personal rights. OK…that sounds good… I guess.

So, I’m left to question: Is my cringing because I’ve lived my entire life controlled by the hegemony, brainwashed into subservience to conformity with passivity, being a good little worker bee who keeps his head down and continues to make profit for his capitalist lords without making any trouble for them? Well, yes I have. We all have. That’s the entire goal of hegemony, be it capitalist or feudal or slave economy. Those in control use whatever sociological means available to control the other 99% of the people for their own benefit. This requires blind obedience to their laws. It requires complete acquiescence to state-supporting meek mildness.

When I remember these things, which I’ve been studying and contemplating for some years now, it reinforces my belief in the anarcho-half of my anarcho-socialism. So, why does the action of subversiveness bug me?

Since President Dubbya started taking away civil liberties after 9/11, I started studying libertarianism and even anarchy–but always from a level of personal rights and liberties. It wasn’t until I started grad school and my first professor, Dr. Burling, introduced me to Marxism that I learned that Bush, civil liberty removal, the corporate ownership of the government, wars, all of it, are a result of the economic foundation: capitalism. It is essentially the base on which everything is a superstructure built extending from it. Everything is about the material question: Who uses it and what is it for? With that in mind it’s easy (easier) to understand power, wealth, who benefits from it most, and how they exploit those without it. Dr. Burling helped change my entire outlook on culture, laws, economy, politics, etc.

But when asked why doesn’t he live outside the corruption and control of capitalism, his response was, in essence: you can’t escape it, it affects everyone, might as well not make your own life unnecessarily difficult fighting it. And this is a guy who, in addition to being an unashamed Marxist, was also a musician with a focus on rock (meaning nothing exactly, except an implication that he has a rebellious spirit).

And it also makes me think of vaunted Marxist cultural critic and major figure of the Frankfurt School, Theodor Adorno, who it is said that during the Paris riots of 1968 when asked by his students why he didn’t participate or support the student protests, he replied “How can you actively fight for something before you fully understand it?”

There is “theory,” and there is “praxis.” Praxis is putting theory into action. Is it that these Marxist critics and theorists I look up to, who happen to be intellectuals and educators, don’t know how to put their words into action? Do they not have the courage of their convictions? Or are all they are about is understanding and criticizing the current system, but not about doing anything about it? When asked what good is knowing how culture develops, knowing how the hegemony controls and influences our decisions and our wants? They have replied that it helps you understand why you make the decisions that you do, why you choose what products or how you sell your labor. But is that enough?

Frederic Jameson (Marxist cultural critic) has developed a concept of applying “cognitive mapping” to cultural criticism, which is a theory of mapping the contradictions in capitalism, where it affects our lives, and finding and exploiting the holes in it. And it’s a step toward praxis, which gives people like me hope of doing something to make a difference. To help turn the tables on capitalist exploitation and help the “seeds of rebellion” grow. But…what is that rebellion? What are we Marxist intellectuals waiting for? We who study culture, and politics, and socio-economics? Dr. Burling had cryptically referred to the biopic about Che Guevara, The Motorcycle Diaries, in which a young, pre-revolutionary Guevara is asked about how to spark the South American peoples into revolution against their oppressors, he responds that you can’t have a revolution without guns.

But then, Dr. Burling often referred to other ways to create such drastic upheaval as to eliminate capitalism, without revolution and war, and used as examples Kim Stanley Robinson’s Mars trilogy and 40, 50, 60 trilogy. Stories in which the only way to evolve from capitalism to egalitarian socialism is either to colonize another planet, or deal with Earth-shaking environmental disaster. So, do we just wait for change?

Back to my point: Are these anarchists doing what we intellectuals fear to do, but are a natural and proper result of the same Marxist-rooted criticism of capitalism we both share? Am I a hypocrite for complaining about and railing about capitalism and its ills and evils, but I continue to lust after home ownership and getting a better job and obeying all the laws of the land so I don’t draw the attention of the state’s police apparatus?

Is it because I have a family to care for? I don’t risk rocking the boat, and so I participate, if grudgingly, in my own commodification and the orgy of consumerism? Of course, this is exactly what the hegemony counts on, this conservativism that we’re all supposed to grow into. We’re allowed to rebel a little as a youth, test the bounds of social acceptance, and then “settle down.” Grow a family, buy a home, get a job you can’t leave because you can’t live without the insurance benefits. You become a productive worker bee who has too much to lose by questioning authority, bucking the system, making waves. Be a quiet little worker bee, and you get to go (somewhat) unnoticed by the system that exploits you and uses you and extorts you, giving little in return except an addiction to mass consumption.

Are anarchists heroes I fear to admire? Or are they the hemp clothing wearing, organic food growing, dumpster diving neo-hippies that I can easily dismiss and marginalize, exactly as I’ve just done, because they threaten the social stability and conditioning I’ve internalized because I grew up brainwashed to become a quiet and non-trouble-making worker bee? Is that why when asked, I say I’m an anarcho-socialist “in theory” but “in practice” I’m a democratic-socialist? Isn’t that just a way for me to marginalize myself?

I don’t know. But this Fighting For Our Lives: An Anarchist Primer is at the very least thought-provoking reading.

Ah, capitalism! What depths you won’t go to to make a buck!

• Child-safety software sells your kids’ IM conversations to market-research companies

…”Turns out that these same sleazeballs also monitor your kids’ IM sessions and sell the info to market-research companies that want to fine-tune how they sell sugar and explosions to kids.”…

Ah, that ol’ “liberal media,” avoiding the truth and spreading lies. Well, part of that statement is correct.

(Feel free to skip the following introductory diatribe and go right to the featured link at the end of this essay. What it has to say is certainly more interesting and coherent than my ramblings.)

Until I gave up XM Radio, I used to listed to Air America all the time. It’s a very, unabashed, left-leaning radio media. And for the few years, during the Bush administration, that I listened to it, I would often hear of some new event, or disclosure, or revelation, or news of some sort that implicated Bush, Cheney, or any number of their cohorts, in war crimes at worst and outright deception at best. Now, knowing that I’m listening to a truly left-wing media outlet, (unlike most people who watch FOX news and listen to Limbaugh who think what they’re getting is “fair and balanced”), I would try to validate what I heard with other sources and gauge its certainty before I went around talking about it. If nothing else, I hate the idea of propagating a story to then turn around and find out it’s unfounded–but mostly, I worship at the altar of truth and try to live my life in discovery of what is and isn’t true.

Anyway, so when I would check out a story and find that it has enough credible, independent support to be true, I’d wait for this important, vital discovery or revelation to appear on mainstream news. And what would happen is maybe, maybe it might make a tiny appearance on Keith Olbermann’s show. Sometimes, rarely, it might get mentioned on Jon Stewart’s The Daily Show (which is null of any affect since the context is it’s a comedy show). And if it did on either, it’d be the once and then never hear about it again. Would it get mentioned on other MSNBC shows? Nope. CNN? Never. ABC News and the like? Not hardly. The idea of the mainstream media being “liberal” was laughable!

For a long time, well…most of my life, I believed in the press as being on the whole fair and interested in the truth. It was our “fourth estate,” charged with uncovering the sometimes painful truth where those in power would want it buried. And then a few years ago, as I started to learn about who actually wielded socio-political power and discovered it was not the politicians by and large, but the top 1-5% richest people in the country (and the world), and that all aspects of our society are controlled and regulated (both intentionally and subconsciously) by capitalist hegemony, some truths started to come to light for me.

The mainstream news, the media, are all corporate owned. Major transnational, global market capitalist corporations which have as their bottom line…the bottom line, and not truth, news, fairness, balance. The money defines what becomes newsworthy and what gets ignored. The corporate media’s very close ties to the Bush dynasty helped keep his administration’s war crimes out of the news or its import minimized to insubstantial.

Now, at one time I would have argued that this control surely wouldn’t filter down to the reporters and the editors who research. Well, yes, it does. A climate, a culture, an agenda filters down from the top to the bottom and when people need work and can’t afford to be too choosy about who exploits their labor, er, pays them and provides their medical benefits, they’re willing to push what the overarching corporate agenda wants pushed and ignore what it wants ignored. And if that’s too much for a reporter to deal with, the editor above them, who has an even greater vested interest in his job, will help make sure the message conforms to the corporate agenda. And as the agenda becomes obvious and doesn’t remain latent, and the employee can’t handle being silenced, they’re free to work on the edges of society and blog, where they’re ignored by all but the fringes and are dismissed by society as irrelevant.

All this to introduce a recent SALON article which discusses this very corporate controlled media dynamic, even in what is thought of by most people as the most “liberal” of all media, Keith Olbermann. Enjoy:

• GE’s silencing of Olbermann and MSNBC’s sleazy use of Richard Wolffe

… Having Richard Wolffe host an MSNBC program — or serving as an almost daily “political analyst” –  is exactly tantamount to MSNBC’s just turning over an hour every night to a corporate lobbyist.  Wolffe’s role in life is to advance the P.R. interests of the corporations that pay him, including corporations with substantial interests in virtually every political issue that MSNBC and Countdown cover.  Yet MSNBC is putting him on as a guest-host and ”political analyst” on one of its prime-time political shows.  What makes that even more appalling is that, as Ana Marie Cox first noted, neither MSNBC nor Wolffe even disclose any of this….

(Facebook viewers: Any images or video from this post have been stripped by FB. To view the original blog post, go to: http://www.celticbear.com/weblog/)

Here’s a question I’d love to get some feedback here, or where it gets cross-posted to Facebook and Twitter:

Let’s say it’s a post-apocalypse situation where whatever happened caused crops to stop growing and all herbivores (i.e.: the animals we farm and eat) to die off, like in the years leading up to Cormac McCarthy’s THE ROAD. Good ole red blooded middle-class Americans are dying from starvation by the millions. Given the mercenary survival instinct of corporations, and the natural survival instinct of humans in general, and our likely desire to not lose as much of our Way Of Life as possible…

Would we knowingly and willingly allow corporate run cannibalism to keep ourselves and our society as we know it running, if it allowed The West from turning into a THE ROAD or MAD MAX style desolation?

What do you think?

(It’s been 20 years since I’ve seen SOYLET GREEN and I’ve not read the book, but the main difference here is in that book/movie the populace didn’t know what the govt/corporations were doing. I’m interested in opinions regarding a willing populace.)

Facebook readers: this post came from my official blog; the auto-transfer to FB tends to strip any embedded images.)

This will be a quick post by me; I can discuss my thoughts on this at great length, but I think it’s more important that one just simply read this fantastic article:

• Canadian Perspectives 2009: The Failure of Capitalism and the Need for a Socialist Alternative

“Capitalism has failed. This fact conditions all future developments.

Since the fall of the Soviet Union, all the mouthpieces of capitalism repeated the mantra, ’socialism has failed, capitalism has won, there is no alternative.’ Francis Fukuyama declared it was ‘the end of history.’ Free-markets, privatization, corporate tax-cuts, deregulation, and outsourcing were seen as the only way forward. In short, there was a massive transfer of wealth from the poor to the rich. The workers had lost and there was very little pity from the victors.”

It is kind of a long article, but please don’t let that dissuade you from reading–it has excellent material from beginning to end, especially as the thesis starts to really pick up steam about halfway through. This article is vital for anyone of any political bent: If you’re a die-hard capitalist, this article may give you a better understanding of real socialist perspectives so you can fight against actual socialism (if you continue to wish to do so) and not some false cartoon propaganda mockery of socialism that hasn’t existed since Stalin; people curious about what socialism is all about, this will give you a great, practical, real-world idea; socialists, well, I don’t need to say anything to you.

Bottom line: anyone interested in what’s going on in politics and economics lately, and what the future may hold, should read this article. As Kim Stanley Robinson mentioned a couple of weeks ago, humanity’s survival may depend on becoming post-capitalism!

Last week, on Earth Day, during my university’s day-long thingie on “social development” and environmental concerns, SF author Kim Stanley Robinson spoke for a bit on social responsibility for humanity’s future. He said some great things, I took notes, he signed a book of mine and we had a very brief conversation. Here’s a summary of what he said, mostly paraphrased quotes, and a lot I’ve forgotten. I’ll try not to digress too much.

KSR is an award winning Utopian author (with a PhD) who’s written, among many other critically acclaimed works, the Moon trilogy and the “Science in the Capital” trilogy. The former is about terraforming Mars and “Utopian” society that develops there, and the latter is about the effects of global warming. In his regular life, KSR is an “American-leftist” and works for social change and climate change awareness. (He made interesting comment that when he started writing, “utopian fiction” meant writing about perfect society, nowadays it means simply society surviving. Kind of indicative of some significant social change.) His talk was in dedication to Dr. Bill Burling who he collaborated with and edited a book of critical essays about KSR. (Dr. Burling was my professor and mentor who I recently mentioned passed away.)

Alright, so, what he said:
Read the rest of this entry »

I’m listening to multi-award winning SF author Robert J. Sawyer on the SciFiDimensions podcast (I’m on my iPhone so you’ll have to google for a link), and he’s asked why so many award winning and critically aclaimed SF writers come out of Canada and the U.K. His answer: socialized health care.

There’s an addage that anyone who can spend 10,000 hours at something will become accomplished at it and can start producing quality after that. When you have socialized healthcare you can start your writing career at young age because you don’t have to worry about the cost of illness and injury. (Author and technology guru Cory Doctorow (Canadian) after living in the U.S. for many years, moved to the U.K. with his wife to start their family and has said he’ll never live anywhere again where there’s not socialized healthcare.)

Listening to Sawyer explain how socialized healthcare is the greatest gift a society could give to it’s people and the arts in particular brought up angry tears. My life since undergrad has been all about working for that “gift” of American for-profit health insurance. Every job I worked, every job I overworked, jobs I desperately wanted to leave, decisions not to work jobs I wanted more, have all been predicated on making sure my family had health insurance. My desire and drive since childhood to write has taken a back- to non-existant seat to slaving away for g–d– health insurance.

And the freakin irony is even with the generous and patriotic boon of for-profit health insurance, we’ve still had to pay thousands in medical bills and premiums and deductables. And even with god’s gift of health insurance upon the only modern nation to not have socialized healthcare, should my family become visited by a little more significant of a health issue, we could become broke, bankrupt, broken.

I’m middle-aged now, barely able to eke through the beginnings of my 10,000 writing hours, and I’ve done shitall except work 40+ hours a week as a drone at mind draining jobs for the gift of health insurance that’s STILL a financial drain on us. I fucking hate capitalism.

(OK, last post for tonight…)

I have a love/hate relationship with the blog “Classically Liberal“. I couldn’t agree more with his analysis on the failed War on Drugs, the criticisms of institutional education, his disgust for the encroaching police state, police abuse of power, face-palming frustration at the destructive and absolutely absurd criminalization of sexuality, and pretty much anything having to do with civil rights. But his hatred of socialism based on as terrible misunderstanding and misrepresentation of it as the creationist “understanding” of evolution, really crinkles my spleen. His economic libertarianism is based on a very elitist, self-righteous, belief in immutable “human nature” and the inherent existence of an objective sense of “the good the true and the beautiful” in class-defined artistic production.

But, I have to say I’m really starting to agree with his criticism of this horrific spending-spree the government is on in bailing companies out. I wish I could remember who I heard recently say: “If a company is so big that it can’t be allowed to fail, then it’s too big for the ‘free market’ and must be broken apart.” Yep.

Anyway, check out this alarming video he has linked on his site under Spending our Future: The Bailout Crisis:

(For the Facebook users: This is a post from my blog getting auto-noted to Facebook, which cuts off any images or videos in the transfer.)

(OK, only a couple more of blog posts in this surge.)

BoingBoing has an article: “Marx was right!” in which the author discusses his move from being a dot-com capitalist to a return to a respect for Marx’s criticism of capitalism. (His wife, who said of his return to Marxist studies that it’s “worse than your reggae phase!”, could commiserate with mine!)

[quote] The work of Karl Marx is ultra relevant to understanding the world’s current financial mess, don’t let anyone tell you otherwise. Marx has become intellectually indispensable to me again, as if there ever should have been any doubt. It’s fascinating to consider that during the time period when Marx was writing “Capital,” there were few factories in England –it was largely an agrarian society still– yet somehow Marx was able to see clearly the mess that we would be in today. He’s the most accurate prophet in all of history, there should be no doubt about this. Marx viewed history with a very, very long telescope. How he was able to see so far into the future is a mystery of his particular genius, but Marx accurately extrapolated how capitalism’s endgame would play itself out at the very birth of the system. Marx saw how utterly destructive this system would ultimately become. Look around you: Marx was right.[/quote]

(On a related note, Richard Metzger posted a followup: “Marx was… second???” about Thomas Jefferson’s essay on “fictitious capital” decades before Marx wrote about it.)

Well, I could write for a long time regarding my thoughts and history in Marxist studies, but you don’t care, do you? Instead, let me link to this great page that helps explain both Marxist and anarchist theories in ordinary terms that speaks to the common person:

Questions about Capitalism and Class

Yes, it’s Chumbawamba’s Web site. They live the spirit of anarcho-socialism, and their answers to common questions about materialist criticism of capitalism is really fantastic! I really encourage you to read at least this one page I just linked top to bottom. That’s it, all I ask.

(For the Facebook users: This is a post from my blog getting auto-noted to Facebook, which cuts off any images or videos in the transfer.)
(Drawing of Marx and Engles stolen borrowed from http://www.hermes-press.com/distinctions.htm)