Capitalism is the AIDS of the psyche.

So true. This peevish personal jousting sucks up all the energy that (3.00 / 1)

should be used in thinking our way through.

But, as the article points out so clearly, when you wonder why we can't cooperate, it's because we've been trained to fight before we cooperate.

Vox is right.

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by: David Byron @ Mon Apr 27, 2009 at 13:15:01 PM CDT

My 3 favorite paragraphs from that (4.00 / 2)

excellent article. Thanks for pointing it out. By the way, it's not quite as simple as "unite". We need to stop 'uniting' with the wealthiest classes and interests (note pearls around necks of female mainstream leaders) and start uniting with each other in the bottom 80%.

Ironically, one of the most radical proposals making the rounds today has come from an economist at the London School of Economics, Willem Buiter, a former member of the Bank of England's Monetary Policy Committee and certainly no Marxist. Buiter has proposed that the whole financial sector be turned into a public utility. Because banks in the contemporary world cannot exist without public deposit insurance and public central banks that act as lenders of last resort, there is no case, he argues, for their continuing existence as privately owned, profit-seeking institutions. Instead they should be publicly owned and run as public services. This proposal echoes the demand for "centralization of credit in the banks of the state" that Marx himself made in the Manifesto. To him, a financial-system overhaul would reinforce the importance of the working classes' winning "the battle of democracy" to radically change the state from an organ imposed upon society to one that responds to it.

"From financialisation of the economy to the socialisation of finance," Buiter wrote, is "a small step for the lawyers, a huge step for mankind." Clearly, you don't need to be a Marxist to have radical aspirations. You do, however, have to be some sort of Marxist to recognize that even at a time like the present, when the capitalist class is on its heels, demoralized and confused, radical change is not likely to start in the form of "a small step for the lawyers" (presumably after getting all the "stakeholders" to sit down together in a room to sign a document or two). Marx would tell you that, without the development of popular forces through radical new movements and parties, the socialization of finance will fall on infertile ground. Notably, during the economic crisis of the 1970s, radical forces inside many of Europe's social democratic parties put forward similar suggestions, but they were unable to get the leaders of those parties to go along with proposals they derided as old-fashioned.

Attempts to talk seriously about the need to democratize our economies in such radical ways were largely shunted aside by parties of all stripes for the next several decades, and we are still paying the price for marginalizing those ideas. The irrationality built into the basic logic of capitalist markets-and so deftly analyzed by Marx-is once again evident. Trying just to stay afloat, each factory and firm lays off workers and tries to pay less to those kept on. Undermining job security has the effect of undercutting demand throughout the economy. As Marx knew, microrational behavior has the worst macroeconomic outcomes. We now can see where ignoring Marx while trusting in Adam Smith's "invisible hand" gets you.

For attractive lips, speak words of kindness, For lovely eyes, seek out the good in people, For a slim figure, share your food with the hungry. -- A-Hep

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by: fairleft @ Mon Apr 27, 2009 at 13:45:37 PM CDT

Not so much capitalism (0.00 / 0)

or even unsustainble eco-systems
or the cash cow that is global warming
or peak oil

It is that decision by elite assholes who fear they will loose control to release bio-weapons to cull world population.

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by: Lasthorseman @ Mon Apr 27, 2009 at 21:20:59 PM CDT

Oh boy! A new tinfoil theory: Swine flu as UberPlot. (0.00 / 0)

Combinatorial genetics as tool of corpofascistae.

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by: pootie @ Wed Apr 29, 2009 at 13:04:11 PM CDT

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