Forum Post: Capitalism cannot be reformed
Posted 13 years ago on Oct. 10, 2011, 11:20 p.m. EST by RossWolfe
(34)
This content is user submitted and not an official statement
One of the most glaring problems with the supporters of Occupy Wall Street and its copycat successors is that they suffer from a woefully inadequate understanding of the capitalist social formation — its dynamics, its (spatial) globality, its (temporal) modernity. They equate anti-capitalism with simple anti-Americanism, and ignore the international basis of the capitalist world economy. To some extent, they have even reified its spatial metonym in the NYSE on Wall Street. Capitalism is an inherently global phenomenon; it does not admit of localization to any single nation, city, or financial district.
Moreover, many of the more moderate protestors hold on to the erroneous belief that capitalism can be “controlled” or “corrected” through Keynesian-administrative measures: steeper taxes on the rich, more bureaucratic regulation and oversight of business practices, broader government social programs (welfare, Social Security), and projects of rebuilding infrastructure to create jobs. Moderate “progressives” dream of a return to the Clinton boom years, or better yet, a Rooseveltian new “New Deal.” All this amounts to petty reformism, which only serves to perpetuate the global capitalist order rather than to overcome it. They fail to see the same thing that the libertarians in the Tea Party are blind to: laissez-faire economics is not essential to capitalism. State-interventionist capitalism is just as capitalist as free-market capitalism.
Nevertheless, though Occupy Wall Street and the Occupy [insert location here] in general still contains many problematic aspects, it nevertheless presents an opportunity for the Left to engage with some of the nascent anti-capitalist sentiment taking shape there. So far it has been successful in enlisting the support of a number of leftish celebrities, prominent unions, and young activists, and has received a lot of media coverage. Hopefully, the demonstrations will lead to a general radicalization of the participants’ politics, and a commitment to the longer-term project of social emancipation.
To this end, I have written up a rather pointed Marxist analysis of the OWS movement so far that you might find interesting:
THE LEFT IS DEAD! LONG LIVE THE LEFT!
Unchecked greed of public servants has led to the unchecked greed of banks and corporations to purchase our Government from WE THE PEOPLE. This has been a fight since day one in this country, there has ALWAYS been a fight against central banking. On Dec. 24 1913 the central bankers took control of the reigns. Our public servants have been bought and sold ever since. Passing laws and regulations that have stifled individual freedoms, competition, and incentive preventing Capitalism from existing and flourishing. What we have here is a false free market capitalist society controlled by the very wealthy to be a facist empire. Stop the banks by changing the rules in Washington.
http://sanityscribe.wordpress.com/
LOL! Power to the People Brother ! How utterly naive.
True, many of them are very ignorant, and although I'm all in favor of taking down today's ineffective and inefficient Top 10% Management Group of Business & Government, there's only one way to do it – by fighting bankers as bankers ourselves. Consequently, I have posted a 1-page Summary of the Strategic Legal Policies, Organizational Operating Structures, and Tactical Investment Procedures necessary to do this at:
http://getsatisfaction.com/americanselect/topics/on_strategic_legal_policy_organizational_operational_structures_tactical_investment_procedures
Join
http://finance.groups.yahoo.com/group/StrategicInternationalSystems/
if you want to support a Presidential Candidate Committee at AmericansElect.org in support of the above bank-focused platform.
THIS is NOT CAPITALISM! we don't have free markets, take econ 101