Forum Post: Sorry to break it to you but if you believe that humanity > money, then you're an ANTI-capitalist.
Posted 13 years ago on Oct. 23, 2011, 5:10 a.m. EST by EliteNinx
(34)
This content is user submitted and not an official statement
Capitalism /Slavery 2.0
I've come to the conclusion that a lot of you will not understand this. Maybe you never will. For some of you it will click right away. For others, it may take weeks, or even months. You can blame our situation on the 2008 housing bubble, the bail outs, the Federal Reserve, the collusion of corporations and government, student loan debt, predatory loans, Wall-Street greed, corporation greed, exporting of jobs, offshore bank accounts, whatever…. At the end of the day these are simply symptoms of the same deep-rooted problem, and honestly, these incidents are a blessing in disguise because they piss people off enough to wake them up so that they finally begin to explore their socioeconomic situation and have the revolution that the world has been waiting for them to have.
So with that said...if you're here for one of these very specific reasons like...
-Getting money out of politics -Campaign finance reform -Forgiving student loans -Massive government reform -Immigration -Ending the Fed -etc...
...then you'll most likely be confused or angered by this. You may not yet possess the intellectual tools to come to a proper assessment of what I'm getting at in the coming paragraphs. If you're a fool, you'll be offended. If you're smart, you'll be curious and intrigued.
Now although I agree with a lot of this stuff, if they get solved, then what? Will your "jobs" magically come back? Perhaps there will be a temporary rise in jobs due to the increased amount of money in circulation but what happens to everyone else? Better yet...what happens after technological unemployment becomes more prominent? How do we address our energy sustainability issue? How are we going to work out a smooth transition off of oil soon? Is it even possible? - http://www.greenbang.com/how-much-oil-is-left_16795.html .There's literally tens of thousands of jobs in these outdated energy paradigms (http://www.bls.gov/cew/oil_gas_drilling.htm) yet we eventually have to get off of them or many of us will simply die. This list goes on and on so for the sake of keeping this relatively brief I won’t go on.
These are essentially a few of the extremely important things that capitalism cannot inherently address.
Too many of us are thinking inside the capitalism box which is exactly what they want us to think inside of. It's actually a great shame because we read so much history and we know so much of what happens after these "revolutions" and yet we are still not learning. Make no mistake about it, these kinds of movements have happened MANY times before and we've won many times. We will protest, cry, scream and get some of what we want, and at the end of the day when it's all over, we'll get a few things shoved our way and we'll be happy, then we'll go back to our mediocre little 9 to 5's and live out uneventful shitty lives while the same fundamental elements that produced these people in the first place (we call them the greedy 1%'ers) are still at play. How do we solve poverty and hunger for instance? How about the psychosis that inevitably comes from it? How do we solve the issue of class? How about unemployment and welfare? If there's no such thing as 100% unemployment then what do we do about that? Should some people just suffer although it's statistically impossible to accommodate them into the working class? Again, we are not thinking about these things. So many of us just assume that they will be handled and everything will magically work out when everyone has more money and can do more stuff. Wishful thinking of course. What's worse is...many people are thinking about what will be better for themselves and when they get it, they will ditch the protest and go right back to their comfort.
I'll leave you guys with this. Capitalism was necessary to get to where we are now, there's no denying that. But it is provably obsolete and there's no reason to get into the literally hundreds of reasons why; because the internet is full of this truth. I would even go as far as to say it's a fact. As you objectively begin to scrutinize every aspect of the system of capitalism and see that it's at its heart a competitive system then you'll begin to wake up and see that maybe a system based on the model of survival of the fittest, race to the top, and dog-eat-dog is not the most efficient and best way to live and will NEVER work for the majority of the Earth's population no matter what kind of abundance we have. Maybe at such a highly technological point where we can easily create, we should be working on transitioning to something better.
Glad to see there are more and more people getting it. The root cause for most of the problems today lie fundamentally in the social system itself. Stop blaming people! People are products of their environment. We have a system that thrives on competition, greed, self-interests and we expect people to behave?? You told your children about Santa Claus and Easter Bunny and then tell them it's wrong to lie??
It doesn't matter if you're rich, poor, Jewish, Muslim, educated or not, WE ARE ALL HUMANS. WE ARE THE SAME SPECIES.
We are a BIG family, 7 BILLION STRONG. Our HOME is PLANET EARTH. Stop focusing on differences, start working on bringing everyone together. What do we all need? What do HUMANS NEED? Food, clean water, arable land, relevant education! This doesn't change, whoever you are, wherever you're from!
Stop wasting your life trying to buy better cars than others, or hating some people for life. YOU DESERVE A BETTER SOCIETY. WE DESERVE A BETTER SOCIETY.
www.unitinghumans.com
While I agree with what you said (if not the delivery), I think there is a crucial part you have omitted and that is that there are solutions and people have started living them around the planet. Sustainable living is not a myth, it's just been obscured by clouds. Permaculture has been around for 40 years for instance. Alternatives to the current global money system are out there and in use and thankfully there are many and they remain small and local.
Like what?
Dude, you're making it too complicated; capitalism is simply profiting from trading the value you create to another person. That's happened since human cultures showed up, and will continue to happen until we go extinct. Not really a problem.
... I'm pretty sure you're not in full understanding of exactly what I'm saying here. I assure you, capitalism is what makes this world more complicated than it has to be, more than anything else actually. Now before you erroneously call me a communist or socialist or any other stigmatized label, I'll say that you're oversimplifying the idea of value and trade. You're essentially alluding to a system of incentive. Why should I do something if I won't get rewarded for it. It's this very same idea that has "worked" since human cultures showed up -- according to you.
And this is where the appeal to tradition and old ideas is dead, because we KNOW that these don't work. Our 300 year history on this continent has been a disaster for the MAJORITY of the people. Yet you say this is how things should work because your mind is only able to think inside of a very limited perspective of how things ought to work? Think about what I'm saying. The golden age of capitalism is GONE. There is not much being built from the ground up other than retail stores. The establishments are established. You can only hope to work for one. You are nothing but a slave on the back of someone else. And if you say you work for yourself then you're wrong, because your income comes from those same slaves who are working for the corporations. I honestly have to question whether or not you fully understand the system of capitalism and its inherent problems as they relate to our ever-changing technological reality.
It's amazing you say "Not really a problem" at the end as if there really hasn't been any problems. I mean...a child dies every 4 seconds due to hunger, not because there's not enough food, but because there isn't enough money.. The majority of the world lives on less than 2 dollars a day. Hundreds of thousands of people die each year because of this system and its self-replicating propaganda team (you are one of them) will have you blame it on something else. I won't sit here and list all the reasons why it IS a problem..because I'm sure you realize there are man. However it actually takes a broad set of knowledge to actually assess what the true causes are instead of simply writing it off with a simple "that's just the way it is", or..."that's just life". The people at the top love complacency. At the end of the day, no matter what kind of capitalism you're in, you'll never compete with what's already established. Get the best capitalism ever and you're still fighting for a job. As you attain the job, a hundred others lose out and must find something else. It's just a bunch of people constantly fighting to fit in, and guess what? .If you don't fit in, tough luck...now you're impoverished. "NOT REALLY A PROBLEM" as you'd say...
You're busy blaming all the symptoms when the actual cancer itself is capitalism. As I said it takes a certain kind of knowledge to understand this. I'll recommend Jeremy Rifkin's Empathic Civilization, you can Youtube it. However, chances are, if you have no idea who that is, then you probably have no business discussion social systems.
See post below- I understand that there's problems going on, but it's because of unethical people not the system.
There's a difference between people who make unethical decisions (which can be traced back to fundamental universal laws of how to gain an advantage in the face of adversity a.k.a. game theory) and a system which encourages and rewards unethical decisions through greater profit and wealth.
Regulations only set the bar at how bad you're allowed to be. E.g. the agreed lifespan of the average light bulb, or the printer that breaks 1 month after the guarantee runs out. The only way to be more profitable than your rival is to be unethical. Fact. Cutting corners (sweat shops, laying off staff in favour of automation, building with inferior, dirty and cheap materials) will give you the edge if you can peddle that shit to enough gullible or needy people.
The list of inevitable undesirable side-effects of the profit/reward paradigm is stupidly long and affect all of our lives in ways we can barely imagine.
The problem of corruption may be human, but for that problem to affect everyone in the world, it must be a problem with the system which amplifies the scope of that human tendency to do whatever it takes to move up in the eyes of others for personal gain. E.g. Capital, wealth.
This is true because being wealthy is not like being strong, charismatic or smart. It doesn't just get you the ladies and earn you respect, it allows you to control the entire world, bribe people, bankrupt people, make the basic necessities of life so expensive that an nation starves. That's no human feat, it's an act of CAPITALISM.
There are absolutely no resource allocation solutions within capitalism that can provide the abundance that we know, through science, is technically possible at this time. For instance, we have enough food to feed MORE people than we currently have on Earth, yet this does not get done. Why? We have enough raw resources to shelter everyone on this planet, and provide basic necessities for them. Why is this not done? We have absolutely NO NEED for war at this stage of communication and understanding, yet we continue to blow up innocent civilians in foreign countries. We have cars that are capable of running on air and water and yet we don't hear about these breakthroughs in the media. Why is that? Our energy crisis isn't really a crisis at all, rather it's a continuing struggle to dismantle the oil interests of today that seem to be completely unaware that they are technologically obsolete.
The problem is that these are too many conflicting interests due to the motivation for the existence of these industries. These industries are no longer there to produce the most efficient, reliable, and safe energy, but rather to increase profits and maintain their industry's hundreds of thousands of jobs.
It's exactly why we are struggling to become truly sustainable, and it's exactly why a resource rich nation like Africa, for example, is so impoverished. Not because it lacks resources or labor power, but because it lacks the money.
It will seem terribly difficult to understand in the future that we allowed ourselves to be completely blinded by this fictional commodity for so much longer than it was necessary, and were willing to kill, destroy our environment, and exploit other people for. The ideas and psychological understandings that fuel the capitalism have long been debunked and science has been getting on board rather quickly to show us just how wrong we were. Things like altruism, human nature, incentive and motivation, along with theories about what the true nature of "life" is, have been carefully exploited in a grand collective effort to perpetuate this anti-economy. Face it, the scientific truth is that we are empathic and social creatures and what truly motivates us are heavily based on these premises. The only reason people don't see this now is because they allow their world view to be completely shaped by their terrible experiences inside of this system. Not many people have read enough, explored enough, and learned enough about other cultures and how they operate to understand that human nature is dependent on the context of the environment. This is why you get erroneous assumptions that lead to the belief that a voluntary, self guided, autonomous, community based, technological, horizontal society would never work. Yet these same people haven't studied the reasoning as to why this is feasible.
If you read your history you'll see that there were many revolutions in our 300+ year history and we got many individuals from those uprisings into government and yet here we are....still complaining about government, Wall Street and certain individuals in the government. Let's turn the wheel more and get "better, smarter" people into government and that should fix it, right...? We've had 300 years and no major change to the way this system is run has been seen.
Money had its use. It is no longer necessary in an age where abundance can be easily achieved.
I don't think you understand what money is- money isn't wealth, it's not a medium of exchange for goods and services- money is the representation of the value that you produce in life. A CEOs value is millions, a mcdonalds laborers value is minimum wage.
If you want to know what money really is and where it leads to please follow the link:
http://occupywallst.org/forum/maybe-this-will-get-the-support-of-mainstream-medi/
When technological unemployment becomes cheaper and more efficient to employ rather than say...human labor, given your logic it would be unethical for the corporations to employ this method right? They would inevitably have to choose between automation and jobs..by your logic, an unethical and greedy person would choose automation. After all, robots don't need vacations, are more efficient, don't complain, and can't get tired so this would clearly result in higher profits. Thus reducing the amount of available jobs while simultaneously laying a lot of people off. In capitalism, we will regard this as "greed" and this would be "bad" for the economy because it's alleviating a lot of human labor. Except in reality, it's an emancipation of human labor and it's truly better efficiency. This is only an issue in a capitalist environment where jobs are necessary.
The system has inherent issues that are pretty much axiomatic if you really give it a long hard think
There are too many conflicting interests in capitalism and this is exactly what causes drug companies to rush out useless and inefficient drugs for diseases that they completely MADE UP. If they don't, they don't make money. It's why your iPhone is obsolete after one year. It's why car companies have to continually waste massive amounts of resources to build new models each year that barely differ from the previous year's model. In capitalism it doesn't make any sense to build the best, the most efficient, and the greatest. It never will, because if you build the best, how do you sell the same product next year? And the year after that? You have to continue to make marginal improvements over the previous year and this makes it in a corporation's interest to hold out on their best technologies and give you the piece of junk that you think is the latest piece of technology, when in reality what you just purchased as new a few days is ago is extremely old.
I AGREE 100%, please read this: http://occupywallst.org/forum/i-demand-informed-direct-democracy-online-whos-wit/ BTW, this guy Pottsandandahalf and a few other users have posted nastiness on my thread too, I wonder who PAYS them their precious money to do it :)
Duh I don't get paid I just like philosophy. That's what this whole movement is, a gigantic philosophical discussion. I'm simply arguing that the source of our problems isn't capitalism, it's good old fashioned corruption. All of the evils and problems that we have been dealing with isn't because of a problem without he system, it's because of the unethical actions of people like Bernie madoff. Bernie ripped people off not because of capitalism but because he's an asshole. Let's actually hold people accountable and get rid of the unethical stooges that scammed us. Simple
And your argument is wrong. The corruption comes from us. The oligarchy now were innocent children before they became this way. It is a fact; what you do will change you and it isn't some inherent evil nature that propel these individuals to commit these "wrongs" as we would call them. They, in their minds, are doing what they do best and most efficiently. There is a massive disconnect between our reality and theirs and what you're not seeing is that this has nothing to do with the person, but everything to do with our hierarchical system. You are trying your best to blame every possible symptom while avoiding the actual root cause.
You're blaming another symptom by using Madoff's name in this. How hilarious. The system gives him INCENTIVE to do what he did. There is no reason not to do these things if your model is the profit motive. Just like there is no reason to not rush pharmaceutical drug into production in order to turn a greater profit, because the slap on the wrist they get as punishment when their medications kill a couple of hundred people in America does not outweigh the reward--which is their profit from selling the drug in the first place...yet you say it's the people? We change the people and things will get better? We've been continually changing the people for 300+ years and we still have the same problems. Let's change the people again, reform the system to benefit and accommodate a few more people and the world will fix itself over time? That is honestly as much wishful thinking as it is ignorance to the true nature of human nature. Sorry, but you're simply not ready to have this discussion. Please go look at the documentaries I mentioned earlier, if you're not willing to do that then you'll stay stuck representing outdated ideas for as long as you avoid your re-education. You said you like philosophy so you should be open to new ones. Good luck.
That would be true if every billionaire was exactly like madoff. Obviously this isn't the case because there are plenty of billionaires out there who are perfectly good people. Take bill gates- super rich, but he gives billions away fighting problems like malaria and global warming. Surely you're not sayin that him and madoff are the same person?
Every solution we can think of, inside the model of capitalism, will work only temporarily and for a few, and never for the majority of the world. Mark my words. The age old idea of "rags to riches" was another grand tool to motivate the lower class to continuously struggle to get out of poverty, with the idea that they were actually "moving up" in society. The serfs had religion, we have societal dogma.
Let us not forget that this is OUR world. There is no them, or us...it's just US. The 99:1% divide is just another artificial divide, instituted this time, not by the powerful elite, but by us; the lower classes, and while I completely understand the message, I'd rather like to think that we are all human beings and that eventually we must all work together. Capitalism will surely guarantee that we aren't working together at our full capacity.
Who am I? I'm a fellow activist and occupier. If you’ve been to Zuccotti Park you’ve probably seen me around. I occupy on weekends because I work. I currently live a decent life and I currently have little reason to complain. In relation to what many others are going through, my problems are small. My school years were granted to me and I'm doing quite fine. So why am I writing this? Because I'm well aware of the symbiotic nature we have with each other and the environment around us and I understand more than most that no system based on perpetual cyclical consumption will ever be efficient enough to last as long as our race should. This is a matter of alleviating ignorance and replacing it with evidence based solutions. Not traditional arrangements within a system that has long since failed its original purpose.
You may be surprised at how many are beginning to think the same way you do. And not just one segment, some are wealthy, so are poor. There's a small change in attitude afoot, Elite, I can feel it. Bubbling just beneath the surface. It's no longer a question of trying to fix the old capitalist model, plenty of people know that's a dead end road. The 99% is just a label. The smartest ones know that it's really the 100%.
I hope I am surprised. I'm actually very glad to see someone understand.
And you have to admit, "We are the 99" does have a nice ring to it. If we called it "we are the 100%" the mainstream media would be REALLY be confused! ; )
I found a new theory about economics called 'debitism'. This new theory is based on having debts as the root cause of economic activity and explains our economy system much better as the traditional theories which think trading goods is the basic principle.
And this theory says that it is normal that the capitalistic system crashes from time to time because of its structure. I have written a post about this and would be glad if someone could read this at the general assembly so more people may recognize that there will be no stable solution in a capitalistic system and that we should consider establishing a new global system for the future which will satisfy the needs of the whole 100%.
http://occupywallst.org/forum/maybe-this-will-get-the-support-of-mainstream-medi/