I want to take a moment to thank ALL the commentors… for educating me. I’m at a mere 20 years of activism, and I am just totally honored to read the perspectives of this “team of world problem troubleshooters” if I may call these thread-wranglers such. You guys and gals sure know how to wring-apart a subject matter from every imaginable angle plus a few hundred more. I’m not NEAR as educated as most of the people in this thread, so I should actually do more shutting up… but I can’t… cuz it feels so exciting to be around this “team”.

I see some “chicken or egg, which came first”-ponder happening here… and that’s interesting to me. One comment claims that it is human behavior that causes the “systems” to form. Another says it is the systems… that cause the human behavior… and that the behaviors are being forced upon the humans… by systems. Other comments propose that those forced behaviors then become invisible to the humans, and humans tend to chalk it off to “that’s life” and “life isn’t always fair” and “that’s just the way it is”. They mistake “life” for the systems/traditions that are forced upon them. I see this often, especially in my own kin.

I suspect that both are causes, or at least “pertinent factors”. The “systems” are often co-condoning systems… self-feeding… self-perpetuating. These systems “feed” upon a continuous source of humans… saying “that’s life” and thus going belly-up to the system’s likely-imposed beliefs and rules. For example, people are NOT forced to join the free marketeers pyramiding, greenpapers, and ownership system (capitalism). Or are they? When the entire planet is owned, and when the only way to get survival supplies… is to get past the capitalism-invented price tags that blockade those survival supplies, then “the people” are forced to get a job (or figure out some other way to acquire capitalism coupons/money).

Nobody is created equal, at least not here in the USA and not when using capitalism as the measuring stick. Everyone is born at the pyramid layer of their parents, and pyramid layers are a system thing. (Right about here, someone could say “Yeah, a system that couldn’t exist unless human behaviors feed it and perpetuate it”.) Actually, true. And yet its a system that is SO overwhelming and infiltrating (COMMONly bought-into?)… that the “get a job or starve” is often unavoidable… barring being lucky enough to be born on a “set for life” pyramid layer, where no job is needed and the word “job” goes undefined.

At “set for life” pyramid layers, the “job” is often shopping, eating in restaurants, and finding a place in one of the 9 “owned” houses… to put all the stuff that was bought today. Owner’s addiction, yes? The do-as-your-told-OR-ELSE servants that served the food and built the toys that the set-for-life shopped-for today… are invisible to the set4life. Those slaves are “that’s life” to the set4life, and that accessory-to-negligent-homicide kind of potential forsaking done BY the set4life… has gone invisible. The set4life doesn’t even know what they do. They are NOT out harming people, they are just shopping.

I call this thinking… being “surface dweller”. Surface dwellers don’t think very deep about things, and rarely research or scrutinize the far-reaching ramifications of anyone’s “human behaviors”, including their own. In a way, its the “heads in the clouds” part of pyramids that I mentioned earlier. The kids at the top of the childhood playground pyramids… gave little thought to the back-crushing they were doing to the kids on the bottom layers… because the “glory” of being “high” was so mind-numbing. No “elite” would ever travel down to the bottom of the Earth-harvesting pyramid and check the emissions at the exhaust pipe… when the diamonds, yachts, learjets, and ice cream are so tummy yummy and creamy dreamy.

Watch a young child lick an ice cream cone, and you’ll often see a blank stare of yummy goodness… a surface dwellism… a mesmerization. Take that ice cream from them at that point, and you’ll get a tantrum… just like when you take the cocaine away from a nose candy tooter. Is this a human behavior that causes the system to exist, or is it a system that promotes, condones, and railroads/bandwagons such human behavior into existence? Or is it both? (reciprocal?) Thoughts? Thanks again, everyone, for the excellent comments. Keep it up… good stuff.

dan e: “More horsepucky, Max. When did this “commons” of yours exist?”

It is ancient, exists today, and the commons began to diminish a few centuries ago, and has nothing to do with whitey, because power doesn’t cares about control and domination more than anything else; in fact racism is born out of privatization of the commons.

This is not white/black; this is about reclaiming what rightfully belongs to all.

I don’t know perhaps on some page in one of his volumes Marx speaks to this. If he does or doesn’t is irrelevant, unless only what Marx writes warrents consideration. Such devotion is mindless dogma. And dan e, I do think you’re an intelligent poster who can think for himself. I have no problem in crediting the writings of anyone with a thought of originality and deep understanding. But just because Marx has written volumes doesn’t make all of what he says valuable or relevant.

The issue Dan that I raise in critiquing Chomsky and his “soft Zionism” is his USE of primarily “U.S. Imperialism” to explain all actions and motives. My critique is no different than Jeffrey Blankfort’s critique of Chomsky for his misuse of Imperialism.

The issue is not who invented the term Imperialism. The issue is RHETORIC. And how Chomsky’s rhetoric has narrowed the scope of analyzing issues. For one Dan as you point out Marxist analysis is extremely important yet these past 30 years with Chomsky’s rising importance as a spokesperson representing the “Left” he has done little to advance Marxist analysis. And that is my point.

my own definition wld be that “commons” appears as just one of the aspect of one and the only reality we have. Thus, arts, language, lore, land, etc., as max points out, is connected to “commons”.

probably the key tenet to keep in mind is not to think elementalistically; i.e., thinking/talking about any aspect of one and the only nature we have as existing in isloation from any other aspect.
in other words, commons, religion, forest, etc., are parts of nature or reality; reality [all that exists] is not part of religion, etc.

Priests, it seems to me, look at religion as a separate entity. They will even instruct their ‘flock’ [read please: serfs], Be with them but not of them!
Sad but true! tnx

by just persistently leaving just one of the more salient facts such as ‘religion’ one is not going to ever proffer an elucidation.
i think that at one time one may have owned a grass or straw bed, bat, cudgel, rock, sandals, etc., but not land and water and all that the two contained.

so, we need to talk/ideate ab. how, when, why, where did the ownership of water and land became a law.
And the why must be connected to when and how and by whom the usurpation of that basic right had been carried out.

And not in order to enlighten adults, but children. We may have lost adults in a country like canada and US; so, let us speak english to children. That is the only language they know.
by english, i suggest that we use as much as possible germanic words. Until just recently, german language used almost solely germanic words.
tnx

The Cuban accomplishments in organic farming are wonderful and invaluable. It should be noted that the decision to go organic came out of a dire crisis in Cuba’s history (as you outline) and were instituted by the Cuban State. At least as important as this, is the fact that beginning in 1993, the workers own the farms in Cuba. They make decisions based in having an immediate vested interest in the land and produce – and not based on Cuban state planning demands. I do wonder, how much of the Cuban organics will survive a relaxation of the embargo by the US. There will be a lot of pressure from the US (acting on behalf of capitalist firms) to start using US-made fossil fuel fertilizers and pesticides. On the other hand, Cuban organic farming and the science that girds it is now a source of considerable pride for Cubans. And even if brought about by a state in crisis mode, may well develop a life of its own. Unless it can be co-opted by capital, however, Big Agribusiness may restrict it to a niche market.

Any theorist or “thinking” who tells you that Marx & Engels can be safely ignored is working for the interests of the Ruling Class.

Deadbeat, you hit the nail in the head: Racism was from the first an essential element in the creation of the modern capitalist world system. Only a cpl things are as important, one being Patriarchy, another is the mystified nature of the wage-for-labor agreement between Capital and Laborer(s).

BTW, DB, Chomsky did not invent the term Imperialism or “US Imperialism”, and it bothers me that you seem to associate it exclusively with him and his “soft zionist” cohorts.

The term was widely used by elites of the British Empire to describe their collective geopolitical/economic enterprise. cf. Hobson.

Modern usage of the term by pro-workingclass/anti-colonialist writers springs from Lenin’s classic analysis Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism”. You don’t have to be a “Leninist” to appreciate the seminal character of this work and the role it has played.

But I’m going to stop trying to convince Max and the rest of these “have the cake & eat it too” denizens of the colonial metropole.
Just look at the names that sprang to his mind when he wanted to describe “our common legacy”: all white, all male, all “Western”. Sorry Max, your narrowmindedness is showing. Please take moment to realize how culturally deprived you are? I don’t mean to blame you for it, none of us choose the circumstances of our birth, but at some point we have to try to expand our outlook…

One point, Max: it was not I who introduced the Capitalist Class, nor can Marx be blamed. They introduced themselves. Well to a certain extent they were “midwived” by the then hegemonic Feudal Nobility, which is where a lot of them got their initial chunk of Primitive Accumulation. More importantly it was the Feudal State, mainly in the form of Absolutist Monarchy, which maintained the set of power relations that allowed the Capitalist class (aka the Commoners, or 3rd Estate) to grow and prosper to the point that they could shape the political State to their own desires.

But these are not controversial propositions thought up by Karl Marx. This is just basic history.

More specifically, just what do you mean by the term?

In Europe under Feudalism there was a tradition that the peasantry had limited rights to make use for designated purposes ( “gathering firewood Si, hunting the King’s Deer No”) of certain portions of manor/village land designated by the feudal lord as part of his “commons”, but when capitalism got going good, these rights were abolished.
Do you know anything about the history of the Enclosure Movement? Do you know anything about Primitive Accumulation?

To me you seem to be dreaming of some small-businessman’s Garden of Eden which never in fact existed. Are you hoping to go back to the era of “free land in the West”?

If you seriously want to reclaim any of this whites-only “legacy” you cite, you will have to take it away from the persons who presently own it under the existing capitalist property laws backed by the Capitalist State.

Ain’t gonna be no “new era of living” until the current Powers That Be are disempowered and society is reorganized on the basis of a different set of priniciples whereby the “right” to own property in the means of production is drastically limited if not abolished outright.

This is not so much an “ownership” but a claim to all use and improvement. People can build and own what they build/earn. Innovation and enterprise will continue to go on and thrive in a much different and healthy way.

Whether it be the works of Albert Einstein or the music of Bach or the literature of Cervantes or the patents that are licensed to corporations. None of these exist in a vacuum. They are part and parcel of a collective community(ies). What enables all of these is what we and our forebearers created and likewise the legacy we leave for generations, yet to be born must all be included in this reclamation.

Once this is done, debates about Marx and capitalism and socialism will be in the dust bin…other debates, hopefully more meaningful ones will emerge to build on a new era of living.

meanwhile religion with its deleterious effects, structure of society and governance, man’s inhumanity to man, miseducation, love for power, etc., do not exist; thus, do not play any role in our life or capitalism; whatever that is, it is clearly not an apple.
they forget or do not know that capitalism or socialism is part of life or reality.
and neither capitalism or socialism, whatever they be to anyone, stands appart from people and their doings.
so, it all comes dwn to people and their behavior. And we can see with naked eye what people do to one another.
it is not capitalism that does anything, it is solely people who act and bring on wars, hatred, oppression, inequality, etc.

i suggest that any discussion about anything begins with at least one fact and not with definitions, ‘explanations’, marxism, socialism, etc.
socialism or marxism are high-order terms, far removed from ditch digging, tool making, buying, marrying, etc.
That people dig ditches, marry, work are facts; isms label ideating mostly.

A ditch digger get’s paid so much. A tool maker makes more money than a digger.
Teacher or professor get’s paid [much] more than both laborers. From such facts we can make conclusions.
i conclude that all three workers shld ge paid the same or simialr wages.
now name this whatever, but what is said is understandable and at least some people wld agree with that.
one can conclude that a child of a laborer shdl not be penalized by being paid less than a father of another child.
A child of a person who get’s paid less is discriminated against, shamed, and deprived of the opportunities that a child has whose father earns more.

having healthcare, right to be informed, etc., falls in either-or not category of evaluating; i.e., it is either wrong or right. Capitalism, socialism, marxism, catholicism do not because, in the main, these labels are to high on the ladder and to which answers true and false do not apply.
in fact, each person is right by own definition of anything. Acceptance of this fact leads to agreement and peace.
Forever running dwn s’mbody elses’s definition of capitalism or socialism leads to rancour and frustration.
so i accept deabeat’s, max’s, et al definitions. I merely wish they’d start their analyses ['explanations'] from at least one fact and then go on and opine, conclude, wish, etc. tnx

The other lesson is not just scale but organization principles, or structure. A top-down structure yields a master/slave (terms which can be adjusted) relationship. This is far from unique to capitalism.

So, along with scale we have the problem of how we organize, our relationships, not just in terms of commerce, but in terms of culture (think of how US culture is defined, and by whom or how Chinese culture is defined…). Rarely is culture something indigenous once a society has structured itself in a hierarchical fashion. Add to that the industrialization of production and work. Is it capitalism that separates the worker from his/her work. Chaplin’s Modern Times is not about capitalism – it could be within any industrialized society.

Read Schumacher again. He presents the problem quite clearly, quite succinctly. It needn’t be a heavy dose of German systems building through dialectic materialism for it to be worthy of consideration.

Schumacher talks about intermediate and appropriate technologies, built to human scale. This is the natural scale of living not only living for now but for the yet to be born.

Derivatives is a blow job…it should be given that level of consideration…sex without sex.

I do not think that derivatives are a pathology of capitalism – I think capitalism is the pathology. Derivatives are an example of several where capitalism leads when there are no reins on it.

But this is the problem, not just who owns but what it means to produce regardless of the owner of production.

If we look at Cuba…I really am trying to provide an example we can agree on…it was off and running with industrialization, even though workers were in charge of production. Unless you’re advocating anarchy, statelessness, than we have to conclude that such “ownership” did not avoid a unsustainable industrialized (fossil based) argriculture.

Can we agree on this? It was not the form of economy it was the scale, in this case, of farming. Cuba had highly mechanized farming with large scale farms – not that different from the agribusiness model in the US.

It was collapse of oil supply to Cuba (the special period) which altered their course to sustainable farming. This is well documented and you may have seen the documentary – The Power of Community. The joy of having re-introduced subsistence farming, where community gardens and small scale organic and permaculture are integral to their food system. This is NOT socialism; nor is it capitalism. Neither provided the solution.

Marx says a great deal, much of which does not provide the crucial lessons. Right or wrong, the difference between say Marx and Berry is that one analyzes and prognosticates based on a dialectical materialism (Marx); while the other provides sound principles of life and observable discovery (Berry).

One’s method of inquiry is important. I don’t think that Marx makes clear the role of derivatives. We agree that derivatives do not describe capitalism nor are they healthy, they are an example of a pathology. Ok let’s call it the result of capitalism’s final dialectic if you will. But what have we to demonstrate that Marx had an answer to this?

Certainly no self-proclaimed Marxist/Maoist/Trotkyite/Soviet communist/socialist regime has provide an answer. The answer is not complacency…necessity will not allow that. But a return to Marx is not the answer either.

We have examples here and there of possible solutions. These are worth all the volumes and lectures of Marx/Engels Dialectecs, Manifestos and Das Kapitals collected and stacked 20 stories high.

That capitalism is virtually the only mode of production standing after having subsumed or eliminated other modes should not be confused with non-existence. That Marx and Marxists describe a situation where one sells one’s labor to another because one has little or nothing else to sell and that said labor has to be remunerated for less than the commodity sells for with the difference going to the owner of capital is not an abstraction. That relationship is a fact of our existence. We see this all day everyday until which point it becomes ‘natural’ and ‘invisible’ and so we think we have solved the problem if we can just get past industrialization or if we can just make our polities smaller. Small may be desirable but fascism can exist in small entities as well.

Marx did not abhor industrialization – he challenged who should own the factory – the factory of capitalists.

I have no argument that derivatives are bad. They are as far removed from the labor that creates true value as any financial instrument ever invented. They contribute nothing to humankind. But they ARE a product of unrestrained capitalism. It is capitalism au natural. Because ultimately, capitalists don’t care if what they produce has use value – they care about profit taking. The goal of capitalists is to make, invest, and gain a larger share of the market – it matters not whether that product is useful. It could be artificial limbs for humans but it also could be pet rocks or derivatives. The idea that finance capital will rule is notoriously Marxist – and it did happen – this is not abstraction.

However, I think you provide the perfect example of how we confound the problem by introducing a “capitalist class”. I won’t disagree that you have specific people in mind. We know about he various barrons of industry and their off-spring.

But you refer to books (you are an intelligent reader) but not to reality, to something that has flesh and blood on it’s bones.

This does not solve the problem because it offers nothing more than a preponderance of analytical hodgepodge about capitalism and the State and Capitalist Class. You may think you’ve found the root cause, but it is a symptom of which can be found throughout human history in every type of economic scheme. So, what is the problem?

I offer “SCALE” as one principle and I think it offers much more than any variant of Trotsky-ideology can ever provide. Swapping out one ill for another is what we’re left with when you rely on ideology and when the root cause it left in tact.

B99, I disagree since there is no example of sustainable industialization that exists – China, former Soviet Union, India?

The abstract notion that it is capitalism that creates the “problem” of life on this planet as it manifests itself within industrialization is hocus pocus because there is no example of such a corner of the world on a large scale.

I would say, in fact, that it is scale which is the fundamental problem (or solution), not capitalism or socialism as evils or solutions. And this is where, belittle him tho you may, Schumacher nails it. And the truth is so does Wendell Berry who is pretty much on the same page with EFS. I think it’s a quibble to say you think one is passe and the other is not because one is still writing.

But scale is a central issue and a principle that cross any and all economic “systems”. This is more a biological issue than a Marxist/Smith/Lock issue (all probably understood that much better than the dribble we hear today from so-called Capitalists and Socialists, I would refer to them as neo).

The industrialisation of everything could be found in the Soviet Union and in Cuba prior to the collapse of the Soviet Union. What Cuba did when it introduced organic farming and permaculture was a biological response NOT an ideological response to their great dilemma of oil depletion. We can and should learn from that. Soviet large scale mechanized farming, much like what we have today, existed in Cuba.

Size is important. A large mass of land and people, an empire, if you will, is scaled to an order of magnitude which cannot be sustained. We all know that. History repeatedly shows it as does nature. Nature not only abhors a void it abhors monopolies. And it is this which is at the core of the problem. It is how we scale which is critical at every level.

Remember life is our purpose, not ideology.

As to derivatives, they make a tiny number of people rich; they serve no capitalistic purpose because the purpose of capital is to make, to invest and produce. Derivatives do not do that. Our high finance is an aberrition, a pathology, a parasitic disease. Ponzi is not capitalism.

Again, I don’t care one iota about capitalism or socialism. I care about correctly identifying the underlying problem and it will always be a problem as long as we keep calling it capitalism or socialism or whatever.

The financial sector was scaled up to such an extent it imploded. That’s what happens when hypergrowth is the name of the game. And it has been (and still is in many influential circles). Our politicians say we must “grow” our way out of a recession – Obama says it to this very day. That is simply suicide for this economy – which will be better for all in the long run, but it will be tragic for many millions.