What is Anti-capitalism? To answer this begs the question - What is Capitalism? For all intents and purposes, capitalism is a system that allows an oligarchy (government by the few) or a plutocracy (government by the wealthy) to accumulate capital and thereby restrict the natural circulation of wealth through the economy. Invariably such a system allows for the diversion of wealth to non-productive purposes like decadent dissipation and conspicuous consumption or to counter-productive purposes like politics and war.



Anti-capitalism isn't Communism or Marxism -- the last communist nations on earth practice capitalism today. It isn't anarchism -- it says nothing about government or freedom. It isn't nihilism -- it's about improvement and change, not total destruction.

Anti-capitalism isn't Socialism either -- it involves the elimination of capitalized wealth not wealth redistribution. More specifically, Anti-capitalism is about eliminating the profit motive as the icon of the world economic order. It could just as well be called Anti-profitism.

Capitalism has been defined as many things. Some claim it to be "natural" economics, as if anything natural could be invented by humans. This point of view ignores the fact that the laws favor those who have wealth. Others consider capitalism to be the economics of democracy, as if we could not vote for any other economic system.

Money, considered the root of all evil, is the foundation of capitalism. But, is capitalism inherently evil? How else could we describe a system that puts phenomenal wealth in the hands of a few while a significant number of earth's inhabitants are left to freeze in the coldest element known to man -- human indifference.



Capitalism, by its' unnatural constraint on the free flow of wealth, decreases the quality of life for most, while only increasing it for the few. Consider all the aspects of life which can be regarded as contributing to the quality of life -- housing, food, education, health, the arts, and social activities. Does capitalism actually improve any of these things? Or is the reality just the opposite -- capitalism invariably decreases the quality of housing, food, education, health, the arts, and social activities?



Historical Precedents for Anti-capitalism

The ancient Spartans were anti-capitalists. They banned all forms of money, precious metals, and gemstones. Overnight, crime disappeared. The quality of life and all things in Sparta became the highest in all of Greece. Instead of focusing on the accumulation of wealth the people developed other ideals for living. Health, athletics, dance, music, social activities, artisanship, and of course, dominating other countries.

Without having to scramble for money every day, the craftsmen of Sparta focused on producing items of the highest quality. The furniture of Sparta was famous, both for its simplicity and durability. There was no ornamentation on Spartan furniture, yet the workmanship was exquisite. Joints were fitted perfectly, materials selected were flawless, all surfaces, visible or otherwise were carefully prepared and polished. Furniture from Sparta could often outlast almost any Athenian house it was placed in.

Since no-one in Sparta worked like the devil to sell shoddy, decadent consumer goods for quick cash, they found themselves awash in free time. They spent many hours a day participating in athletics, watching ahtletics, playing music and dancing. Teens were allowed one hour of privacy each evening with their lovers.

So abundant was the free time of the Spartans that they were virtually all musicians, with free communally owned instruments. Decadence and extravagance were eliminated as ideals while health and happiness became paramount. Without the icon of profit driving society today we'd approach the same ideal. Of course, history repeats itself in many ways: We are the helots of America. We work for the elite, except that our hours are longer, our taxes are higher, and instead of making essentials we waste our careers making useless consumer products for somebody else's profit or luxury items for the self-indulgence of those who don't work at all.



Architecture and Morality

Our houses and apartments are built as compromises for profit, not for perfection or quality. They stand as pale imitations of what they could be. We spend our lives living in plasterboard boxes made of cheap materials fashioned to look like little suburban mansions. Their cheapness of construction is covered up with every manner of superficial adornment -- wallpaper, paint, face brick, plaster stucco, hollow cornices, fake ionic columns, fake fireplaces, cheap noisy ventilation systems or uncomfortable, inefficient, heating systems.

We build these live-in lies in the name of profit. Those on the low end have the worst of it. Small, noisy, apartments and houses in neighborhoods made unsafe by the prevailing social misery. Roaches, drafts, flimsy appurtenances and furnishings that fall apart before the interest is paid all stand in mockery of a failed ideal for living. With each new storm or tornado these cheap excuses for human habitation fly apart or collapse, leaving families displaced or dead. Houses built in a day from low-cost non-renewable wood products are made for first sales only, ignoring the long-term benefits of building houses that last, that are fireproof, tornado proof, and beautiful by virtue of stone, steel, structure, and spaciousness instead of cheap superficial adornment. The shallow, deteriorating quality of our residential architecture seems to reflect the direction our profit-based society is headed -- to obsolescence.




If, instead of sacrificing the quality of human life for the profit fantasies of a few, we built a world of lasting quality in all things, wouldn't everyone end up rich? Buckminster Fuller once said that the world could have one billion billionaires, in terms of the quality of our lives, if we worked together. This is an achievable goal if we work for the good of everyone, instead of the good of the few.

All consumer goods are driven to converge on cheapness and imitation by the profit motive, as Karl Marx the mathematician astutely observed a century ago. Except for the occasional scientific advance that produces useful new materials, most products deteriorate in quality. The scientists who develop improvements, it should be noted, are almost always focused on achievement, not money. Many artists and musicians are likewise driven by the desire to achieve excellence much more so than money.



Poverty in the Richest Nation

When Lyndon Johnson declared a war on poverty following Kennedy's assasination, there seemed little doubt that the invincible United States could achieve this goal. This was as certain as the fact that we would win the war in Vietnam. Almost half the nation's wealth today is held by 1% of the population. Twenty five years after the war on poverty began, the richest 1% hold twice as much of the nation's wealth, but the poor are no better off. In this system, the wealth flows from the poor to the rich and the laws guarantee their right to possess it in excess of what would be proper in a humane society.

The U.S. maintains nearly 15% of its people, and 20% of its children, in a state of perpetual poverty. The middle class works longer hours than the ancient Romans or Egyptians, yet supposedly we have advanced. Where are the promised benefits of industrialization if we work harder than anyone in human history? And, unlike the ancients, our houses don't last a lifetime, hunger, poverty, and homelessness have increased, and crime is far beyond natural levels.

The Great Teacher once said, "It is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven." If you want to see a rich Christian spout heresy, ask him to explain these words.


Consider again the wealth distribution in America as compared to the natural wealth distribution that is found in nature, as manifested by every manner of food source distribution from bacteria to honeybees to birds. The natural form in which wealth, in terms of food and territory, ar distributed among natural creatures is the normal curve, or what is called the bell curve because of its' shape. The figure below shows one example of how a natural wealth curve could be implemented such that no human being falls below the poverty line. And, there is still plenty of room for people to make themselves filthy rich, if that should remain their paradigm.






Conditioning Consumers

Consider the structure of our capitalist society. People are conditioned to be consumers from the earliest. They are given a minimal education -- learning just enough Math to work for someone else, and just enough English to know what consumer items to spend their paychecks on. All of the things that are most important to human enjoyment and happiness are suppressed or minimized, while all the things they don't need are advertised heavily to give them mock importance.

What things do people naturally enjoy the most? In roughly this order they enjoy conversation, reading, romance, exercise, sex, dancing, enjoying music, watching athletics, playing music, creating arts and crafts, cooking, travelling on foot, experiencing nature, and numerous other activities that don't necessarily cost anything at all.

What do people spend most of their time and money on? Movies, consumer goods, cars, clothes, vacations, alcohol, dining out, junk food, drugs, gambling, professional entertainment, and a host of other activities that merely distract them from more beneficial and healthier aspirations. Consumer pleasures amount to nothing more than daily rewards for manifest career disappointment, and the habits of social and personal stagnation are inherited by each succeeding generation.

Consumerism does not represent the highest ideals of mankind, but the lowest common denomator of man's most base desires and frustrations. The economics of consumer-based corporations are unbalanced equations that ignore the most vital aspects of both mathematics and human existence. The gun industry pours weapons into our cities in the name of profit and freedom while the dead and wounded are carried out at the taxpayers expense. Where is the damage to people accounted for in the gun industry's economic equations? The tobacco industry likewise kills millions but denies their product is responsible and spends a fortune feigning innocence and garnering political influence to protect them from their victims. The alcohol industry kills as many or more and does untold damage to families, but none of their balance sheets mention or account for the cost their products do to society. If the true costs of the products sold to society are properly accounted for, many of them would be unprofitable to manufacture. It is only deceit and iresponsibility that keeps many of them in the markets.


Economy Without Capital

Can a barter economy work, that is, one that ran on pure credit? Proudhon's Bank of the People was a farsighted experiment that would have demonstrated the superiority of a barter economy. The idea was to assemble working people of diverse skills such that anything anyone needed could be provided by someone else. Credits would be defined for the value of work or goods, whether carpentry, milk, health care, tailored goods, or whatever. Defining the values would not be diffficult, after all, we do this with dollars already, except that instead of receiving flat rates they would receive true value. In Proudhon's Bank there would be no money, no interest or profits, and no absentee owners of the same -- it would simply facilitate the flow of goods in a near frictionless manner.


In such a system taxes could not be collected in terms of money, but only in terms of credit dollars towards human labor. Nor could interest be collected, since this also represents profit. The capitalisation of wealth, which holds human labor in suspension and diverts it to the whims of a few, rather than the needs of the many, would not be facilitated. Napoleon, who had considerable capitalized wealth, had Proudhon imprisoned for a trumped-up charge of slander just prior to the opening of the Bank -- and the grand experiment collapsed before it began.

Those who, by fate or artifice, end up in key positions, squander the resources of the planet in their pursuit of personal, political, or nationalistic fantasies while the greater mass of men lead lives of perpetual irrelevance. Is this an admirable way for the human race to conduct its business?


The tensions of life today lead to historical record high rates of divorce, suicide, and crime. The frustration of the people turns to the only outlets they are legally permitted -- voting and religion, but to no avail. Their collective anger is channeled for political gain by candidates with no better ideas than the symptomatic band-aids of bigger prisons, more police, and accelerated use of the death penalty. The sad reality of the American legal system today is that it consists primarily of rich white people putting poor black people in prison. There is no hope if there is no attempt to solve the root cause of the problem.



Production Before Profit
Thorstein Veblen, author of Absentee Ownership, studied the American and European economies in detail. He noted that, wittingly or unwittingly, the goal of maximizing profit leads companies to limit production through various means including managing supply and demand. He referred to these manipulations as economic sabotage, since they required reducing both production of goods and employment. It is worth noting here that contrary to modern economic theory, the demand for essential goods and services is universal -- everyone needs a house, medical care, food, etc. The classic law of supply and demand only holds true for manipulated prices beyond the means of most people, and in an economy where people are kept unemployed.


The figure below illustrates the concept generically for any company that produces goods that are affected by supply and demand, and economies of scale. In theory, a company could boost production to the maximum by allowing profits to approach zero. This necessitates increasing employment and increasing sales by improving quality.





Obviously, if every company that manufactured essential goods (i.e. food, housing, health care, etc) increased production to either the maximum or the limit of consumer need, the benefits would be synergistic and possibility of eliminating poverty comes into focus. Without poverty, crime drops to natural levels, whatever those may be. Note that since the limits of consumer need would likely occur before production hit a maximum, there would still be profits, but they would exist in terms of the salaries paid and the goods produced for the people. The most enterprising managers, those who maximized production of high quality goods, would receive the highest salaries.






Profitless Capitalism
Most companies use resources and human labor to generate profits for absentee owners, whether corporations, sole proprietors, or stockholders. The figure below illustrates the flow of wealth. The company will maintain the highest prices for consumer goods that the market will bear, while simultaneously paying the lowest wages that the workers will tolerate. The company employees receive a fraction of what their true labor is worth while the quality of the overpriced goods is kept at a minimum. The owners, non-working profiteers, will sacrifice even human health and the environment in their greed for excessive profits. In general, owners who do not actively participate in the operations perform no function other than parasitism and the existence of such a practice highlights a fundamental flaw of capitalism -- corporate non-entities are guaranteed the right to profit while human beings do not even have a guaranteed right to subsistence.




The pie charts below show the effect of eliminating profits from the average Housing sole proprietorship (see these business statistics for the data on this and other industries). Maximum production requires foregoing profits and, therefore, the elimination of payments to any parties who are not working. Only salaries and expenses can be paid out. In a such a profitless company there is no drain on resources, as illustrated in the figure below, and all resources can be efficiently devoted to increasing production and improving quality.




The profitless company is a self-owned entity in which the employees are the stewards. The company becomes an engine for generating essential goods and services and increasing employment. In a profitless system all prices drop to their natural levels and all workers are paid the true value of their labor.

The synergy of profitless capitalism is illustrated in the figure below. When a complete range of companies goes profitless and single-source to each other, all of their costs begin dropping. The result is a synergy that could double or quadruple the GDP. The continuous construction of homes and other goods at cost would accelerate the standard of living and provide continuous employment. The reduced consumer costs would make everyone wealthy in the sense that they could live comfortably. Business taxes would also transfer to income taxes from increased employment, and so would not be negatively affected. By putting production before profit on a national scale we would effectively be prioritizing poverty, which is the only cause worth pursuing in the modern world, and implicitly includes the control of all diseases, social and otherwise.


In profitless capitalism only those who work are paid although everyone would be guaranteed subsistence. The entire nation would ratchet itself up to a high standard of living without the drain on the economy produced by profiteering. The rich could keep what they have, but they would no longer be paid for doing nothing. Without interest paid on loans or capitalized funds being held in suspension, all available credit dollars would end up financing growth and production and thereby keep employment universal.





The beauty of profitless capitalism is that it puts all the people to work directly for their own benefit. Instead of the fruits of their labors being drained off as profits and diverted to useless enterprise, their efforts are immediately and directly used for improving the quality of life. The people would be actively solving all of their most pressing problems instead of sitting in stagnation. All of this from a simple shift of paradigm.






SUMMARY
Profit is the icon of the modern economic world, leaving the quality of life a casualty of mindless competition. It's time for the US, as de facto leader of the modern world, to consider abandoning capitalism and taking the first step towards a future where the entire human race, not just the privileged minority, could be wealthy enough to solve our more important problems. Perhaps until all diseases, social and otherwise, are cured, this should remain a non-profit world. Since most of us are bonded into non-profit employment anyway, the only differences we'd notice would be of the profound kind.

fuck that shit read this:

"The World Trade Organziation meeting in Seattle, Nov/Dec 1999, surprised almost everyone with the level of violence and vandalism that was manifest. Although there were many indignant and militant radicals at the demonstrations, the lawlessness was largely the doing of self-styled anarchists, often recognizable by all black clothing and black face masks, not to mention actual black flags. This "Black Block" contingent was also conspicuous at the political conventions in 2000. This seems to be the largest reactiviation of self-consciously anarchist action since the 60's and is perhaps understandable given the level of incoherence, irrationality, and desperation in recent leftist thought. Nor is it surprising that the ignorance and nihilism promoted by public eduction would produce the crop of clueless idiots who seem to be involved in this movement. The folly of such people is painful, when nothing is more brightly written on the pages of history than the fact that, when they actually get the kind of Revolution that they want, anarchists are subsequently the first people to be massacred by the more realistic militants, e.g. Lenin.

There are, indeed, libertarian anarchists, e.g. Murray Rothbard. Few libertarians have much love for the World Trade Organization, and there is nothing in principle to prevent such people from using violence, even Revolutionary violence (as in, indeed, the American Revolution). But an animus for capitalism, business, and "corporations" in general, trashing and looting small businesses, and rejection of free trade at all, not just the "regulated" trade of the WTO, distinguishes the leftist bent of the conspicuous anarchists, as with their opportunistic allies in the following categories.

Despite the painful level of folly among the anti-capitalist anarchists, they can invoke apparently significant intellectual support. Seminal linguistics pioneer Noam Chomsky, a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, has for years spent much of his energy on a lunatic fringe political crusade against capitalism and the United States. Chomsky considers himself an "anarcho-socialist," regards people like Lenin as "right wing," and supports free speech to the extent of travelling to France, where it is illegal to deny the existence of the Holocaust, to defend the questionable people who were doing just that. Chomsky, to be sure, should be particuarly sensitive about such an issue, since he was one of the people who at the time indignantly denied that a holocaust was going on in Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge. Nevertheless, Chomsky's views are otherwise in general little "...in comparison to conditions imposed by U.S. tyranny and violence, East Europe under Russian rule was practically a paradise."
Noam Chomsky

more than a depressingly familiar repeat, root and branch, of Soviet propaganda points. Thus, the United States is wealthy and successful only because it "exploits" other countries and its own poor. In this the United States is merely the logically and causal successor of Nazi Germany, whence it derived an irrational and vicious hatred of the Soviet Union. Chomsky, consequently, is one of the people who tend to regard the repressive totalitarian regime of the Soviet Union, or other Communist countries, as merely the excusable response to American opposition. Their hearts were in the right place, and if they did bad things, it is our fault -- and they certainly didn't have corporations. Chomsky can only honor any such regime that refused to participate in the Western economic system, with the United States at its rotten core, and grieve its passing. Indeed, he thinks that U.S. policy is to destroy even economically insigificant countries (using unspeakable levels of torture and terror, his view of the U.S. role in El Salvador and Nicaragua) just so that the possibility of their setting an alternative "good example" is erased. Unfortunately, when such countries, like the Soviet Union itself, Vietnam, and Cuba, actually do break free of American control and the Western economic system, it is nevertheless still our fault that they do not subsequently prosper economically. How they can continue to fail although free is mysterious, although perhaps, if Chomsky is an anarchist, he assumes that they maintain a repressive state apparatus only to protect themselves from us, and that otherwise the state would "wither away" in true Marxist fashion, allowing a prosperity that the state as such precludes.

Curiously, Chomsky even explicitly endorses greater state power in the United States. He says "[R]ight now I'd like to strengthen the federal government. The reason is...in this world there happen to be huge corporations of private power which are as close to tyranny and as close to totalitarian as anything humans have devised...[s]o you end up supporting centralized state power" [Class Warfare, 1996, pp.122-123, boldface added]. The real sin of corporations, of course, is simply that they are private. If they were truly tyrannical and totalitarian, they would be able to arrest people, imprison them, and execute them. They cannot do that, however, unless they get governments to do it for them. But Chomsky wants to strengthen the government. Some anarchist. Indeed, this is the basic absurdity of anarchism: In the absence of government, people will be entirely free to form organizations for their own purposes, whether legitimate or wrongful. To stop the vicious organizations, the innocent ones would need to achieve enough power to defeat and contain them -- they would, in short, become governments. Since there will therefore always be governments, and since Chomsky doesn't like private property, wages and prices, or private corporations, only a totalitarian level of socialist government, i.e. a communist government, will be sufficient for his purposes.

However much Chomsky's worldview seems like a Twilight Zone of counterfactuals and dishonest, unfalsifiable ideology, his influence is nevertheless great in a generation whose own political and economic education is a mush of incoherent welfare statism -- the true fascism whose affinities are, indeed, more with Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union itself than with laissez-faire capitalism or American Constitutional government. But since Chomsky presumably doesn't like any of those things, there is literally no precedent for the kind of regime he would prefer and no evidence for the practicality, or even coherence, of whatever economic and political system he envisions. The idea of giving power to anyone of the sort is terrifying. When I find self-identified anarchists (including one of my own students) complaining that it is an outrage that conservatives are able to be heard on talk radio, I have no doubt that the excuses for Communist regimes that someone like Chomsky offers can very easily become excuses for their own violent repression of dissent should they ever have the chance to do so. As in the Soviet Union itself, free speech and such can be allowed after class enemies are eliminated and the state does wither away. Thus, until the whole world is assimilated to their system, they don't have to apologize for any acts of violence or oppression. By resisting, we are to blame.

In the 1993 movie Bram Stoker's Dracula [Columbia, American Zoetrope/Osiris], there is a scene where Count Dracula, confronted with his pursuers, turns into a figure made of rats, who then scatter and run in all directions. This is rather like what has happened to Communism since the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991. Few in the West today would identify themselves publically or self-consciously as Communists (though some do, like the recent poet laureate of New Jersey, Amiri Baraka, who sees no hope for the United States outside a "Marxist-Leninist" political party), but a large body of leftists and even advocates of "liberal" opinion, when taken together, can more or less be reassembled into Soviet attitudes and policies. As Talleyrand said of the Bourbons, they have learned nothing and fogotten nothing. For instance, a Hobbesian absolutist statism can be found in the popular historian Garry Wills (cf. A Necessary Evil), who denies that government can be limited by laws, since it makes the laws, and so cannot really be limited or divided at all. This rejects, consequently, all the principles of the rule of law (which is now only invoked by the Left to require blind obedience to the government), separation of powers, checks and balances, enumerated powers, and all the other devices conceived for the limitation of government. Wills, in short, doesn't believe in and doesn't like any of the basic or original principles of Liberal, Constitutional, or traditional American government. What we get instead is an authoritarianism which is exactly what the Left wants for its other assaults on freedom. These assaults in general are what can be assembled as the rats to reconstitute the whole of Communism, even when we overlook the explicit Marxists who can be found thick on the ground at every American university. Thus, besides socialist economic policies that dismiss property rights, and that endorse price fixing for wages, medicine, gasoline, and whatever else seems unsatisfactory at the moment, we also find a growing totalitarian dimension in attacks on personal rights and voluntary association. A crude joke at work is now a "civil rights" offense (unless it is done by someone on "our side," like Bill Clinton). Any activity whatsoever, indeed, with any dimension that can be construed as economic, like advertising for a roommate, is now subject to high standards of anti-discrimination and political correctness. All of this not only violates the Fifth Amendment prohibition against the taking of private property for public use without just compensation but really breaks the Thirteenth Amendment prohibition of "involuntary servitude." When we then find fashionable theories denying that free speech should be allowed, or that it even means anything (cf. Stanley Fish -- with practical manifestations in common university "speech codes," as well as hostility, obstructionism, and tolerated violence towards non-leftist speakers at American universities), the direction in which the whole project is headed should be clear. Communism did not die; its unrepentant followers and sympathetizers simply executed a tactical dispersal. Since Communist strategy was always one of deception, misdirection, dissimulation, and dishonesty, there is nothing out of character about all this.

More overt Communism can be found in a recent book that has become beloved of the Left. This is Empire by Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri [Harvard Unversity Press, 2000]. Part of what is going on here is evident in who Antonio Negri is. Formerly a political science professor at Padua, Negri is presently under house arrest in Italy because of evidence of his connection, even participation, in the infamous terrorist campaign of the "Red Brigades," including the kidnapping and murder of former Prime Minister Aldo Moro in 1978. That Negri is not in prison may be due to the continuing influence of the (former) Communist Party in Italian politics. Nor are the Red Brigades ancient history. On March 19, 2002, Marco Biagi, an economics professor adivising current Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi on the reform of Italian labor law, was gunned down outside his home in Bologna. A group identifying itself as the Red Brigades claimed credit for this, as part of the post September 11 fight against "imperialism." Michael Hardt is a literature professor at Duke University, thereby nicely fitting the profile of an English Department Marxist, at a school infamous for a reign of deconstuctionist political correctness. What Negri and Hardt want is a fantasyland version of Marxism in which the Soviet Union was "in fact...a society crisscrossed by extremely strong instances of creativity and freedom." Perhaps this is why no art of note, except for novelists who were then suppressed, was produced after the 1920's in the Soviet Union, and nothing significant ever invented outside of the Soviet military sector (of which, of course, the space program, which never did get to the Moon, was a part). The "Empire" of the book's title is thus the Leninist image of capitalism as imperialism -- a point where Chomsky, of course, is unlikely to disagree. This all gives us an extremely fine example of intellectuals as fools, self-blinded to the most conspicuous events of recent history, vicious fools for whom terrorism may be the most promising tool for bringing about the revolution.

Environmentalism can be thought of as a broad based and popular movement, but its activist and militant wing goes far beyond what most people would think of as protecting the environment. Vandals and terrorists who break equipment on isolated ranches, who "spike" trees so that lumber mill saws (and saw mill workers) will be destroyed, and who burn down houses in developments of which they disapprove, may seem to be a mere lunatic fringe, but all organized environmentalism shares many views and strategies with the rest of the Left, with the distinguishing feature that, while traditional Communism believed in expanding production and ever greater wealth for all, many or even most real environmentalists, fringe or not, do not believe in economic growth ("consumerism") and would just as soon have many fewer humans living in virtuous poverty. Few will say in public, of course, "Most of you should go and die," but slow growth policies, to preserve the "quality of life," imply that anyone shut out by the lack of construction or economic growth should simply go elsewhere. When a California law professor goes to Cuba and finds "ecotopia," precisely because of the poverty into which Communism has plunged the country, we have a very curious reversal on the failures of Communism and a striking point of alliance between environmentalists and unreconstructed Communists. When Castro is the darling, not just of crypto-Communists, but of environmentalists, one may well suspect that the Greens are truly "watermelons" -- green on the outside and red on the inside. The popularity of the Green political movement with former socialists, and even Mikhail Gorbachev, may reveal that the stated purposes of socialism, like greater wealth, were never the most important things. Instead, it was power and control that mattered, regardless of either its positive or negative effects on economics.

The purely political dimension of the Green movement is especially clear in the nomination by the American Green Party, two times in a row, of "consumer advocate" Ralph Nader. Nader has relatively little interest in environmentalism, is not a member of the Party, and, at least in 1996, admitted that he hadn't even read the Green Party platform. But the Greens know that Nader's anti-corporate and anti-business views are something they are comfortable with and that there is nothing incongruous with him representing their movement. Indeed.

The poverty of ecotopia and an anti-capitalist assault on all the conditions of modern life, which will be productive of general poverty, will all be happily conformable to the beliefs of those who actually want to preserve or return humans to pre-modern ways of life. Thus, an anthropologist at Hunter College and the City University of New York, Marc Edelman, has written a book, Peasants Against Globalization [Stanford University Press, 1999], in which the indictment of capitalism, free trade, and "globalization" is pitched in terms that traditional peasants tend to be forced off the land, which destroys their way of life and simply makes them underpaid urban workers. This is a far cry from Marx's remark about the "idiocy of rural life," let alone the hatred that Lenin and Stalin had for peasants and their intention to destroy them as a class, which they did. Mao, who did not have enough of an urban proletariat to make a revolution (the orthodox Marxist requirement), used the peasants to make the Chinese revolution, but then he put the peasants on communes, just like Stalin, and denied them what peasants had always actually wanted, a bit of land of their own. What Edelman seems to want to less arcane: tariffs, price supports, commodity cartels, and all the other (neo-Mercantalist) devices of protectionism. Peasants in Central America are leaving the land because the international prices of coffee and corn are falling. This kind of thing has been rendering much agricultural labor superfluous for a long time. Thus, in the United States in 1840, 68.6% of the work force was in agriculture. By 1880, this was below 50%; by 1950 it was only 11.6%; by 1980 2.2%; and by 1990 1.6%. Edelman wants to "protect" traditional rural life by preventing the prices of food and other agricultural products from falling. This implies the rather paradoxical idea (although long popular with American farmers) that expensive food is a good thing. Since Edelman worries about possible famine in Central America, it is especially curious that his policy prescriptions would make food more costly. He does seem to realize that displaced farmers could find other kinds of employment, but then he complains that high interest rates prevent the kinds of loans that could fund small business creation. What Edelman doesn't seem to know is that in the 19th century the Chinese in Malaya, Indians in East Africa, and even the Jews in America did not start businesses with loans from colonial authorities or other ethnic groups that usually were unsympathetic or actively hostile to them. They worked at some of the most thankless labor available, rubber plantations for the Chinese, the Kenya railroad for the Indians, and Lower East Side sweatshops for the Jews, but nevertheless they managed to accumulate capital and rise in business, in all these three cases to dominate the economies in the areas where they found themselves. For this to work in Central America, where there is little of the entrepreneurial culture manifest in the immigrant Chinese, Indians, or Jews, Edelman (and the countries of the area) must allow foreign capital and foreign business -- perhaps even Chinese, Indians, and Jews. But Edelman can countenance no such thing. Foreign capital and business will exploit the locals and refuse to pay a "living wage." Thus we come full circle: Marx was right, capital exploits labor, and we must use all the force of the state, not just to drive up commodity prices, but to drive up the cost of labor also. If what Edelman wants is to preserve pre-modern poverty, this will certainly do it. But what Edelman wants isn't even coherent -- expensive food to prevent famine and high labor costs to prevent unemployment. What he wants, in short, are all the devices of a command economy, with the illusion (or ignorance) that these things have not been dismal failures.

Although the assault on freedom and on the proven institutions of the free market and liberal democracy was given a bad moment by the events of 1989-1991, the pace and the confidence of the Left is picking up again. Since the intellectual and moral case for collectivism, command economics, and coercive, authoritarian politics is still bankrupt, the "Post-Modernist" adaptation of irrationality and relativism has proven useful. Ad hominem arguments were always the bread and butter of the Left anyway. All a Marxist ever had to do was identify someone as a class enemy, and then arguments were unnecessary -- just kill 'em. Now it is a matter of "race, class, and gender" enemies -- the only thing good about the "dead white males" (Plato, Milton, Jefferson, etc.) was, indeed, the first attribute.

The reason for the renewal of the Left through all these movements, anarchist, Communist, and Green, may be the muddled nature of the victory of freedom in 1991. Few realized that the socialist approaches of the New Deal and of earlier Progressivism were discredited along with Lenin and Stalin. Even Chomsky says, "New Deal liberalism [sic]...[and] its achievements, which are the result of a lot of popular struggle, are worth defending and expanding" [The Common Good, 1998, p.5]. But these "achievements" were foreign growths in free institutions; and, like a cancer that has metastasized, the removal of the tumor does not mean the end of the disease. The cancer comes back. Thus, to the Democratic Party, the Press, and the "chattering" university and literary elites, something like nationalized medicine is still a wonderful, progressive idea; and they can hardly wait to burden the already foundering systems of Social Security and Medicare with further expenses, control, and obligations. Having refused to learn better, they are ironically heartened by their own failures: That the War on Poverty failed, is now the reason to try it all over again. That "progressive" education (with teachers unions and a federal Department of Education) has resulted in ignorant and illiterate students, is now the reason to spend even more money on the same approaches (and self-interested institutions). One hardly knows, indeed, whether to laugh or cry."

http://www.friesian.com/rand.htm

Before I disseminate this, what is your view smut? I'm assuming pro-capitalist in nature; to what extreme? Do you support the Nikey work camps overseas where people are paid pennies a day? Do you support work moving overseas because labor is cheaper? Do you view freedom as America being the administrative capitol of the world and the increased division of poor and rich?

Are you the Adventure Capitalist?

I read most of the above. I highly recommend it to cure insomnia.

Do you support the Nikey work camps overseas where people are paid pennies a day?
How much were they making before (Nikey) came along?

Here's some links to illustrate my point that cheap labor is no excuse for a lack of ethics. Even though the people may have made the same or no money before the company moved in, it doesn't mean they can't keep humane standards and pay a decent wage for the country they are in. Even a decent wage in a poor country is a savings.

Confessions Of A Sweatshop Inspector
What is a Sweatshop?
Piece Work
sweatshop - Wikipedia

Ok, Later I will check them out. I'm just not in the mental state right now for it. Long day, but made it through the presentation to the decatant VPs.
Hang tough and keep up the fight.
Speaking of a fight. Have you seen how Kyoto has made an attempt to rile me on here. Man this guy is an immature joke. Unable to communicate on any level, above the most base. He would never make it in an intellectual sparing match.

While you and I may not agree, at times, at least you have a measure of intellect that makes conversation interesting.

I can never figure out if Kyoto's fits are drug induced or a lack their of. The thought never crossed my mind that he might be a mental invalid; incapable of communicating on any other level.