Beyond Capitalism?

It is a common assumption in American ecopolitical discourse, it seems, that those who claim to be either critical of, or indeed steadfastly against capitalism are therefore, by apparent technicality, promoting socialism, anarchism, or some other non-capitalist ism.  I seek to destroy that concept in this short essay.

Capitalism is not just an economic system, nor a socially constructed dogma, or an evil system created by greedy men bent on hoarding the Earth's sources of capital accumulation.  It is far more powerful than that, and I use that term power in the Foucauldian sense.  That is, power is a product of knowledge, just as surplus profit (capital) is a product of the capitalist mode of production.  Jason W. Moore (1) tells us capitalism is a system for organizing all of nature; it is a world-ecological paradigm unto itself.  Power is organized knowledge.  Capitalism informs nearly every decision the modern urban (and to a large extent exurban, suburban and rural) human makes every day, from the decision of whether or not to buy the local eggs or the cheap eggs, to whether or not a person should pursue their dream of higher education.  Much of it is conscious and arguably most of it is a mix of subconscious and completely unintentional, with no rectifying in sight.

Professors Richard Lewontin and Richard Levins (2) remind us that the human species is "obviously not in equilibrium with its environment.  We are a young species, a scant 5,000 generations out from the savannas where we took shape, some 500 generations into agriculture and a mere twenty generations or so afflicted by capitalism."  One does not have to have a PhD in biology, ecology, bioethics, or environmental science to say that most of the degradation visited by humanity upon the Earth has in fact happened during that span of time that saw twenty generations of agriculture.  Karl Marx was already deep into this realization toward the end of his life.  The point here is that capitalism, as a world-system, or to stay with Moore's perspective, a world-ecology, is so vastly much more than the economic arrangement that "capitalists" have worked out among themselves.  It is scarcely possible to make the choice to be anything but capitalist in the post-modern world.  Even individual nation-states that have resisted capitalism have themselves either had to become willingly dominated by it as a world-ecology or forced to live in a self-imposed exile from the global market, like a North Korea.  Capitalism organizes knowledge, because it actually is the system that decides by way of its dominant knowledge framework, for better or for worse, what research projects get funded, what university programs get cut or extended, how many homes get built, how many schools get closed, how much to pay people who clean bathrooms AND the people who's job it is to profit off of the low hourly wage they get, and on and on the list goes.

All one has to do is attempt to think of one thing in your daily life that is not directly or indirectly related to the system of capitalism.  I wish you luck.  But that's not it.  There's more to this story.  If we are to move forward with this logic, namely capitalism as more then an economic system for the delivery of commodities; capitalism as world-ecology, we can then state that some alternative massive meta-system is probably not going to be any better.  Even if socialism or anarchism were better, the chance of shutting down the omnipotence of the capitalist world-ecology at the humanity level is about as likely as engaging in an ethical conversation with the director of labor relations for Tommy Hillfiger.  What is much more logical, and indeed practical, is to engage in a humanity-level re-examination of the underlying assumptions we have as animals on this planet; re-examining the binary understanding of the human-nature nexus that has been force-fed to us by the captains of industry; re-examining how knowledge is organized to suit the system's needs over those of humanity and the Earth system we all depend upon.

What is being argued here is that capitalism has been, for the bulk of world-history since the long sixteenth century (roughly late 1590s-1700) the dominant knowledge framework of the increasingly urban human.  Taking it down is not an option.  Reforming it is not an option either, in my opinion;  not enough, at least, to adequately deal with the global problematics of humanity.  Therefore, socialism, anarchism, or whatever other ism one may want to suggest, I argue is of no consequence.  Beyond capitalism?  I'm not sure we can get there until humanity is on board.

(1) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qr799S-caHs&noredirect=1 
(2) Lewontin, Richard and Richard Levins. Biology Under the Influence: Dialectical Essays on Ecology, Agriculture, and Health. (New York: MRP: 2007), 162

Some Thoughts on Materialism

In the past month I have engaged the work of Karl Marx at a deeper level than ever before, reading most of Capital, Volume 3 and big pieces of Volume 1 again, as well as his doctoral dissertation, his early Economic Manuscripts, the German Ideology, and several other essays that really brought to light for me both my disagreements with Marx, as well as the areas of the Marxian framework that I feel are virtually undeniably accurate, such as the fetishism of commodities, the alienation and exploitation of the worker within the capitalist mode of production, and the constant reification of the capitalist system by way of its inherent cycles of crisis; this last bit can even be pointed to as a lifting off point for postmodern analysis of social-cultural phenomena.

While it is primarily Marx's analysis of the capitalist mode of production and its obvious affect upon the ordering of human society, perhaps more now than ever before, that I utilize his theoretical framework for, it is his early interest in natural materialism that has really sparked further readings. Marx takes as a basic truth of humanity, or the extant universe in general, that humans cannot create matter, but merely shape it.  This may sound like an overly simplistic, and undoubtedly obvious sentiment, but if we dig a little deeper into what that means, entire new levels of analysis develop.

Marx was particularly influenced by the natural materialism of the Greek philosopher and physiologist Epicurus.  Most of what Marx knew, and what we today know of Epicurus is from the very few letters that were uncovered and the unfolding philosophical school of thought derived from them, Epicureanism.  His most important pieces of knowledge, and what Marx took through all his work, is that the universe is infinite and eternal, that nothing can dissolve into nothing, nor be born of nothing, and that all events in the extant universe are based on the interactions and motions of atoms moving through empty space.  The debate between Epicurus and Democritus about whether or not atoms moved in only one direction in space, straight down, or in a myriad directions based more on chaos than anything else, was what Marx actually wrote his dissertation on.  He agreed with Epicurus that if atoms only moved down, never touching one another, no matter could in fact be formed.  Sure, basic stuff today, but this was ancient Greece, long before electron microscopes and the like.

The point here is this.  All that is, is based on matter interacting with matter.  There is no non-matter.  What used to be referred to the in early periods of physiology as "the void" we now know, thanks to post-Neutonian theoretical physics, as dark matter and dark energy, which together makes up 84% of the known universe.  I am a materialist, but only to the extent that I accept this basic foundational assumption that matter is the basis of what we like think of as reality.  Only after accepting that can I begin to address the ecopolitical reality that I, as a theorist, am attuned to.

But this admonition that I am indeed a materialist is not enough.  As long as materialism is a school of thought, there are those who think of materialism as only that early mechanistic understanding of scientific materialism that we see in the work of the liberal individualist philosophers, classical and neoliberal economists, and physicalists in general.  That is, the simplistic linear logic of A causes B and C is a reaction to B, and so on.  This mechanistic materialism was just the early throws of humanity's understanding of the concept of matter and humanity's interaction with it.  We now know it is infinitely deeper than that, and it is often some of our earliest philosophers who are educating us on such subjects.

What is sometimes codified as postmodern materialism tends to challenge this basic idea that if one is a materialist, he or she must also be determinist and absolutist.  This certainly stems from the mechanistic period, which frankly extended to just a few decades ago and still persists today, as I have already mentioned.  Just because I believe that all of what we assume is originated in matter; that all will eventually return to being nothing but matter; that matter is in fact the basis of all reality, does not mean that I must also believe that those interactions are predictable, inevitable, or even identifiable.

I will venture to say that consciousness itself is a product of the interactions of matters.  Human matter interacting with nonhuman matter.  Sentient matter interacting with its negation.  Atomic matter interacting with subatomic matter.  Reality interacting with its own negation, if you will.  We know that the brain is a big mess of neuro-regulatory process points, but we still don't really know why it does what it does, nor why we have such things as dream states, sleep, and imagination.  Are all those things not also matter?

Here is my main point:  If matter is the basis of all physicality, and physicality is the basis of all non-physicality, i.e. thinking, imagination, emotion, etc., is not the negation of matter an impossibility?  In other words, conceptual frameworks like spirituality, imagination, and thought itself, all arise with the use of our brain and its processing of physical stimuli into emotional and sensory response.  If we negate matter, we negate reality, and if we negate reality, we are negating our existence.  If we negate our existence, as some have, we enter a new realm of anti-consciousness that is not likely to provide much in the way of humanistic enlightenment or understanding.  Therefore, we again return to matter.  In the framework I have just eluded to, matter is clearly not mechanistic, nor predictable, nor even identifiable.  Furthermore, even mainstream physics tells us that matter is energy, so the computer screen I am looking at right now, is both a physical material entity and a vast array of energetic particles dancing in chaotic patterns, forming 1's and the 0's.  Or are they?

I am suggesting that by embracing the idea that we are made of matter and that we interact, all of the time, with matter, we may better understand the human condition, but that we do not need to wall ourselves off into some naive mechanistic view of materialist science in understanding humanity.  Thought is ultimately a production of human-material interaction.  Perhaps if we close the divide between the tangible and the intangible, by recognizing their commingling with matter, we may eventually learn to see in multiple dimensions; to exist in frameworks of knowledge that do not depend upon vulgar causal mechanisms.  And maybe, just maybe, through that realization, the ignorant systemic problems we have developed, like that of capitalism, will cease to be of use.

It's Capitalism, Stupid.

IT'S CAPITALISM, STUPID.

Christopher Robin Cox

     During Bill Clinton's Presidential campaign against George H.W. Bush in 1992, he spoke the now infamous words “It's the economy, stupid,” to a gaggle of media all desperate for a new buzz phrase. I even caught myself using it every so often, during some dope-induced debate with other twenty-somethings who, like me, didn't know jack about socioeconomics in the United States. Eighteen years later, it has become clear to me how misleading, and maybe even propagandist, that statement was. But the truth would have made a lot of cherished and charismatic people look buffoonish.
     It is not, nor has it ever been, the economy that leads us to wars of occupation in the Middle East. It is not the economy that makes our government support dictators around the world, even when there are internationally recognized citizen-led movements in opposition to those leaders. It was not the economy that made our CIA go into Central America and wreck havoc that still rages today. It is not the economy that gives us cause to instigate coup d'etats against democratically elected leaders like Chavez in Venezuela, Morales in Bolivia, and Correra in Ecuador. It is not the economy that causes us to make budget cuts to the social programs that offer a basic standard of living to the least among us. It was, and has always been, capitalism at the root of these disastrous decisions.
     By definition, the economy is nothing more than the overall collection of inter-related economic production and consumption activities which aid in determining how resources are allocated in a given geographical location. Capitalism is the engine of our economy, and like the proverbial gas-guzzling engine of an oversized American car, the brand of capitalism we are using today is antiquated at best. At worst, it's inhumane and criminal.
     An economic system based primarily on competition as the main determining factor in the distribution of wealth, posses inherent savage inequalities. The artists, writers, thinkers, and all others who care first about their craft, are essentially left in the position of hoping to be in the small minority who “make it”. Along with the craftsman and thinkers, those who have physical or psychological conditions that limit their competitive participation are left behind as well, for they can not possibly turn a profit. Of course, the vicious bulls of capitalism will surely charge on. And they will say, regardless of physical or psychological condition, that every person is free to pursue their heart's content in America.
     Imagine for a moment what would happen if there were to be an open-ended public debate in this country about the real-life characteristics of capitalism, aired freely to all Americans, with participants from all around the world invited. That debate, if done objectively, would lead to a revolutionary change in the way Americans view themselves and their role in humanity. It would also separate out those who are on the side of pure, unfettered competition as the best method of achieving the highest good for the most people, versus those who are on the side of first providing for the least among us; a distinction that ought to be made in a country that posses the largest separation between rich and poor in the industrialized world.

Capitalism, along with its inherent misconceptions, is the most counter-revolutionary and conservative force in America. In the words of Andy Grove, ex-CEO of Intel, “The goal of the new capitalism is to shoot the wounded.” The American people are lying upon the ground in anguish, and it is the boot heel of capitalism that is keeping them there. Contrary to popular belief, it is not the best system that has been tried. It is the system that is most preferred among the world's most corrupt and powerful elite.
     Hitler was a capitalist. He called it "National Socialism.” In Nazi Germany, the means of production was solely owned by private corporations and individuals, who ultimately had to answer to the Nazi Party. This is not an assertion that the American government resembles the Nazi Party of World War II Germany; it is one that points out the simple truth that the engine driving the American economy is exactly the same as that which drove the economy of Nazi Germany.

     To Mr. Clinton I say, it's capitalism, stupid. What we need in America is a lot less of Bill Clinton's entertaining, but misguided concepts, and a lot more debate about the soul of America, and what we stand for as a people. The engine of our economy needs to be methodically dismantled, piece by piece, so that it can be rebuilt by the people.

Evidence of the Fall of the American Empire, Finally!

Yes, finally. It's about time that Americans begin to witness what has been happening right under their noses for the past 8 years or so. That is, the obvious falling apart of what was once the American empire. Arguably, it should have never existed in the first place, because if we were a country that actually learned from its historical mishaps, we would not even seek to become an empire in the first place. Alas, there are always a bunch of moneyed buffoons like Project for the New American Century and other adherents to silly philosophies like "free market" capitalism and global hegemony. In our case, those fascistic loons became the controllers of government, bolstered by the multinational corporations and mega-churches - which we might as well call propaganda machines - that benefited financially from the new economics of the American right.

We now have the largest separation of the rich and poor we have ever seen anywhere in the industrialized world, for sure, and possibly in the entire world. The two largest mortgage banks in the world just had to be taken over by the government. And that's a big one, because the new Republicans are absolutely allergic to any kind of regulation or public ownership of anything at all. The reality is that they have now silently admitted failure by allowing these banks to become government entities. And now, the government will still have control of them when the new government is sworn in next year. Perhaps we will make the smart decision and keep control of those banks and actually use them to put people into homes at affordable interest rates and all that communist mumbo-jumbo. I kind of doubt it, but we'll see.

Back to the list of evidences that Rome is burning.

Iraq, you know the country our military is occupying, just canceled six no-bid contracts. (1) This is the country that we have built what the American government refers to as an "embassy" that includes a shopping mall. The same country that we are spending over $200 million per day to occupy, for what we all know is oil, has just given the finger to George W. Bush and his military by saying, no thanks, we'll get someone else to do these contracts. Perhaps the Russians, or the Iranians, or the Brits, or whatever. After all, the other no-bid contracts that were supposed to be bringing Iraqis fresh water, working sewers, rebuilt pipelines, rebuilt schools (because we bombed many of them), new hospitals (because we bombed them too), new power lines, etc, have for the most part failed in providing the basic goods they were paid handsomely for. So, it should come as no surprise that the Iraqi government, and certainly the people, are not interested in making America richer by cutting them in on oil deals. In fact, I would argue it makes a lot more sense for Iraq to offer no-bid contracts to places like Venezuela, China, Japan, Cuba, Brazil, and maybe even Russia. I mean, after all, none of those countries illegally and bombastically attacked and occupied a sovereign nation in a very very long time. Well, Russia and Georgia is debatable. I'll save that one for another blog entry.

Anyway, point is, America's global influence is now dwindling, and it comes as a direct result of the same kind of careless policies that every empire in history has displayed just previous to its grand collapse, Rome being greatest example. In order for Rome to become the powerful empire it was, it had to rape and pillage its way to the top. Ring a bell America? Well, the American empire has now reached its pinnacle. There is no middle class to speak of. Education is at an all time low point. The separation of the rich and poor is a joke. Houses that were selling for $200,000 a few years ago are now selling for less than $100,000. And there are countries all over the world, even poor ones like Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, and Venezuela, are pointing at us and saying, "Karma is a bitch, ain't it?" You see, they all learned their lessons a long time ago: Don't waste your time trying to become an empire. Empires are the biggest targets in the world.

America is now the big target, and for good reason. We are hegemonic, exceptionalist, chauvinistic, and our foreign policy is structured in such as way as to - by its very design - leave out the humanistic concerns of the other countries we deal with. Will Obama matter? I don't know, maybe. Maybe people around the world will not equate the actions of the American government with the minds and hearts of the American people. But as an American, I am prepared to be tarred and feathered, for we all bear the responsibility for what our government has done in our name.

Let the burning begin, so that we can rebuild this nation in a way that makes the world a better place.





(1) http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/11/world/middleeast/11iraq.html?_r=2&partner=rssnyt&emc=rss&oref=slogin&oref=slogin

Bring on the Economic Collapse

That's right, I said it. And I know there's a million people out there who would immediately disagree with my premise for actually welcoming the destruction of the modern American economic paradigm, but before you say something like: "Won't all the people who already suffer under this system be adversely affected too?" here me out.

Here is my simple premise:

There is not one major problem of humanity, be it environmental degradation, inequality, poverty, the digital divide, education inequality, prison justice, access to health care, care of the elderly, or any other major imperative of human kind that can be adequately addressed until we first address the issue of the rampant concentration of wealth within the United States - and indeed much of the rest of the world - into the hands of an ever shrinking minority of uber-wealthy individuals.

I am asserting, perhaps very similarly to that of Karl Marx, that the last stage of "free market" capitalism as a working system is some form of plutocracy. Simply defined, plutocracy means rule by the wealthy (1). Lenin stated that imperialism would be the last stage of capitalism (2), but many people refute that statement, saying instead that imperialism might be more the sign of the coming end to capitalism, but that the last stage would be social revolution by necessity. I fall into that category of thought. Now, going back my initial statement in this paragraph, namely that plutocracy is the last stage of capitalism, in its working form (depending on your definition of "working"), we might as well say we are there.

According to John Cavanagh and Chuck Collins in their Nation Magazine article The Rich and the Rest of Us, "The richest 1 percent of Americans currently hold wealth worth $16.8 trillion, nearly $2 trillion more than the bottom 90 percent. A worker making $10 an hour would have to labor for more than 10,000 years to earn what one of the 400 richest Americans pocketed in 2005.(3)"

Take a moment and read that statement over a few times. After you've done that, think about the implications of that statement.

There is an inherent conundrum in all of this. That is, the system cannot in any real way continue to operate like this, for numerous reasons, without a massive failure.

First, the only reason the United States has managed to develop this massive separation between the super-rich and EVERYONE else, is by way of the government (from Reagan through George W. Bush) in collusion with the owners of industry convincing the vast majority of the American people (or at least the mainstream media, which they own) that taxes are bad and the market is good. I would argue there has been a steady propaganda campaign put fourth upon the American electorate for more than twenty years with the primary goal of dismantling the very societal notion that the role of government is to provide for the common good. So, in other words, everything that the history of political and otherwise economics has taught us, is wrong in the eyes of the current power structure of the United States and the economic system they preside over. So-called "free market capitalism" literally depends upon its consumers believing that the only true role of government is keeping the enemy at bay, which is in itself a clever ruse to put more money in the pockets of more giant corporations. The primary operating necessity of this kind of system is a totally revisionist math that takes all but completely takes away the role of government in providing an economic and social safety net for the engine of industry - the people; the laborers.

Second, the system depends upon people somehow remaining happy with the idea of debt. That is, as long as people (like myself) continue to drive cars and live in houses with big payments, without the slightest intention of actually paying them off and instead "trading up" when they want a different one, or selling when the market is right, the system will continue to operate. Without a constant flow of interest, fees, and outlandish speculation, this system just crumbles.

We have already begun, in my opinion, to see the beginning of the end of capitalism in the way we have become acquainted with it. Most every highly regarded economist of note the world over would agree that a capitalism system, coupled up with a governmental regime that ensures some of the basics of life, such as education, health care, clean water, food, and housing is ideal. While I routinely quote Marx, and I would call myself a socialist, I do not believe that capitalism is itself the enemy. In fact, I would argue that capital is the enemy, not the trading of money for labor and goods. It makes much more sense to have no capital, but a high standard of living, than it does to have a ton of capital with the rest of the population living in constant debt and fear of bankruptcy. As long as we continue to lower, and in most cases totally get rid of, taxation of the wealthy, the majority of the population will continue to get poorer while the minority rich will get richer.

This brings me to the third and final reason I think we are witnessing the last stage of American free-market capitalism. Progressive taxation is an absolute necessity for any society that boasts any recognizable level of equality. I will spare the long rhetoric about Sweden, Norway, Iceland, and so on. Instead, I will just say that a system in which middle income earners (like myself) are taxed at damn near 20+ percent and people who make $500,000 are getting tax breaks, sometimes bringing them to less than 20%, is a pyramid on its head. In fact, it is this backward ideology that has us in the pickle we are in now. Health care in America is a great example of this trend. Doctors are awarded and receive bonuses not for healing patients ahead of schedule, but for selling certain drugs over others, and indeed for denying service. Because the system is profit driven, the more service that is provided means the less profit brought in, as a result of expenses. So in the end, the success of a hospital or an individual doctor has little to do with the quality of care and much more to do with how cheaply it was provided. Every time someone is rushed to the hospital in an ambulance, for example, profits are made from a multitude of sources, including the patient. This same discussion can be had about the airline industry, the higher education system, and the prison system. In all cases, rewards are given for service provided at the cheapest possible level, with little to no focus being on the actual quality of service.

Here is, in my mind, the silver lining. Because of the deplorable mismanagement of the economy by the neoliberals that have been at the helm of this government since the 1980s, and their insistence that the market will look out for the common good better than the government - exactly what it was invented for - we are now reaching a stage that could be called the awakening. People are beginning to look around and take note of how they live their lives. The average person who makes less than $300 thousand or so is in debt up to their eyeballs for the most part. Those who make $40,000 feel the same as those who make $25,000 because they have about the same amount of expendable cash. Furthermore, because of their income level, folks in this tax bracket are unable to get help paying for school other than loans, and they are far from the qualifying point for any kind of government aid.

This awakening to the fact that the vast majority of Americans are being screwed out of a life they deserve, a life that any person who works 40 hours per week - and a hell of a lot more for many of us - should have is creating a new generation of people who are basically now unafraid to go bankrupt; unafraid to lose their home; unafraid to simply give up on the "American dream". This is when people of like mind can come together to demand a better world view on behalf our government. Without the docile participation of the majority of Americans in this clearly inhuman economic system, the system fails, and rapidly at that.

So I say, bring it on. Bring on the big one. Bring on the collapse of all collapses. I'd love it if all the banks in American came crashing down. Repossess my car please! Take away my credit cards. The list goes on and on. The point here is simple: If the system as we know it comes crashing down around our feet, we get to rebuild it. And I think it is pretty damn safe to say that when we get the chance to rebuild, we will do it in a way that is more humane. Plus, imagine the feeling of watching America's most filthy rich falling from grace right before our very eyes. Some of that is happening already.

To the people of America: DEFAULT ON YOUR CAR LOANS! LET YOUR HOUSE GET REPOSSESSED! RUN UP YOUR CREDIT CARDS TO THE LIMIT AND THEN TOSS THEM IN THE RIVER! THROW AWAY YOUR COLLEGE LOAN PAYMENT INVOICES - IT SHOULD HAVE BEEN FREE TO BEGIN WITH! PULL ALL OF YOUR MONEY OUT OF YOUR BANK!

Sometimes the best way to fix a structure is to tear it down and rebuild the whole thing in a completely different way.




(1): http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plutocracy
(2): http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=9453
(3): The Nation Magazine, June 30, 2008 :: p. 11