Funny, that song has been playing my mind for the past few days...
As I'm writing this, my own house appears to be directly under some military plane training pattern, (I live near an AFB), which is a constant reminder of how almost everything in the US takes place under the shadow of intense, hyper-militarization. That demoralizes, and I think it does so even for the USA jingoists here. It's a form of intense blindness. "Here, in all its questionable glory, actually lies the key error of the entire modern project from its medieval roots onward, i.e. the reification and alienation of the very categories of thought themselves." Blindness, and a fettered form of thought that means I'm supposed to either ignore what the planes are for, or turn it around in my head to be something good or at the very least necessary. T.I.N.A. Of course what I'm talking about, I think, is not as deep as the very categories of thought themselves, but I do think there's a quality of not letting oneself know things.
Well, you cut to the core of the poodle (to translate the idiom into english) with this:
"Production under capitalism is for exchange rather than use..."
Now, I do not advocate a communist state, we have so much empirical evidence as to the hows and whys that doesn't work, but I would offer this argument:
Pure communism works if you accept all the horrible consequences required to make it work: eugenics, genocide, starvation as a weapon, order becoming obedience, and the value of a fellow human being reduced to its value as producer-unit - and the number one problem: everything from family to makro-scale economy becomes subservient to making the idea function, rather than the idea meshing with and integrating into society slowly over generations (like the first four centuries of christianity f.e.).
So communism is right out.
Problem is, pure laissez faire capitalism is just as much of a horrorshow, and results in much the same type of society: what difference is there really between working in a state factory, earning state credits for your state apartment and state school and state store, as opposed to company credit from your work in a company factory and so on?
Thus, capitalism has worked well only when it has been separated from the state (federal to americans I guess) and when the state has acted as a non-partisan arbiter between actors, imposing limitations on capitalism - truth in advertising laws f.e.
As we had the very real CCCP to compare ourselves to, western liberals (european and american definitions both) and capitalists had a hard limit as they couldn't really advocate anything which was too similar to the CCCP (such as today's censorship of media f.e.).
But since 1991-1995, the counterweight is gone and we are in full swing towards the corporatist state, where capital, union, organisations, parties and civil administration are all blended together with capital, and on an international level to boot, firmly removing all democracy no matter the ritual of the vote.
Sadly, I believe we can no more rectify this by separating capital from state again and keeping them apart, than could the CCCP reform during the 80s when it was perfectly obvious to anyone working inside the system that it had already lost the Cold War in the 1970s. Rather, our societal, financial and civilisational system must collapse in the same way Jugoslavia did.
What will come after, well... demography is destiny, not opinion and two tribes cannot farm the same field at the same time.
from the Tao Te Ching
Meditation 13
Accept misfortune and welcome disgrace,
For they are the human condition.
Don’t be driven by fear of loss
Or hope of gain.
Love even misfortune
As if it were your own body.
Because having a body
Means being bound to the gain and loss
Of all things.
Love all things
As if they were your own body.
Funny, that song has been playing my mind for the past few days...
As I'm writing this, my own house appears to be directly under some military plane training pattern, (I live near an AFB), which is a constant reminder of how almost everything in the US takes place under the shadow of intense, hyper-militarization. That demoralizes, and I think it does so even for the USA jingoists here. It's a form of intense blindness. "Here, in all its questionable glory, actually lies the key error of the entire modern project from its medieval roots onward, i.e. the reification and alienation of the very categories of thought themselves." Blindness, and a fettered form of thought that means I'm supposed to either ignore what the planes are for, or turn it around in my head to be something good or at the very least necessary. T.I.N.A. Of course what I'm talking about, I think, is not as deep as the very categories of thought themselves, but I do think there's a quality of not letting oneself know things.
Well, you cut to the core of the poodle (to translate the idiom into english) with this:
"Production under capitalism is for exchange rather than use..."
Now, I do not advocate a communist state, we have so much empirical evidence as to the hows and whys that doesn't work, but I would offer this argument:
Pure communism works if you accept all the horrible consequences required to make it work: eugenics, genocide, starvation as a weapon, order becoming obedience, and the value of a fellow human being reduced to its value as producer-unit - and the number one problem: everything from family to makro-scale economy becomes subservient to making the idea function, rather than the idea meshing with and integrating into society slowly over generations (like the first four centuries of christianity f.e.).
So communism is right out.
Problem is, pure laissez faire capitalism is just as much of a horrorshow, and results in much the same type of society: what difference is there really between working in a state factory, earning state credits for your state apartment and state school and state store, as opposed to company credit from your work in a company factory and so on?
Thus, capitalism has worked well only when it has been separated from the state (federal to americans I guess) and when the state has acted as a non-partisan arbiter between actors, imposing limitations on capitalism - truth in advertising laws f.e.
As we had the very real CCCP to compare ourselves to, western liberals (european and american definitions both) and capitalists had a hard limit as they couldn't really advocate anything which was too similar to the CCCP (such as today's censorship of media f.e.).
But since 1991-1995, the counterweight is gone and we are in full swing towards the corporatist state, where capital, union, organisations, parties and civil administration are all blended together with capital, and on an international level to boot, firmly removing all democracy no matter the ritual of the vote.
Sadly, I believe we can no more rectify this by separating capital from state again and keeping them apart, than could the CCCP reform during the 80s when it was perfectly obvious to anyone working inside the system that it had already lost the Cold War in the 1970s. Rather, our societal, financial and civilisational system must collapse in the same way Jugoslavia did.
What will come after, well... demography is destiny, not opinion and two tribes cannot farm the same field at the same time.