The capitalist solution to climate change is to seal the borders. Based in the highly developed "western" world, those who control the world's capitalist economy outsource their destructive needs to the rest of the world. They destroy the environment of "less developed" countries, pollute the water, poison the air and subjugate the people, using oppressive local regimes sometimes labeled as democracies, but only where it makes the people easier to stomp down.
This makes life for the people who live in these places hellish and often very short. So, often these people leave the smoking ruins of their homelands (sometimes these places are literally "smoking ruins"), to seek a better life. They see that better life in the protected enclaves set up by the capitalists for their own use: the US and Europe, mostly. So, they head for these places.
What they find there, especially at the borders of the US, is armed resistance. They are shot at, arrested, separated from their families, tortured and sometimes they die. Often, they are sent right back the hellscape from which they fled. The very hell set up by the capitalists who pay for the border guards and militias.
Trouble is, it isn't working. Climate change is here, and it is going to keep getting worse. No political border is going to keep it out. No matter how many people border militias round up and kill, it is going to keep coming, and eventually, it will get the capitalists, too.
There is only one solution: Remove the capitalists! Shut down their bullshit horror farms, and start correcting the vile wrongs committed for centuries in the name of capital. AND OPEN THE BORDERS.
Tuesday, November 12, 2024
Open the Borders!
Capitalist Bullies
"From the late 20's, when Stalin decreed 'socialism in one country', Soviet foreign policy was geared towards stability and security. The primary reason Stalin set up so many satellite states in Eastern Europe was to give the Soviet Union a security buffer between it and what he considered a resurgent and aggressive west.
The Russian experience in WWII meant that they were (to an extent understandably) scared witless of a surprise attack from the West, be it fascist or capitalist. This gives a lot of context to Soviet actions in the Cold War - the Berlin Blockade as a response to what they considered Western intransigence over a unified and neutral Germany, Cuba as a response to American SRBM's in Turkey, right the way through to Afghanistan as a way to secure their southern border.
So Russian aims in the Cold War weren't to 'defeat' the west (they believed this would happen anyway, through the Marxist doctrine of the historical inevitability of the collapse of capitalism), but rather to secure the safety of the USSR - whereas the USA was clear about it's desire to turn the USSR into part of the wider capitalist world."
Tuesday, October 29, 2024
Nazis
Historians have a word for Germans who joined the Nazi party, not because they hated Jews, but out of a hope for restored patriotism, or a sense of economic anxiety, or a hope to preserve their religious values, or dislike of their opponents, or raw political opportunism, or convenience, or ignorance, or greed.
That word is ‘Nazi.’ Nobody cares about their motives anymore.
A.R. Moxon
Wednesday, June 28, 2023
Sagan
One of the saddest lessons of history is this: If we’ve been bamboozled long enough, we tend to reject any evidence of the bamboozle. We’re no longer interested in finding out the truth. The bamboozle has captured us. It’s simply too painful to acknowledge, even to ourselves, that we’ve been taken. Once you give a charlatan power over you, you almost never get it back.
Carl Sagan
Saturday, April 22, 2023
Graeber on Stultified Technological Culture
Of Flying Cars and the Declining Rate of Profit
What are the political implications of all this? First of all, we need to rethink some of our most basic assumptions about the nature of capitalism. One is that capitalism is identical with the market, and that both therefore are inimical to bureaucracy, which is supposed to be a creature of the state.
The second assumption is that capitalism is in its nature technologically progressive. It would seem that Marx and Engels, in their giddy enthusiasm for the industrial revolutions of their day, were wrong about this. Or, to be more precise: they were right to insist that the mechanization of industrial production would destroy capitalism; they were wrong to predict that market competition would compel factory owners to mechanize anyway. If it didn’t happen, that is because market competition is not, in fact, as essential to the nature of capitalism as they had assumed. If nothing else, the current form of capitalism, where much of the competition seems to take the form of internal marketing within the bureaucratic structures of large semi-monopolistic enterprises, would come as a complete surprise to them.
Defenders of capitalism make three broad historical claims: first, that it has fostered rapid scientific and technological growth; second, that however much it may throw enormous wealth to a small minority, it does so in such a way as to increase overall prosperity; third, that in doing so, it creates a more secure and democratic world for everyone. It is clear that capitalism is not doing any of these things any longer. In fact, many of its defenders are retreating from claiming that it is a good system and instead falling back on the claim that it is the only possible system—or, at least, the only possible system for a complex, technologically sophisticated society such as our own.
But how could anyone argue that current economic arrangements are also the only ones that will ever be viable under any possible future technological society? The argument is absurd. How could anyone know?
Granted, there are people who take that position—on both ends of the political spectrum. As an anthropologist and anarchist, I encounter anticivilizational types who insist not only that current industrial technology leads only to capitalist-style oppression, but that this must necessarily be true of any future technology as well, and therefore that human liberation can be achieved only by returning to the Stone Age. Most of us are not technological determinists.
But claims for the inevitability of capitalism have to be based on a kind of technological determinism. And for that very reason, if the aim of neoliberal capitalism is to create a world in which no one believes any other economic system could work, then it needs to suppress not just any idea of an inevitable redemptive future, but any radically different technological future. Yet there’s a contradiction. Defenders of capitalism cannot mean to convince us that technological change has ended—since that would mean capitalism is not progressive. No, they mean to convince us that technological progress is indeed continuing, that we do live in a world of wonders, but that those wonders take the form of modest improvements (the latest iPhone!), rumors of inventions about to happen (“I hear they are going to have flying cars pretty soon”), complex ways of juggling information and imagery, and still more complex platforms for filling out of forms.
I do not mean to suggest that neoliberal capitalism—or any other system—can be successful in this regard. First, there’s the problem of trying to convince the world you are leading the way in technological progress when you are holding it back. The United States, with its decaying infrastructure, paralysis in the face of global warming, and symbolically devastating abandonment of its manned space program just as China accelerates its own, is doing a particularly bad public relations job. Second, the pace of change can’t be held back forever. Breakthroughs will happen; inconvenient discoveries cannot be permanently suppressed. Other, less bureaucratized parts of the world—or at least, parts of the world with bureaucracies that are not so hostile to creative thinking—will slowly but inevitably attain the resources required to pick up where the United States and its allies have left off. The Internet does provide opportunities for collaboration and dissemination that may help break us through the wall as well. Where will the breakthrough come? We can’t know. Maybe 3D printing will do what the robot factories were supposed to. Or maybe it will be something else. But it will happen.
About one conclusion we can feel especially confident: it will not happen within the framework of contemporary corporate capitalism—or any form of capitalism. To begin setting up domes on Mars, let alone to develop the means to figure out if there are alien civilizations to contact, we’re going to have to figure out a different economic system. Must the new system take the form of some massive new bureaucracy? Why do we assume it must? Only by breaking up existing bureaucratic structures can we begin. And if we’re going to invent robots that will do our laundry and tidy up the kitchen, then we’re going to have to make sure that whatever replaces capitalism is based on a far more egalitarian distribution of wealth and power—one that no longer contains either the super-rich or the desperately poor willing to do their housework. Only then will technology begin to be marshaled toward human needs. And this is the best reason to break free of the dead hand of the hedge fund managers and the CEOs—to free our fantasies from the screens in which such men have imprisoned them, to let our imaginations once again become a material force in human history."
Monday, January 23, 2023
The World Owes You A Living
"We must do away with the absolutely specious notion that everybody has to earn a living. It is a fact today that one in ten thousand of us can make a technological breakthrough capable of supporting all the rest. The youth of today are absolutely right in recognizing this nonsense of earning a living. We keep inventing jobs because of this false idea that everybody has to be employed at some kind of drudgery because, according to Malthusian-Darwinian theory, he must justify his right to exist. So we have inspectors of inspectors and people making instruments for inspectors to inspect inspectors. The true business of people should be to go back to school and think about whatever it was they were thinking about before somebody came along and told them they had to earn a living."
-“The New York Magazine Environmental Teach-In” by Elizabeth Barlow in New York Magazine (30 March 1970), p. 30
"The problem with the kids today is that they think the world owes them a living!"
-Everybody's Grandpa everywhere
Your Gramps was wrong. The world does owe each and every one of us a living. For the purposes of this discussion, let us assume that "the world" means all of the people on the planet. All of the people on the planet owe you a living, just as you owe all of those people.
We do not have to sell our labor to each other. We do not have to kill ourselves at occupations, simply because our less-technologically-advanced ancestors had to. We have reached a point in the development of our society and it's technological aptitude where there is no reason for all of us to occupy a 40-hour-per-week job. There just isn't that much that needs to be done. We create useless occupations to ensure that we cling to the old paradigm (ever have to deal with a commissioned salesperson?), just because that is the way it has always been done. We are seized with indignant rage when we see the unemployed. We call them lazy and useless. Sounds good to me.
And all of these useless jobs are designed specifically to serve a single purpose:to preserve the power of the powerful. In other words: keeping the wealth in the hands of the wealthy. Your job is not going to make you rich. It is going to keep you in your place. And the place of millions, even billions of us, all over the world, is to die in poverty.
We continue to murder the poor using labor largely because the tiny number of people who have the power to change this don't want it to change. They don't believe it is in their interest to do so. Poverty kills by making healthcare unaffordable, by mandating malnutrition, by enforcing ignorance. There are many excuses made for this, but they are all insufficient. The paradigm of labor is used as a weapon of social control by the oligarchs, providing just enough income to make the poor cling to their jobs, but not enough for them to break out of their situation.
There is a solution to all of this: The practice of selling labor needs to end. Production for profit needs to end. Manufactured scarcity needs to end. Put the means of extraction, production and distribution in the hands of all of us, in the form of collectives. Convert the basis of the world's economy from profit to need. Design and produce for need rather than wealth-creation and the need for useless labor goes away.
This creates a society where only a few are needed for work. So, the paradigm becomes part-time work, work-as-needed or work on a rotational basis. The vast majority of one's time becomes free to pursue whatever the heart desires, rather than doing what must be done simply to survive.
We have the means to do this, and each and every one of us owes it to all the others to make this happen. So, yes, the world does owe you a living. Demand it.
Saturday, November 5, 2022
The Way of Heaven and The Way of Marx
"May not the Way (or Dao) of Heaven be compared to the (method of) bending a bow? The (part of the bow) which was high is brought low, and what was low is raised up. (So Heaven) diminishes where there is superabundance, and supplements where there is deficiency.
It is the Way of Heaven to diminish superabundance, and to supplement deficiency. It is not so with the way of man. He takes away from those who have not enough to add to his own superabundance.
Who can take his own superabundance and therewith serve all under heaven? Only he who is in possession of the Dao!
Therefore the (ruling) sage acts without claiming the results as his; he achieves his merit and does not rest (arrogantly) in it: - he does not wish to display his superiority."
— Tao Te Ching, Lao Zi
