| Capitalism Failed
by Great Orion Voyager © 2009 thorkorps CAPITALISM FAILED: Stores are flooded with crap made in China. Capitalist desesperados flood media with pathetic ads for mortgage refinancing, debt consolidation, bankruptcy protection, ambulance chasing lawyers, used car salesmen, real estate sharks, stock market guru conmen, deceiving cellphone plans, deceiving internet provider plans, fraudulent life insurance, fraudulent aging formulas, baldness cures, impotence cures, quack medical cures, snake oil health potions, herbal supplements, pyramid schemes, money laundering schemes, get rich quick schemes, worthless private colleges offering worthless college degrees. All superfluous crap. CAPITALISM IS AN EMBARASSMENT: It is shocking to listen to radio and TV advertisements today: How embarrassing! No one needs these absurd products or services. Why do these gits make commercials hawking unnecessary products and services? The entire market economy is a sick joke built on nonsense, a house of cards waiting to collapse. If consumers opened their eyes, no one would buy anything and the entire market economy would collapse overnight. CAPITALISM IS SLAVERY: If you have no capital, you can only be a slave or runaway slave. Capitalism is a Total Failure for the Worker Class: Where is our American Dream, our mansion, our wealth, our Quality of Life? We work too hard to acquire anything. Hharder we work, poorer we get. Capitalism works only for the Property Class, Greedy Gangsters, Vampire Parasites. CAPITALISM IS MORIBUND: Adam Smith and Karl Marx predicted the Death Stage as Monopoly: Rule by a few giants that strangle competition and stifle progress: Oligarchy. Plutocracy. Crony Contractor Corruption. Economic stagnation. We are right now in this Monopoly Death Stage. The Property Class refuses to admit it because they benefit from it even as it fails. Capitalism already failed for the vast majority. It will also fail for the Property Class, because the Monopoly Stage cannot be sustained. CAPITALISM FAILED. GLOBALIZATION FAILED. Globalization is capitalism at its worst: Slavery on a planetary scale. NAFTA and CAFTA and WTO did nothing but collapse American Quality of Life and transform us all into underemployed desesperados. It is time for a Revolution in trade, manufacturing and tariffs. It is time to replace capitalism with American Social Democracy. IT IS TIME FOR AMERICAN SOCIAL DEMOCRACY: BE A SOCIAL DEMOCRAT. Don’t wait for your nation. Revolucion in your own life. BREAK THE CHAINS OF LANDLORD AND EMPLOYER. LIVE LIFE WITH PRINCIPLES. BE LA REVOLUCION. Hugo Chavez, World Social Forum, Porto Alegre, Brazil, January 2005 "When imperialism feels weak, it resorts to brute force. The attacks on Venezuela are a sign of weakness, ideological weakness. Nowadays almost nobody defends neoliberalism. Up until three years ago, just Fidel Castro and I raised these criticisms at Presidential meetings. We felt lonely, as if we infiltrated those meetings. Just look at the internal repression inside the United States, the Patriot Act, which is a repressive law against US citizens. They put into jail a group of journalists for not revealing their sources. They won't allow them to take pictures of the dead soldiers coming home from Iraq, many of them Latinos. Those are signs of Goliath's weaknesses. The south also exists. The future of the north depends on the south. If we don’t make that better world possible, if we fail, and through the rifles of the US Marines, and through Mr. Bush's murderous bombs, if there is no south to resist the offensive of neo-imperialism, and the Bush doctrine is imposed upon the world, the world shall be destroyed. Every day I become more convinced, there is no doubt in my mind: It is necessary to transcend capitalism. But capitalism cannot be transcended from itself, but only through socialism, true socialism, with equality and justice. I’m convinced it is possible to do in a democracy, but not in the type of democracy imposed from Washington. We have to re-invent socialism: It cannot be the kind of socialism we saw in the Soviet Union, but it will emerge as we develop new systems built on cooperation, not competition. Privatization is a neoliberal imperialist plan. Healthcare cannot be privatized because it is a fundamental human right, nor can education, water, electricity, other essential public services. They cannot be surrendered to private capital that denies the people of their rights!" Che Guevara, "Notes for the Study of Man and Socialism in Cuba," 1965 "The laws of capitalism act upon the individual without his thinking about it. He sees before him only the vastness of an infinite horizon. That is how it is painted by capitalist propagandists who purport to draw their lesson from the example of Rockefeller about the possibilities of success. Well, the amount of poverty and suffering required for the emergence of one Rockefeller, and the amount of depravity that such an accumulation of such a fortune entails, are left out of the picture. The reward is always seen in the distance; the way is lonely. Further on it is a route for wolves: One can succeed only at the cost of failure for others. Wealth is far beyond reach of the masses simply through the process of appropriation. Capitalism uses force but it also educates: Direct propaganda is carried out by those entrusted with explaining the inevitability of class system, either through some theory of divine origin or some theory of natural selection. This lulls the masses since they see themselves as being oppressed by an evil against which it is impossible to struggle. Immediately following comes the hope of improvement, and in this, capitalism differs from preceding caste systems which offered no possibilities for advancement.” Karl Marx, DAS KAPITAL, 1867, Chapter 6: The Buying and Selling of Labour-Power “He who before was the money-owner now strides in front as capitalist; the possessor of labour follows as his labourer. The one with an air of importance, smirking, intent on business; the other, timid and holding back, like one who is bringing his own hide to market and has nothing to expect but: a hiding.” Karl Marx, Alienated Labour, 1844 “The more wealth the worker produces, the more his production increases in power and scope, the poorer he becomes. Indeed, work itself becomes an object which he can obtain only with the greatest effort. His work therefore is not voluntary, but it is coerced, forced labor. If my own activity does not belong to me, if it is alien, a forced activity, to whom, then, does it belong? To a being other than me. Now who is that other being? The gods???” Karl Marx, Manifesto of the Communist Party, 1848 “In proportion as the bourgeoisie developed, in the same proportion developed the proletariat, the modern working class, a class of workers who live only so long as they can find work, and who can find work only so long as their labour increases capital. These workers must sell themselves piecemeal as a commodity, exposed to all the competition and fluctuations of the market. Not only are they slaves of the bourgeois class and the bourgeois state; but they are daily and hourly enslaved by the machine and the overseer. No sooner is the exploitation of the worker by the manufacturer, then he is set upon by other portions of the bourgeoisie: the landlord, the shopkeeper, the pawnbroker. Law, morality and religion are to the worker just so many bourgeois prejudices, behind which lurk in ambush just as many bourgeois interests. What the bourgeoisie therefore produces above all, are its own grave-diggers!” Noam Chomsky, 1973 "Capitalism is a system in which the central institutions of society are under autocratic control. A corporation is fascist; that is, it has tight control at the top and strict obedience has to be established at every level. Just as I'm opposed to political fascism, I'm opposed to economic fascism. I think that until major institutions of society are under popular control, it's pointless to talk about democracy." Noam Chomsky, UNDERSTANDING POWER, 2002, p 200 “The United States is off the spectrum: What’s called ‘libertarianism’ here is unbridled capitalism. Now if you have unbridled capitalism, you have extreme authority. If capital is privately controlled, then people must rent themselves in order to survive. Now you can say, ‘well they freely rent themselves in a free contract,’ but that’s a joke. If your only choice is ‘do what I tell you or starve,’ that isn’t a choice—it’s wage slavery. Now there are consistent libertarians, and if you read the world they describe, it’s a world so full of hate that no human would want to live in it. This is a world where you don’t have any roads because you don’t see any reason why you should cooperate in building a road you’re not going to directly use. If you need a road, you get together with other people who need it and you build it, and then you charge people to ride on it! Now who would want to live in a world like that? It’s a world built on hatred. The whole thing’s not worth talking about. It couldn’t function for one second. And even if it could, all you’d want to do is get out, escape, commit suicide or something.” Noam Chomsky, UNDERSTANDING POWER, 2002 "So long as power remains privately concentrated, everybody, everybody, has to be committed to one goal, and that’s to make sure that the rich folk are happy, because unless they are happy, nobody is going to get anything. So if you’re a homeless person sleeping in the streets of Manhattan, your first concern must be that the guys in the mansions are happy, because if they’re happy, they’ll invest, and the economy will work, and things will function, then maybe something might trickle down to you somewhere along the line. But if they’re not happy, everything is going to grind to a halt, and you’re not even going to get anything trickling down." Noam Chomsky, MANUFACTURING CONSENT, 1992 “The driving force of modern industrial civilization has been individual material gain, which is accepted as legitimate, even praiseworthy, on the grounds that private vices yield public benefits. Now it has long been understood that a society based on this principle will destroy itself in time. It can only persist as long as it is possible to pretend that the destructive forces humans create are limited, that the world is an infinite resource, and that the world is an infinite garbage can. Either the general population will take control of its own destiny and concern itself with community interests, guided by values of solidarity, sympathy and concern for others, or alternatively there will be no destiny for anyone to control." Noam Chomsky, Interview by Yifat Susskind, August 2001 "Take the Kyoto Protocol. Destruction of the environment is not only rational, it's exactly what you're taught to do in college. The market is regarded as democratic because everybody has a vote. It follows that if there are dollars to be made, you destroy the environment. The people who are going to be harmed by this are your grandchildren, and they don't have any votes in the market. Their interests are worth zero. Anybody that pays attention to their grandchildren's interests is being irrational, because what you're supposed to do is maximize your own interests right now. Nothing else matters. So destroying the environment and militarizing outer space are rational policies, but within a framework of institutional lunacy." Noam Chomsky, CLASS WARFARE, 1995 "Public education was designed to turn independent farmers into docile, passive tools of production. That was its primary purpose. And don't think people didn't know it. They knew it and they fought against it. There was a lot of resistance to mass education for exactly that reason. It was also understood by the elites. Emerson once said something about how we're educating them to keep them from our throats, because if you don't educate them, they're going to take control, they being what Alexander Hamilton called the great beast, namely the people. Because the freer the society gets, the more dangerous this great beast becomes, and the more careful you have to be to cage it somehow." Noam Chomsky, UNDERSTANDING POWER, 2002 "Remember the media have two basic functions: One is to indoctrinate the elites to make sure they have the right ideas and know how to serve power. Typically the elites are the most indoctrinated because they are exposed to the most propaganda and take part in decision-making. So for them you have the New York Times and Washington Post and Wall Street Journal. There’s also a mass media whose main function is to just get rid of the rest of the population, to eliminate them from decision-making. So for them it’s TV sitcoms, National Enquirer, sex and violence, babies with three heads, football, that kind of stuff." Noam Chomsky, UNDERSTANDING POWER, 2002 "You're trained to be obedient, you don't have an interesting job, there's no work around for you that's creative, in the cultural environment you're merely a passive observer. Political and social life are out of your range: they're in the hands of rich folk. So what's left? Well one thing that's left is sports, so you put a lot of intelligence and thought and self-confidence into that. Sports occupies the public and keeps them from getting involved with anything that matters." Noam Chomsky, UNDERSTANDING POWER, 2002, pp 276-279 "You might ask why popular movements in the United States have to look to small community radio stations to get programming. Why doesn’t mainstream radio do that? Well in every major country in the world, radio was turned into a public forum. The United States went the other way; here radio was privatized, put into private hands.... When television came along in the 1940’s, there wasn't even a battle for it—it was just completely handed over to private power. I think the internet is going to be the same basic story: If it's put into the hands of private power, we know exactly how it’s going to turn out: It'll be used as another technique for control, and for keeping people in their role as mindless consumers." Noam Chomsky, UNDERSTANDING POWER, 2002, pp 396-399 “There’s complete disaffection about everything: People don’t trust anyone, they think everyone’s lying. The whole civil society has completely broken down. Take these guys in militias: They’re high school graduates, mostly white males, a segment of society that has really taken a beating. I mean, real wages in the United States have dropped about 20% since 1973. Their wives now have to work just to put food on the table, their families are broken up. Their kids are running wild. I mean, a lot of people don’t even read. We should bear in mind how illiterate our society has become. So these groups certainly represent a response to worsening conditions. Or take this guy called Unabomber. When I read his manifesto, I thought if I don’t know him, I know his friends—they’re the kind of people I run into on the Left all the time: demoralized, fed up, desperate. The LA riots were not a constructive response: South Central Los Angeles was just a riot, the reaction of a completely demoralized devastated poor working-class population. All people could do was mindlessly lash out, just steal from stores. The only effect was: we’ll just build more jails. Can you marginalize a large part of the population as superfluous because they’re not helping you make those dazzling profits—can you set up a world in which production is carried out by the most oppressed people for the happiness of rich people? Could it lead to a civil war? It definitely could. There’s a streak of independence and opposition to authority in the United States. It can show up in antisocial ways, like running around with assault rifles. But it can show up in healthy ways, like opposition to illegitimate authority. My friend was listening to one of my gloomy disquisitions and said: ‘Y’know, what you are describing is an organizer’s dream.’ And I think that is true.” Friedrich Nietzsche, THE DAWN, 1881 "I would not know what to say to workers of factory slavery, provided they do not consider it altogether shameful to be used up as they are, as gears of a machine. Phew! To believe that higher pay could abolish your misery, to be talked into thinking that such an increase could transform the Shame of Slavery into a Virtue! Phew! To have a price upon which you become a gear! Are you co-conspirators in the current folly of nations who want to produce as much as possible and be rich as possible? What vast sums of Inner Worth are thrown away. Better to emigrate, and in savage fresh regions seek to be Master of the World and master of myself! Keep changing locations so long as slavery beckons: Never avoid adventure. Be prepared for death. What began at home as dangerous discontent will once outside gain a wild beauty and be called Heroism." |