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     Welcome to our critique of capitalism.  As you read and scroll through the material please notice that we steer clear of ideological attacks and instead try step back and take a fresh look at our economic system impartially, as if we might be encountering it for the first time.  We urge you to do the same.  Although difficult, and some would say impossible, try to remove your rose-colored glasses and see with the honest eyes of a child.  We begin by first asking the question:


                                                 Are You a Capitalist? 


I don't think so, protest though some might.  In order to answer that question we have to fully understand what capitalism actually is.  We routinely think of it as a scientific system of exchange whose origins are traced to Adam Smith, commonly thought of as the “father of modern economics” but who thought of himself as an 18th century Enlightenment philosopher of ethics and morals, as did his contemporaries like his good friend David Hume.   With the publication of Smith’s Wealth of Nations we began the modern era of continuous prosperity, so the thinking goes, brought to us by the power of free markets.  And we believe that with the collapse of the Soviet Union, socialism/communism, its mirror image and only competitor, has been vanquished, proven false and relegated to the dustbin of history, suitable now only to demonstrate the veracity of capitalism.  See there: particular private property is the only way to achieve freedom and order.  Collectivity is demonstrably tyrannical.

Progress belongs to the victorious.

"As Karl Polanyi described in his 1944 book, The Great Transformation, 'To allow the market mechanism to be sole director of the fate of human beings and their natural environment . . . would result in the demolition of society...'"   
James Gustav Speth, author of Ameica the Possible





Kick it Over 

Many may think that capitalism is complicated, that the now global interplay of finance, goods and services, resources, labor and people is knowable only to the very best and the very brightest.  It is the capitalists who proffer this complexity, and this belief, to their distinct advantage, enabling them to prosper in a surely dynamic world. 
But capitalism is actually very simple, so simple in fact that its essence lies hidden among  the growing heap of  models and data, policies and politics, lobbying, laws and regulations, and endless news stories about jobs, the economy and life in all its true complexity.

Capitalism is the progeny of the separation of Capital from Labor.  That's all.

*
  What then is Capital? Capital is a construct, a posit, an idea, a made-up entity that we have agreed to collectively imagine.  Capitalism is the worshiping of that idea, of that postulate.  Capital is a pure product of the imagination that breathes singular life into the inanimate, into money—or more properly, representations of money.  Capital is accounting entries come to life.  Capital cannot just be, instead it must move, it must be invested and therein lays the mystery and power of our imaginary creation.  Capital has a telos: it has its own mission and goal, it must compound, infinitely.  Reproduction is its single attribute and as such its ends and means are the same.  In practice it creates all necessary structures to ease its reproductive path.  Woe to any manager who fails to achieve returns to Capital—to grow his Capital.  Such neglect of his ward will bring a flock of suitors who promise to better care for this petulant figment of our presently 
collective imagination.

Capitalism is immensely powerful.  All would agree that it has shaped our world from our cultures and institutions to our environment, globally.  When Capital comes to a field, the field changes; when Capital comes to a neighborhood, the neighborhood changes—likewise when capital leaves...  Wherever Capital goes change follows—its telos is always felt.  
We have to stand in awe of its power.

 Capital is amoral—not immoral—though what it does may often be so construed, it doesn’t have any sense of itself whatsoever.  It is innocent, as one might be of a crime by reason of insanity.  But we have given it the right to exist in the world—it has become deeply embedded in our culture and in our language.  And we cotton to it by giving it inalienable rights and privileges.  Moreover it is said when Capital is free we are free.  We even write books about it proclaiming how essential its free existence is to our free existence.  Capitalism and Freedom, argues Milton Friedman, is best thought of as an eternal bond.  So our world is richer for our creation; we have plants and animals, rivers, mountains, oceans and insects…humans and Capital.  Of all these Capital is the 
most powerful.

It stands next to God as a pure being.  
*
Whoever can lay hands on Capital wields a measure of its power—and those who best fully grasp and identify with its essence find immense power.  Many have thought that we can fertilize and grow the common good with its telos—in fact harnessing the power of money is the liberal political agenda.  But as we have seen, such agendas have been crushed in recent history—thirty years for starters—though we can trace a timeline going back much farther.   Capital is too wily a beast—its single property too powerfully simple.  Even the best Samaritans who agree to Capital’s liberation find their work Sisyphean.  Whether they work towards charitable or environmental ends, every time they get their rock up the hill, it rolls back down on them.  
War, poverty, inequality and environmental destruction carry on as before.

And they turn again to beg of this amoral entity more means towards their just ends.

*
  By splitting the labor/capital atom we have put in place an increasingly furious chain reaction, only now becoming fully visible.  It is an unleashing of power which only a few can control and it should not be surprising that it is those few who reap the rewards.

Who then among us would claim filial affinity to this insatiably rapacious simplicity?  Who would claim their sole mission in life, their teleology, is to multiply without rest and without end?

*
Whoever Holds Kinship Holds Power

We have to ask, and then observe, who best among us grasps the teleology of capital?  Here think of an athlete: the aggressive sprinter possessed of solid thigh muscles, the marathon runner patient, sinewy and lean.  We know them and their attributes, both mental and physical enable their excellence in their chosen sport.  What then can we say of capitalists?  To the extent they are driven to unfettered reproduction they are close kin to capital—they share its single and simple attribute.  The very best are unencumbered by strings of morality and social convention—ideally they would have no strings at all.  Again, it’s not that capitalist athletes are immoral, but rather amoral, naturally exhibiting the properties of their profession.  They are single-minded.  We wouldn’t expect a sprinter to be distracted by some mishap in the stands and nor should we expect a capitalist to be distracted by the amount of carbon in the atmosphere or the destruction of the middle class, let alone
the suffering poor.

Thus we must observe that the capitalist sees the world as Capital sees the world: as a reductionist in pursuit of reproduction.  Hawk-eyed and simple.  Nothing can be denied access to its productive capability and anything can be created in its service.  Mountains moved, rivers reversed, technologies produced, ideas, cultures, governments and peoples created and destroyed.  

All in the service of its teleology.

*
  The instrument of the capitalist is price, the common denominator within which economists tell us, is found all the information we need to know.  Telling!  Capitalists are the Grand Simplifiers who parse and parcel according to the efficiency of price to enable themselves the most profitable reproductive reassembly.  Theirs is the re-creative power of God.  

Since the process is the same the results look the same, the world over.  And so within our bio-diverse and complex world we see a spreading homogeneity, begun as development, and then heralded as progress, now a torrent of scorched earth and blacktopped banality whose purpose reflects the purpose of its creator.  Globally.  
Capital cannot abide diversity.

*
  The power of the Grand Simplifier has surpassed that of the Grand Inquisitor for he is the ultimate arbiter, able to put to death and eliminate anything that cannot be made productive.  His power is not limited to saviors and sinners but includes all entities, from flora and fauna to social relations and people and geographies, technologies, jobs and ideas.  Is it then any wonder that ardent capitalists exhibit such infallible confidence?

Just as the Grand Inquisitor offers his flock a circumscribed world of imaginary freedom, so too does the Grand Simplifier circumscribe the world in imaginary freedom.  Increasing productivity and growth sit at the right and left hand of this father and these are solemnly good, apriori.  He keeps all within the orbit of His arms, within the flow of markets, which encompass all that needs to be known about the world.  

His teleology becomes culture: the endless production and consumption of goods and services.  The word "goods" well chosen for it is an adjective masquerading as a noun—thus any material possession is good—a tempting tautology.  The use value of goods and services are by their nature limited—how much of anything can any person use?  And so something had to be done to overcome this contradiction of His essence. Through the transubstantiation of advertising, which now saturates the World, use value becomes comparatively meaningless, replaced by symbolic values, thus exciting endless exchange; perpetual creation and destruction, in true manifestation of His essence.  

Ideally the flock ceases to exist as persons.  Infatuated with symbols people become consumers, whose servitude and debt in pursuit of symbols are born-again as virtuous work and honorable obligation, and most of all, as illusory happiness, and so, they become trapped in Capital's aspirational web. 

Production is the master; consumption the servant.

There are no other possible worlds, we are assured; it is, after all, science we are told.  Capital exists. 

We have no choice but to acquiesce. 

*
And indeed we find all the religions of the world complicit in this comparatively new creed, hostage to and fearful of its power--and perhaps, not a little envious.   Knowing their flocks are dependent, so too they are dependant.  Just revolt remains remote; their past history of questioning science has not worked out well, so they remain quiet minding their own business: the carting over to another world in which it is not clear whether Capital exists or not.  

Perhaps they should ask.

Miraculously, periodic objections swell defiantly and sometimes with great hope in the face of the amoral tide.  Stop!  There must be some limits--humans can only bear so much.  Such entreaties come from many and varied quarters but all objections become subsumed, however well plotted or passionate they may be.  Even major reforms leave in place the ontological entity, Capital, that then begins to attract its human kin—the pleonexic—who begins again the quest for eternal reproduction and growth; a remaking of the world in Capital’s own image.

*
So I ask again: Are you a capitalist?  And my hope is that you are not.  My hope is that your essence is not the essence of cancer cells and that your complexity dazzles me even if some of your attributes unsettle me.  We can exchange goods and services.  And we might even use a proxy for value—though we don’t have to.  But there is no reason to grant that proxy independent corporeal existence.  And to imbue Capital with rights, with freedom, is the chimerical delusion of those most kin to Capital—the pleonexic psychopaths.  There is no reason to name that into existence and set it loose on the world.  It can be mine, and it can be yours.  But capital can’t live outside of us, disembodied, lest it attract those least like us, and we all suffer and serve the tyranny of its simplicity and perish within its contagion of its life-crushing homogeneity.  
 
Capital threatens our planet and us.
 *
I’m betting you’re no kin to Capital, that you have known the warmth and love of your friends and family, and the peace of satiety.  It is my fondest wish that be so.

 tecumseh  
©2012 EJ Tangel
 Essay in PDF
EJ Tangel is founder and editor of the Tecumseh Project.org, environmental/social justice activist and ex-securities trader; a degree in philosophy and masters in liberal studies, inspired by Occupy and faithful about the end of neoliberalism and rule by its pleonexic practitioners and apologists.  

Climate and     Capitalism

World People's Congress

Real-World Economics 

Inequality.org

The Story of Stuff

Too Much

the Other 98%

Mind the Gap

Inequality & the Common Good

US Uncut

UsAgainstGreed

United for a Fair Economy






"Capitalism    means Inequality"
-EJT






"We have to begin to understand that business leaders are not our leaders...
and they have no business constructing our world."
-EJT






















Capital cannot abide diversity





















Production is the master...


...consumption the servant























Capital threatens our planet and us


"Where is the outrage?  The crypto-fascists have us living in a hyper-marketized, hyper-capitalized society...greed is running amok...congress is the site of legalized bribery and normalized corruption.  How long can this fragile experiment in democracy survive the oligarchic economy?"

         - Cornel West, Mandel Hall, Univ. of Chicago.  May 7, 2012

"Corporations, long identified as our principal economic actors, are now also our principal political actors. The result is a combined economic and political system—the operating system upon which our society runs—of great power and voraciousness, pursuing its own economic interests without serious concern for the values of fairness, justice, or sustainability that democratic government might have provided."  

          - James Gustav Speth, America the Possible 

"Fascism should more appropriately be called Corporatism because it is a merger of State and corporate power." 

           - Benito Mussolini

"Capital is an absentee slumlord"

          - EJ Tangel

"Do people exist to serve the economy?  Or should the economy exist to serve people?"

          - David Korten, author of Agenda for a New Economy, in PBS interview


America the Possible: A Manifesto, Part I  
From Decline to Rebirth

BY JAMES GUSTAVE SPETH Published in the March/April 2012 issue of Orion magazine

The case for the transformation of today’s American capitalism into something truly sustaining for people and planet rests on two related propositions:

1. System failure. Today’s system of political economy and its principal product, economic growth, destroy the environment, and not in a minor way but in a way that profoundly threatens the planet. Equally, they are not delivering economic and social well-being. People will therefore increasingly demand solutions, but the current system will not be able to deliver credible answers and so will lose legitimacy. Dissatisfaction will multiply. Meanwhile, America’s political economy will be severely stressed by multiple pressures, general overload, and buffeting events at home and abroad, including scarcities and rising prices. Having lost resiliency and coping capacity, it will be highly vulnerable to crises that will open the door to major change.

2. A better world. The affluent societies have reached the point where, as John Maynard Keynes forecast, the economic problem has been solved; the long era of ceaseless striving to overcome hardship and deprivation should be over; there is enough to go around if it were shared. But this prospect and other hopeful possibilities contrast sharply with everyday reality, so people are increasingly fed up and are seeking and building something more meaningful. A positive alternative to the current order is coming into view, taking shape on the horizon. People and groups are busily planting the seeds of change through a host of alternative arrangements scattered across the landscape, principally at the local level, and are identifying still more directions for upgrading to a new operating system. We can imagine now the articulation of a new American Dream and a new explanatory narrative, the appearance around the country of new and attractive models, and the projection of a powerful set of new ideas and policy proposals confirming that the path to a better world does indeed exist.

These two developments will raise consciousness, inspire hope, open the door to deep change, and help launch a powerful movement that can transform the current system.                                                                 continue reading...

James Gustave Speth is a former dean of Yale's School of Environmental Studies, currently teaching at Vermont Law School. He is the author of The Bridge at the Edge of the World. His article in this issue, the first of a two-part series, is based on his September 2012 book from Yale University Press, America the Possible: Roadmap to a New Economy  








"Of the major socio-economic ism's, only capitalism binds us to a wholly inhuman root.  Though we must shun all dogma, both socialism and communism find grounding in known human values: society and  community. Capitalism, on the other hand, binds us to a synthetic construct, a  product of a pleonexic imagination.    Shedding all ties to people and the earth, capitalism levitates us into a simulacrum 
of insatiability."
EJT





Robert F. Kennedy on the values we measure; Univ. of Kansas March 18, 1968
Glaser Progress Foundation

"Too much and too long, we seem to have surrendered community excellence and community values in the mere accumulation of material things...the gross national product does not allow for the health of our children, the quality of their education, or the joy of their play. It does not include the beauty of our poetry or the strength of our marriages; the intelligence of our public debate or the integrity of our public officials. It measures neither our wit nor our courage; neither our wisdom nor our learning; neither our compassion nor our devotion to our country; it measures everything, in short, except that which makes life worthwhile. And it tells us everything about America except why we are proud that we are Americans."  
Robert F. Kennedy 1968 

GDP is a measure of capital's ontological progress, it's growth.  We measure capital's teleology, its reproduction, which often profits from misery, from the medical-industrial complex to the prison-industrial complex, and more.  We do not measure human happiness, flourishing or well-being.  We measure only what capital needs measured.  We get what we measure...   
Picture
But the real question is, do we really want wealth?  Or do we want happiness and well-being?
Pleonexia destroys happiness and well-being.  Fortunately, happiness destroys pleonexia.  

Discard the pursuit of wealth; stop consuming--drop out. Seek happiness and well-being.






...burgeoning aggregate wealth increasingly concentrated in fewer hands. Yet the health of a society has always depended on how widely wealth is shared, how much respect is accorded all its members and how compassionate it remains to those in need.  An economy beholden to capital cannot share wealth, nor be compassionate because it is fundamentally pleonexic and psychotic, run by pleonexic psychotics.   Capital is single-minded: it must forever accumulate and grow, its efficiency dependent on eradicating all obstacles in its ammoral path.  In a multifarious and radically diverse world, capital alone is singular and seeks to recreate our world in its image.

See our essay, A Fractured Fairy Tale: Pleonexia and the Psychopath.   



"Capitalism attacks and destroys all the finer sentiments of the human heart; it ruthlessly sweeps away old traditions and ideas opposed to its progress, and it exploits and corrupts those things once held sacred." 
- Daniel De Leon  

"Poverty and wealth are merely names for want and satiety.  Hence, neither rich are those who want more, nor poor those who want nothing."
--Democritus, Ethica 5th Century, B.C.E.

(Read it again...please)

Add demand-side essay:  How capitalism projects its efficient division of labor to division of consumers, a process of unifying its teleology, two sides of the same coin.  Thus we have technologies that actively divide while claiming to unite, again a contradiction so common in ideological discourse.  The homogeneity of individuals, communities, county and world is achieved through dividing all into parts easily reassembled.  Perhaps this essay can introduce:



Divide, Shape and Profit

          In each of these books below and the New York Times articles that follow, the authors describe how the growing  sophistication of  data collection and management, and the proliferation of individuated technology-based communication generates huge profits for corporations at a terrible cost to people.  The process severs our ability to communicate in meaningful ways and fundamentally  re-shapes us both as human beings and communities of human beings as well.   This is an example of demand-side productivity within capitalism.  For capital, it is not only the production process that must be maximized--as production is made more profitable by division of tasks, so too are people made more profitable when they are divided.  In order to maximize returns, capital must maximize consumers--the more units the better.  Capital  must separate us.  

           But more alarming is that by separating us and  collecting and manipulating data, corporations are able to actually reshape people into more profitable consumers.  The more each unit consumes the greater capital fulfills its reproductive teleology.   Any loss of community and meaningful connections is of no concern to capital.  And any human traits that cannot be made profitable have to diminish to the point of non-interference with capital's teleology.  
                   
                      Capital must simplify us.  Capital creates the world in its own image.
 








Capital must simplify and separate us...





...Capital creates the world in its own image


The NYT Sunday Review; 
The Flight From Conversation By SHERRY TURKLE Published: April 21, 2012 

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Peter DaSilva and Byron Smith, for NYT
Repost from NYT: WE live in a technological universe in which we are always communicating. And yet we have sacrificed conversation for mere connection.
At home, families sit together, texting and reading e-mail. At work executives text during board meetings. We text (and shop and go on Facebook) during classes and when we’re on dates. My students tell me about an important new skill: it involves maintaining eye contact with someone while you text someone else; it’s hard, but it can be done.
      
Over the past 15 years, I’ve studied technologies of mobile connection and talked to hundreds of people of all ages and circumstances about their plugged-in lives.  I’ve learned that the little devices most of us carry around are so powerful that they change not only what we do, but also who we are.

We’ve become accustomed to a new way of being “alone together.” Technology-enabled, we are able to be with one another, and also elsewhere, connected to wherever we want to be. We want to customize our lives. We want to move in and out of where we are because the thing we value most is control over where we focus our attention. We have gotten used to the idea of being in a tribe of one, loyal to our own party. 

Continue reading...



Sherry Turkle is a psychologist and professor at M.I.T. and the author, most recently, of “Alone Together: Why We Expect More From Technology and Less From Each Other.”  



The Daily You
How the New Advertising Industry Is Defining Your Identity and Your Worth,  Joseph Turow 

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Yale University Press 2011
From Yale Univ. Press: The Internet is often hyped as a means to enhanced consumer power: a hypercustomized media world where individuals exercise unprecedented control over what they see and do. That is the scenario media guru Nicholas Negroponte predicted in the 1990s, with his hypothetical online newspaper The Daily Me—and it is one we experience now in daily ways. But, as media expert Joseph Turow shows, the customized media environment we inhabit today reflects diminished consumer power. Not only ads and discounts but even news and entertainment are being customized by newly powerful media agencies on the basis of data we don’t know they are collecting and individualized profiles we don’t know we have. Little is known about this new industry: how is this data being collected and analyzed? And how are our profiles created and used? How do you know if you have been identified as a “target” or “waste” or placed in one of the industry’s finer-grained marketing niches? Are you, for example, a Socially Liberal Organic Eater, a Diabetic Individual in the Household, or Single City Struggler? And, if so, how does that affect what you see and do online?

Drawing on groundbreaking research, including interviews with industry insiders, this important book shows how advertisers have come to wield such power over individuals and media outlets—and what can be done to stop it.

Joseph Turow is Robert Lewis Shayon Professor of Communication, Annenberg School, University of Pennsylvania. He lives in Bala-Cynwyd, PA.


You for Sale: Mapping, and Sharing, the Consumer Genome, Natasha Singer.  Sunday Business, NYT June 17, 2012 (Repost from NYT)

"It knows who you are. It knows where you live. It knows what you do.

Picture
Steve Howe, CEO Acxiom;
It peers deeper into American life   than the F.B.I. or the I.R.S., or those prying digital eyes at Facebook and Google. If you are an American adult, the odds are that it knows things like your age, race, sex, weight, height, marital status, education level, politics, buying habits, household health worries, vacation dreams — and on and on.









 Photo credit, Steve Keesee, AK  Democratic Gazette





Right now in Conway, Ark., north of Little Rock, more than 23,000 computer servers are collecting, collating and analyzing consumer data for a company that, unlike Silicon Valley’s marquee names, rarely makes headlines. It’s called the Acxiom Corporation, and it’s the quiet giant of a multibillion-dollar industry known as database marketing.

Few consumers have ever heard of Acxiom. But analysts say it has amassed the world’s largest commercial database on consumers — and that it wants to know much, much more. Its servers process more than 50 trillion data “transactions” a year. Company executives have said its database contains information about 500 million active consumers worldwide, with about 1,500 data points per person. That includes a majority of adults in the United States..."

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"Jennifer Barrett Glasgow is the company's chief privacy officer." NYT Photo: Ken Cedeno/Bloomberg News
Continue reading this must read article which describes the "sophisticated ecosystems" that these companies create in which they parse and parcel to simplify our nature in their endless quest for profit maximization.  Like  Turow's book, The Daily You, New York Times writer Natasha Singer describes the process by which we are being recreated as entities that maximize Capital's reproduction--a process that accumulates data (largely without our knowledge) and then feeds it back to us, a process that reconstructs us psychologically, physically and philosophically.  It is a building of a simulacra for profit.  Remember, consumption is the servant, production the master.  "Scott E. Howe, the chief executive of Acxiom...sees the company as a new millennium 'data refinery,' rather than data miner."   

How Companies Learn Your Secrets
By CHARLES DUHIGG
NEW YORK TIMES Magazine Feb 16, 2012

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Antonio Bolfo for NYT
Our intro: "Andrew Pole had just started working as a statistician for Target in 2002, when two colleagues from the marketing department stopped by his desk to ask an odd question: 'If we wanted to figure out if a customer is pregnant, even if she didn't want us to know, can you do that? '”

In this article based on his new book, The Power of Habit: Why We Do What We Do in Life and Business, Charles Duhigg explains in great detail the lengths to which corporations--in particular Target--will go to garner ever increasing profits through monitoring and influencing the habits of its  customers and would-be customers.  His research focused on the work of Andrew Pole, a young statistician who managed to find profitable machinations, and who talked to Duhigg freely until "Target told him to stop."   Duhigg surveys the issue of habit widely, discussing scientific and corporate research, and even includes a story about modifying his own bad habits.

The force of this work is in the revelation of  the corporate drive to maximize its profitability through the gathering of information on people, largely without their knowledge.  "Whenever possible," Duhigg writes, "Target assigns each shopper a unique code--known internally as the Guest ID number--that keeps tabs on everything they buy.  "[L]inked to the Guest ID is demographic information" about everything you can imagine...so much that Target analysts are able to predict, with a high level of accuracy, that a customer is pregnant before she tells anyone, and begin to market to her, surreptitiously.   As a Target executive said, "As long as we don't spook her, it works."

This collection and manipulation is outrageous, but the real goal of this data collection is to influence habits, a behavior in which scientists have found (unsurprisingly), that subjects think less and once set, these people can become regular and reliable producers of profit.   "Some of the most ambitious habit experiments have been conducted by corporate America," Duhigg writes.   And as it turns out there are key times in peoples lives when those habits are most liable to outside influence, the biggest of which it seems, is parenthood.   "If they could entice...women or their husbands to visit Target and buy baby-related products, the company's cue-routine-reward calculators could kick in and start pushing them to buy groceries, bathing suits, toys and clothing, as well."   Like other companies (Duhigg discusses Procter and Gamble at length), Target would try to "piggyback on existing habits...As long as Target camouflaged how much it knew, as long as the habit felt familiar, the new behavior took hold."

Well worth the lengthy read--Duhigg includes a humorous story about a father who stomps into Target demanding to know why they are sending his teenage daughter coupons for baby-items--and later calls to (of all things) apologize.  That Target is not happy is an indicator of how important his work is:  Attempting to visit Target's headquarters Duhigg writes, "I was told I was on a list of prohibited visitors...." And "a very nice security guard named Alex said 'I was instructed not to give you access and to ask  you to leave."  And Andrew Pole won't talk to him either. 

  -EJ Tangel

Artwork by Liu Bolin

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Image from Slate May 23, 2013
Look closely, he's there...

How much of ourselves have we lost on corporate shelves?


Liquidated: An Ethnography of Wall Street
by Karen Ho, Duke University Press 2009

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Duke University Press

In 1996 Karen Ho, now an assistant professor of anthropology at the U of MN, got a job on Wall Street as part of a multi-year process to study the environs just as any anthropologist would take part in a culture non-judgmentally to fully understand how it works.  Her method employed the process of "habitus", a concept developed by the sociologist/anthropologist Pierre Bourdieu says Gillian Tett, in her laudatory review of Ho's book as capital markets editor at the Financial Times. [1]  Interesting that Tett also has a PhD in anthropology.  "Habitus is the idea that a society develops a cognitive map to order its world that is usually based on physical experience, albeit in ways the participants are only dimly aware of," says Tett.  Thus the world of bankers is shaped by both their educational experiences--products of elite schools they are thought of, and think of themselves as, "the best and the brightest," and critically, the environment of Wall St itself.    "Modern financiers live in a world where jobs are insecure, and where bankers are paid by trading things or cutting deals. They tend to project their experience on to the economy by aspiring to make everything “liquid”, or tradable, including jobs and people (emphasis added). These projections are typically couched in the rhetoric of “shareholder values” or abstract concepts of “free-market capitalism” – presented as absolute “truths”," says Tett who quite well understands the business herself.  

"Ho argues, however, that many of these “truths” are riddled with contradictions that bankers ignore because they are seduced by their own rhetoric." (emphasis added)   Yes they are--but far worse is they have trapped us in their world.  Ho writes: "Massive corporate restructurings are not caused so much by abstract financial models as by the local, cultural habitus of investment bankers...and the institutional culture of Wall Street."  As we have argued throughout, none of the above are absolute truths but instead reflect a world constructed by Capital for Capital.  It is a world in which those most kin to capital, the pleonexic psychotics, thrive.   When we understand the self-delusion of Wall St, then perhaps we can understand how terribly trapped we are in their world.  Wall St is a massively powerful global middle-man that shapes all our worlds: work, environment, society, justice systems, food,  poverty and even our language.  It is a world in which competition is everything--anything and everything else, has no value.  

Interest is growing in Ho's work.  See her interviewed on Up With Chris Hayes, MSNBC April 1, 2012  (about 1:40 in, with apologies for a dreadful commercial for Chevron) 
 
[1] Gillian Tett, Financial Times 

https://www.ft.com/content/904f0508-aee3-11de-96d7-00144feabdc0

​  -EJ Weinstangel 








"Their workplace culture and networks of privilege create the perception that job insecurity builds character, and employee liquidity results in smart, efficient business. Based on this culture of liquidity and compensation practices tied to profligate deal-making, Wall Street investment bankers reshape corporate America in their own image."


Duke U. Press



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Source: Reflection of Me

Capitalism Beyond the Crisis, Amartya Sen 
NYRB March 26, 2009

      In this article Noble Laureate economist and Harvard professor Amartya Sen reacts to the economic crises by questioning the premises of modern capitalism in part by delivering a solid, if short, historical analysis of Adam Smith's ideas.  He notes for example, that Smith's Wealth of Nations (1776) was preceded by his Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759), and was wholly dependent on this earlier work.  Smith's "overwhelming concern--and worry," Sen writes, was "about the fate of the poor and the disadvantaged..."  Smith was "a defender of the role of the state in providing public services, such as education, and poverty relief...he was also deeply concerned about inequality and poverty that might survive in an otherwise successful market economy."  Smith was aware of, and deeply concerned about likely over-speculation and warned of excessive risk sought by "prodigals and projectors."  Sen also says that Smith never used the term "capitalism", and argues that he also never suggested "the sufficiency of market forces," for social relations, "or of the need to accept the dominance of capital." (emphasis the editors)  This is a critical for our understanding of economics today.   

     Adam Smith was an Enlightenment moral and ethical philosopher.  His title as "the father of modern economics" came much later, part of a process that stripped his thoughts of their complexity and their humanity.  This is the work of the Grand Simplifiers, who now rule the world, the very "prodigals and projectors" Smith so solemnly warned us about.  In fact, Smith's invisible hand belonged to God, an omni-benevolent being, and its manifestation was the "fellow feeling" among people...that is, their natural compassion and inclination to do the right thing.  Smith did not invent Capitalism and would have nothing but contempt for its worshipers today.      

There is a difference between market economies and capitalism.  The former privileges people, the latter creates Capital as an ontological being, establishes itself as a secular religion, and privileges those who share its single attribute: the pleonexic.                                                                                                                                                        EJT

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Capitalism empowers the pleonexic to piss on the rest of us, "trapped" as we are by what we have been led to believe about economics, work, consumption, happiness and more...
            "Turn on, tune in and drop out." Timothy Leary PhD
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"The comfort of the rich depends upon an abundant supply of the poor." Voltaire Graphic: Thinkprogress.org
Your work enriched the 1%...STOP: Intentional "recession" is the best way to take power away from the 1% and place it in our (your) hands; their wealth and power depends on our work, our consumption, our compliance with, and our belief in their system.  It is a fraudulent and life-destroying system.

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Be sure to checkout their link...

"Adbusters invites economics students around the world – especially PhD students – to join the fight to revamp Econ 101 curriculums and challenge the endemic myopia of their tenured neoclassical profs...download the [manifesto] and pin them up in the corridors of your department...Put your university at the forefront of the monumental mindshift now underway in the 'science' of economics."

How Capitalism Works:
The Children of Sodom and Gomorrah; Third Coast International Radio podcast April 2012

by Jens Jarisch and Sharon Davis (360 Documentaries, 2011)
"Sodom and Gomorrah is a hellish neighborhood in Accra, Ghana, where children eke out a living on a scrap heap of discarded computers that the West no longer needs. The children scavenge and then sell computer parts for a pittance, while they dream of escaping illegally to Europe."

Capitalism relies on cheap labor, extraction and disposal, all of which cause suffering world-wide.  
For an excellent sketch lecture of the process see: 
The Story of Stuff 

Work Free, Jane and Eden 

Some of the best social commentary art we've seen...

The Wrecking Ball of Innovation, Tony Judt
A review of Robert Reich's Supercapitalism: The Transformation of Business, Democracy and Everyday Life
New York Review of Books December 6, 2007

     In this wide ranging review, written before the economic crisis, Tony Judt, professor of European Studies at New York University, and a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, reveals the deeply held beliefs and assumptions clung to by even our most liberal economists.  Judt lambastes Reich for giving into the tautology that capitalism is a good for its own sake.  Reich's Supercapitalism is just the natural progression of a natural phenomena, and though Reich does a good job of elucidating the debilitating consequences of the resultant inequality, his prescription to address these ills are both superficial and weak amounting to the great majority of us becoming better, more active and diligent citizens on the watch.          

     "Reich's categories [for action] faithfully reflect his epistemologically thin view of society: by 'citizen' he means no more than economic man + enlightened self-interest" and fails to acknowledge that "The market requires norms, habits, and 'sentiments' external to itself to hold it together to ensure the political stability that capitalism needs in order to thrive."  Here again we find resonance with Adam Smith's forgotten principals.  That the market cannot supply many goods was well known to Smith (schools, roads, etc.) but Judt adds that the market has become like a secular religion, discarding anything without a direct value for its own reproduction--that is, productivity and growth.  Our normative framework on which exchange must be securely fastened is being "undermined"--the market "cannot reproduce the noncommercial institutions and relations--of cohesion, trust, custom, restraint, obligation, morality, authority--that it inherited..."  

     And so Judt says our present looks a lot like our past: in the Middle Ages the Church dictated an ironclad world view from which the Enlightenment freed us.  But capitalism, especially Supercapitalism, returns us to a similar box, this one wholly reductionist, beholden to productivity and growth, and without room for normative ideals.  A secular clerisy has replaced the clerics and our eschatology is now endless growth. 


     Judt wants us to survive this onslaught, as human beings.  "The idea of a society held together by pecuniary interests alone is, in Mill's words, 'essentially repulsive.'  A civilized society requires more than self interest, whether deluded or enlightened, for its shared narrative purpose."  And he argues that we desperately need increased public participation--our democracy is under assault from our economic system itself which has turned into a tool or method of oppression and fear (e.g. of unemployment and being at the mercy of globalization).  We cannot accept Supercapitalism but instead our economy must be made subservient to the general welfare, subordinate to meaningful lives.  "If modern democracies are to survive the shock of Reich's 'supercapitalism,' they need to be bound by something more than the pursuit of private economic advantage, particularly when the latter accrues to ever fewer beneficiaries..."                                                            


EJW

Market Man; What did Adam Smith really believe?   by Adam Gopnik. 
The New Yorker review of Nicholas Phillipson's Adam Smith: An Enlightened Life (Yale University Press 2011) 

"...By cutting off 'The Wealth of Nations' from his other great book, 'The Theory of Moral Sentiments,' we not only cut off one half of Smith’s mind from the other but lobotomize our own understanding of modern life, making economics into a stand-alone statistical quasi-science rather than, as Smith intended, a branch of the humanities. Phillipson’s new biography tries, very successfully, to pull together the two Smiths, letting us see how the man of feeling became the little god of finance. Tells about Smith’s childhood in Scotland, his friendship with philosopher David Hume, and the development of his ideas. Discusses the three main arguments Smith advances in 'The Wealth of Nations.'"

This is a must watch and must share video.  While Annie Leonard doesn't specifically mention capitalism, it is exactly what she is describing...
Story of Stuff
Annie's Home Page...check it out.
Apple fan?  Watch this short clip, Sixteen Hundred iPhones a Day, from UsAgainstGreed.  Capitalism depends on resource exploitation, human and natural.

Great Books
The Enigma of Capital, David Harvey   Oxford University Press 2010

     The most obvious causes of the current financial crisis are the technological and organizational changes over the last thirty years empowering finance and solidifying a state-finance nexus, says David Harvey in his book The Enigma of Capital.  The underlying cause—the core of the problem—is that capital has cornered too much power inflicting itself with an effective demand problem that it relieved with widespread indebtedness.  
     
     But this is an opportunity, one that hasn’t come along since at least the 1930’s, and Harvey is cautiously optimistic and determined to take advantage of it.   This is the exegesis of Enigma.  By elucidating the inherent contradictions within capitalism, Harvey hopes to make clear that it not only doesn’t fulfill its promise of prosperity but also that it causes widespread harm.  Periods of prosperity spread wealth unevenly while engendering poverty and a host of ills.  Periodic episodes of collapse are endemic to capitalism and the occurring ever more frequently concentrating pain throughout the working class—that is, everywhere outside the capitalist class. Driven by both coercive competition and the inherent need to reinvest its profits Capital must find a way around barriers of geography, regulation, the environment and so on. 
     
     Harvey hopes a fuller understanding of the system that causes crisis will open a space for change--and indeed, nothing less than a complete reorganization of the economy, and all its related spheres is required.  

According to Wiki: "David Harvey…is the Distinguished Professor of Anthropology at the City University of New York (CUNY).  A leading social theorist of international standing, he received his PhD in Geography from the University of Cambridge in 1961.  Widely influential, he is among the top 20 most cited authors in the humanities…His world has contributed greatly to broad social and political debate…He is a leading proponent of the idea of the right to the city (A movement that claims a right of access to, and development of common space belongs in the hands of the community, enabling their “collective power to reshape the processes of urbanization.” (Wiki)                                                                                                                                                                  EJW

 Buy "The Enigma of Capital here":  betterworldbooks.com/ 


David Harvey: The Crisis of Capitalism, sketch lecture by RSA Animate.  
April 26, 2010 (11 mins.)

 A wonderful short explanation in which Harvey concludes "We have a duty to change our mode of thinking..."  Or as Einstein has been reputed to say, "No problem is solved using the same consciousness that created it."

"The Enigma of Capital" 
David Harvey at the London School of Economics; Lecture and Book Tour

26th April, 2010 
(The first of six 10 minute lecture sections) 

What Can Economists Know?  Rethinking foundations for economic understandings

Gerd Gigerenzer, PhD
INET Conference, Berlin April 12, 2012. 
A critically important talk given by psychologist Gerd Gigerenzer on the efficacy of economic decision-making that effectively demolishes the foundation of current economic thinking.   

"Almost all neoclassical, neuro-economics and behavioral economics makes decisions based on risk—that is, when all alternatives, all consequences and all probabilities are known."  Modeling works with risk, but not Uncertainty, argues Gigerenzer.  And of course the world is filled with uncertainty, of which, the recent near-collapse of the financial system is just one example.  And we would add, proof of the immeasurable hubris of Wall Street.  But this hubris is not limited to Wall Street, it pervades our entire economics because it is built on economists' ability to model reality.  This modelling of reality, actually creates reality, a world of pleonexia, competition and collapse.

Heuristics are better, Gigerenzer argues. “We must dare a science of heuristics…which are normative…and how most humans and animals make decisions most of the time." Gigerenzer is arguing for a human understanding of the world.  Recognizing both our limits and our strengths he favors simplicity, "complex problems don’t require complex solutions...and "very often less can be more.”  EJW

-GERD GIGERENZER is Director of the Center for Adaptive Behavior and Cognition at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development in Berlin 
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Art by Adbusters: kickitover.org/econ-101

    Another picture from Liu Bolin...in Slate Magazine

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