$ The Capitalism Thread $ - Is it sustainable? - Are we living fulfilled lives?

Originally Posted by Langur (Post 98479192)

And what do you think built Hong Kong or Vitória in your pictures above? Socialism? The green movement perhaps?

And where did the national parks movement take off (another rich seam for your posts in this thread). Ah yes, the arch capitalist United States!!

Originally Posted by wjfox (Post 98479244)

Science and technology built Hong Kong and Vitória.

Originally Posted by Cherguevara (Post 98482301)

Tossing around words like that is meaningless anyway. A communist at the most fundamental level is someone who believes all property should be held in common for the benefit of the community. A socialist someone who believes that the workers should own the means of production. But if those are your ideals it doesn't follow that you advocate Marxist-Lennism or any of the various political models of socialism which have been applied throughout the world, in the same way that believing in Christ the risen son of God makes you automatically a 7th Day Adventist or a Quaker. Similarly a capitalist doesn't have to advocate sending children down the mines; they just believe in the ability of a free market to regulate itself.

Originally Posted by VaastuShastra

I am broadly speaking in favour of exactly what you are in favour of - resource based society - it's just that I no longer believe it will simply arise by itself, or even perhaps through democratic change - the forces arrayed against it are too powerful and too concentrated. So I favour socialism as a means to an end; it is the only system that has ever been able to face that concentration of power - the military/industrial/media/political complex.

I think we have the technological means right now (perhaps we have even had the means since the 70s or 80s), to feed, clothe and house everyone, and provide them freedom - and that our current means of organisation has prevented this. But I don't advocate spending planetary resources beyond our means - depleting forests, ocean stocks, mineral wealth, and air quality.

Originally Posted by wjfox (Post 98485170)

From the Stone Age, to the present day, the main creator of wealth has been science and technology. Money and capitalism just rode the wave of success from the scientific method. To insist that there's no alternative to capitalism - a system that is blatantly unsustainable in the long run - just seems incredibly short-sighted and unimaginative to me.

Originally Posted by VaastuShastra

I don't believe that at all - I think the media is at the most powerful it has ever been; and there are good reasons (statistical and otherwise) for me to believe our living standards are not heading in the right direction. People think that a totalitarian state has the most sophisticated type of censorship; but totalitarian states with their 'great firewalls' are positively obvious and easy to overcome compared to the much more effective strategy employed in consumer democracies. The power of association and repetition - our form of censorship, is to repeat the assertion enough times, through enough 'credible' sources, that other information channels become irrelevant - they are utterly overwhelmed. Another component of this is the association of evidence with emotions, to make people accept them - I've seen how effective it is amongst lower middle class and working class people personally - people who get riled up over whatever they read in the tabloids - whilst ignoring issues that take more time and effort to inform about, and voting based on meaningless sound-bytes. But the 'serious media' are just as bad - the upper middle class require more sophisticated means of convincing - association of foreign wars with the spread of women's rights, etc. Control of information in an authoritarian state is done by really overt and easy to spot censorship of books and websites. Control of information in liberal states is accomplished by dumping your idea far more than anyone else, through every outlet you can possibly co-opt - and associating the idea with positive words, while associating opposition to the idea with fear and negativity. This then does not look like censorship at all - people have the illusion of freedom - and the idea is then even repeated by popular artists - Hollywood films and video games start being made that promote the same world-view. The beginning of the chain was misrepresentation, lies, lack of sourcing, censorship by omission, and censorship by association - the end of the chain is popular movies reinforcing ideas. Some people have an almost religious belief that the internet is a free and open forum for ideas; but actually, it has arguably obscured the truth even further - as people can write whatever un-sourced opinion they want and pass it off as respectable fact.

I urge you to read 'Manufacturing Consent' by Noam Chomsky, for an example of this. And I urge you to watch 'The Century of the Self'', as well as every other Adam Curtis documentary you can, for a fair view of the power of the media. For a more comedic and light-hearted view, Chalie Brooker's 'How TV Ruined Your Life', is quite amusing, but obviously nowhere near as damning or well-referenced/sourced.

A TV show on C4, or a BBC 24 hour rolling news channel, or a major paper, has more credibility to most people than a Wikileak or Blog - which takes time, effort, and political/legal education to read.

Originally Posted by Octoman (Post 98486903)

Standards of living are massively higher though. Just look at car ownership, foreign holidays, electronic gadgetry, central heating, outside versus inside toilets, life expectancy, literacy and so on over the past 50 years. There is no comparison. There are people who have dropped through the cracks sure. Being really poor sucks. Always has done and always will do. However, the average quality of life for people, all things considered has been on an upward trajectory for many decades. You only have to walk down the street to see this. Would you rather live in Victorian Britain or Britain today? Post was austere Britain or Britain today? 80's Britain or Britain today? Or is it a case of late 90's Britain was really great and why can't it be that again?

We are going through a cyclical pinch and it isnt very nice. It will pass like they all do. I would also hazzard a guess that we will go through a downturn like this a couple more times in our lives.

Originally Posted by Octoman (Post 98487169)

We can moan and say houses are more expensive now or whatever. That is more a function of poopulation growth, demographic changes and mistakes in the management of the housing stock. However, on pretty much every level that counts we are better off. The irony really is that we can sit here whinging about how hard we have it sat in front of personal computers - something that would have been unimagineable to our parents.

Originally Posted by VaastuShastra (Post 98487182)

Asking if I would rather live in Victorian Britain or Britain today is pointless - I obviously don't want to live in an era before the labour movement, before penicillin, before the UN Charter of Human rights. But ask me whether I would rather live in 1950s USA, or 1960s Britain to today? I wouldn't mind that so much - but every drawback that concerns me, has nothing to do with lack of consumer products - and everything to do with scientific progress and human rights. I wouldn't want to see MacCarthism first hand - I can live without an Xbox 360.

Originally Posted by VaastuShastra

Since I'm going to visit some friends tomorrow for a Christmas break and am running out of time to prepare, I'm gonna try writing a small abstract of what I intended to say, hopefully to be expanded on later.

I am sorry that this post will not contain as many citations and sources as I intended.

---

Are we living better lives now than decades ago?

1). Scientific mitigating factors

A lot of the improvement in our lives in recent decades, has come not from an improvement in the availability of material things, but from advances in science, which are apolitical.

2). Time - The Most Valuable Commodity

We have less time now than ever to spend with our families and friends - and on self-improvement. With greater access to transport - greater efficiency - greater productivity - greater automation - we should now be working shorter hours than in the 1950s. We are in fact raising the retirement age, and people are working longer hours than ever.

Additionally, the workforce has grown almost 50% larger in the same amount of time - a man would previously support an entire family, while a woman would raise that family - when women entered the workforce, you would have expected that the amount of hours a family spent working could be reduced - instead, both people work longer - and have less time than ever to raise their family properly and see their children.

Why? Because real wages have not risen since the 1970s in America, and the UK, while a different case, probably has similar history.







People don't so much work to live, as work to exist.

Corporations are legally compelled to put profit above all other motivations.

So, instead of raising real wages, they have fuelled continued growth in profit by keeping them low, or even reducing them.

But how can consumerism continue to exist, when it requires a well-funded body of consumers to buy useless shit?

The credit card was invented - almost exactly around the time when real wages stopped rising. So, the consumers, without any rise in real wages, were able to buy more - and the interest repayments also enrich corporations more too. The wage slave is now additionally a debt slave.

How can we possibly say that living standards have improved when nobody has time to actually live any more? Do people actually enjoy their lives more because they have products and no time to enjoy them? Stress is increasing (major cause of morbidity and death) - as well as all. People are more distanced from their product (and source of pride), working in extremely cerebral and stressing jobs, with less job security than ever - and more and more foreign competition and unemployed competitors for their jobs than ever.





3). Consumer Goods

You know I am a lover of technology - a Star Trek fan - a technology geek - yet I would not say that having consumer electronics is a major source of happiness in life - in anyone's life. If I hadn't been a computer geek - I would have had an imagination - if I hadn't had an imagination, I would have had a public library.

The increased availability of consumer goods, hasn't really reflected the fact that real wages aren't rising and that we get less for our labour than ever before - because they are cheaply sourced from other countries, with vastly different standards of living.

It is an utter distortion - an mp3 player can be bought for less than a piece of meat! A bunch of vegetables can cost more than a burger in a restaurant! And people wonder why poor families buy 20 bars of chocolate for 99p instead of spending £10 on ingredients they have no time to cook.

£6.50 on Amazon:



£5.50 on Sainsbury's:





Basic things needed to have a good life and good health, have either stayed the same, or become more costly in real terms. Time has become ridiculously scarce. Are we living better now than in past decades?

Do we need more consumer products?

4). Jobs

Have jobs become more fulfilling or less? People no longer have to go down mines. But actually, physical work provided satisfaction, and was not mentally stressful. There was no being paid 'on commission' - no wondering where your next sale is coming from - no distorting your personality just to get an intern position. Wage slavery is wage slavery, so I am not glamorising repetitive manual labour - but having some measure of job security, and seeing the product of your labour is something most service sector workers can hardly dream of.

"But modern work has worse implications. People don’t just work, they have “jobs.” One person does one productive task all the time on an or-else basis. Even if the task has a quantum of intrinsic interest (as increasingly many jobs don’t) the monotony of its obligatory exclusivity drains its ludic potential. A “job” that might engage the energies of some people, for a reasonably limited time, for the fun of it, is just a burden on those who have to do it for forty hours a week with no say in how it should be done, for the profit of owners who contribute nothing to the project, and with no opportunity for sharing tasks or spreading the work among those who actually have to do it."

My own parents tell me how much easier it was to find work in previous decades, and how much more relaxed the clerical and office work they did was. My mother a few years ago, went to work at a bank, where she was chained to the desk - having to swipe a card just to go to the lavatory - having to explain every wasted minute. My own experience is that the lower-level service industry is a place of relentless exploitation for those not lucky enough to be part of some ethically run company (i.e. 90% of workers). The quest for efficiency has turned much work into nothing more than a prison.

This culture of constant surveillance is something dictators and emperors could only dream of.

"The degradation which most workers experience on the job is the sum of assorted indignities which can be denominated as “discipline.” Foucault has complexified this phenomenon but it is simple enough. Discipline consists of the totality of totalitarian controls at the workplace—surveillance, rotework, imposed work tempos, production quotas, punching-in and out, etc. Discipline is what the factory and the office and the store share with the prison and the school and the mental hospital. It is something historically original and horrible. It was beyond the capacities of such demonic dictators of yore as Nero and Genghis Khan and Ivan the Terrible. For all their bad intentions they just didn’t have the machinery to control their subjects as thoroughly as modern despots do."

"The demeaning system of domination I’ve described rules over half the waking hours of a majority of women and the vast majority of men for decades, for most of their lifespans."

"Socrates said that manual laborers make bad friends and bad citizens because they have no time to fulfill the responsibilities of friendship and citizenship."

I do not think so.

Life expectancy is unrelated to capitalism - it is a function of medical advance, education, and free time - it is currently having to deal with increases in 'diseases of affluence' - alcoholism, heart disease, diabetes, chronic depression, drug addiction, suicide, etc.

Literacy is a function of education.

Cars, gadgets, foreign holidays - do these trivial things really make us happy?

Smoking kills millions.

Once upon a time, smoking in public was seen as unacceptable for women.

How did this change?

Edward Bernays, the nephew of Sigmund Freud, and father of the Public Relations industry, applied his uncle's theories to marketing.

He handed out cigarettes to women engaged in a women's rights march, and got them to light up - they were dubbed by him "torches of freedom" - in the popular psychology, they became a symbol of rebellion and sexuality.

Most of the marketing industry today feeds of neurosis.

The deliberate aim of most marketing is to make a person feel inferior - and make them buy an item in order to feel better about themselves.



An unattainable image is presented - a product is associated with this high degree of class, or education, or individuality. The person watching it feels inadequate on some level (even subconscious). They associate the product with relief of this existential fear.

The product was never necessary.

By their first year, babies can recognise different brands. By the time they can talk, they are asking their parents for the specific brand. "Take me to McDonalds", rather than "I want food."

This is a vastly simplified look at the truly Byzantine complexity of marketing. As sociologists have noted, television has more power than the Catholic Church once did - where people had to go to hear a sermon every Sunday, with all it's complex guilt and shame psychology - now many families sit in front of the tube for dozens of hours a week. The Church could have only dreamed of that much control of information.

Let's not even get started on war, politics, and economics - and how they are utterly distorted by either over-saturation or complete omission of information.