In Reply to: Capitalism posted by John Kafarski on January 11, 1997 at 13:13:51:
> Hello out there..> ..this is my first time actually sharing my ideas out in the open
> other people that share my opinions. I hope I can add to the
> discussion and shed light on the problems at hand. This is my
> beef: Capitalism empowers an elite few to control and manipulate
> society and that power should not be taken lightly and if at all
> possible, must not be made available to an elite few.Yup. The adage goes that the people you shouldn't trust with power
anyone who actually wants it.> ..the other day I started thinking (I am a philosophy major at
> Rutgers University) and I am getting very interested in picking
> apart capitalism and aiding in the cause to bring it down.
> However, I have yet to find any alternatives, partly because
> this is the very first research of any kind I have done.Right, well there are any number of alternatives, the big
trouble is that case studies tend to be small/obscure/short lived
under the lash of capitalism.The Marxists will argue that no true Marxist society has
yet existed and that it is a society on which you can
run a planet. I'm no professional, so I won't piss people
off by holding forth for or against. The one feeling I
will air in public is that I find Marxism inherently
rule-based, and thus vulnerable to the personality cult.Similarly, the Leninists/Stalinists/Revolutionary Socialist
Eggplants will say that the societies extant don't really
represent their ideologies. Which is fine and good, but the
effective thing about capitalism is that its ideology bends
to fit the world (to a certain extent) and that it requires
no ardent supporters, just human sheep. Which does tend to
mean that attempts to overthrow the status quo get swamped
in this tide of inertia.Anarchists range from the "fluffy-and-ineffective" (that's me!)
to the nihilist "lets-break-everything-down-for-the-hell-of-it"
brigade. No stable anarchist society has ever really existed.
This could well be due to the tendency of anarchists to be out
of order - they can take internecine squabbles to really stupid
proportions. Remember the Judaean Popular Front and the People's
Front of Judaea? They share this problem with the Marxists and
revolutionary socialists above, and will while away hours trying
to find the best way to confound each other. The world's states
have been known to encourage this behaviour - it keeps them out
of the line of fire.This is a bit of a digression, but it's worth stating that the
viability of a cause is compromised by infighting amongst
yourselves, especially when your opponents present a more-or-less
united front.Also, a society that depends upon brilliant and inspired activists
doing their bit and forgiving transgressors is heading for a fairly
hard fall - a stable, long-term society has to be able to cope with
lazy egomaniac morons. One of the insidious things about capitalism
is that it can do this - we just put the lazy egomaniac morons in
charge.I don't know if there is a viable alternative. I hope so, since I
think the world is doomed under capitalism. In my opinion, any
system has to have the following priorities:1. The Earth comes first.
2. Maximal freedom and tolerance.
3. Global equality of opportunity.I know it sounds vague and wishy-washy, but that's just my $0.02
Gideon.
> ..that is about all the rambling I am going to do now, so I hope
> to hear from ya's and maybe I can enlighten myself to the point
> where I know what I am talking about.