Whatever one wants to call whatever takes its place, it is the inhumanity, even murderous criminal insanity of the totally materialist and mindless capitalist system that we are living through right now. Those of us who merely try to make it a bit less monstrous, are more acquiescent to its continuance, than to its being replaced with something more intelligently human.
Recommend for clear and simple analysis of the basics of capital function and its dire need to be all-engulfing and all-overwhelming: "THE ENEMY OF NATURE - THE END OF CAPITALISM OR THE END OF THE WORLD", by JOEL KOVEL, 2002.
For capitalism's post-WWII human destruction techniques: "CONFESSIONS OF AN ECONOMIC HIT MAN - HOW THE U.S. USES GLOBALIZATION TO CHEAT POOR COUNTRIES OUT OF TRILLIONS", by JOHN PERKINS, 2004
For recent perfidy in the world of mega (Capitalist) finance taking homicidal advantage of defenseless small nations especially during natural disasters: "THE SHOCK DOCTRINE – THE RISE OF DISASTER CAPITALISM" by NAOMI KLEIN, 2007
For understanding what is fomenting within impoverished "majority society" and not just as we in the affluent "minority society" perceive the masses of our trashed brothers and sisters: "GRASSROOTS POSTMODERNISM - REMAKING THE SOIL OF CULTURES" by GUSTAVO ESTEVA and MADHU SURI PRAKASH, though published in 1998 - largely unnoticed in our 'minority society'.
(Don't be but off by the academic sounding titles of these four works - they are each poignantly penetrating and heartfelt in tone with text relating to real human experience.)
This then is your journalist-historian's offering: A Four Book Course For Extricating Oneself From Complicity In Capitalist Crimes. A particular tacking of the sails within today's oceans of despair?
The United States, already controlling half the resources of the planet, is compelled to continue machinations and murderous violence to increase that present ownership under the mindless drive of accumulated capital growth for immediate highest returns on 'investment', and as an sociopolitical entity out of any sane control, is quite simply unable to reflect accountable consideration of human cost and ecological consequences.
There is however hope! Read John Maynard Keynes describing our coming era in "The Economic Possibilities of Our Grandchildren":
"In this millennium, wealth will no longer be of social import, morals will change, and we shall be able to rid ourselves of the pseudo-moral principles which have hag-ridden us for two hundred years, by which we have exalted some of the most distasteful of human qualities into the position of the highest virtues. We will be able to dare to assess the money motive at its true value.
The love of money as a possession - as distinguished from love of money as a means to the enjoyments and realities of life - will be recognized for what it is, a somewhat disgusting morbidity, one of those semi-criminal, semi-pathological propensities, which one hands over with a shudder to the specialists in MENTAL DISEASE."
Demand sanity! Ask that private ownership of the globe be recognized as a delusion.
Musician and writer, who has lived and worked on all the continents and whose articles on media have been published in China, Italy, England and the US, and now resides in New York City.
The views expressed in this article are the sole responsibility of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of this website or its editors.
I basically agree -- but at the same time, it's clear to me
that such a terse, blunt assertion of the case against capitalism will never be taken seriously by those who don't already agree.
To put it mildly, it's deeply regrettable that it's so difficult to get people to examine this all-important subject. Most Americans simply assume that capitalism is "good," the same way they'd accept their own religious faith, & the same way they accept the idea that America is "good."
Underlying the entire spectacle of American politics is the defense of capitalism itself, though this subject is so sacred & so much an article of faith that it's rarely even mentioned by name in what passes for US "political dialogue."
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Richard Mynick (2 articles, 4 quicklinks, 1 diaries, 1552 comments [255 recommended, 5 rejected]) on Sunday, Dec 2, 2007 at 12:41:08 PM
When this writer was a child, the word 'capitalist' was used exclusively in a pejorative, selfish and advantage taking, sense. Capitalist owned media has cleaned up the term to mean someone enterprising in very helpful and very necessary ways. But during WWII, the cold war and even today news media anchors avoid mentioning the still ugly word 'capitalism', and deceptively promote the idea that 'freedom' and 'democracy' are the opposite of, and alternative to, communism and socialism. So encouragingly one can notice that even our corporate conglomerate governance masters and hacks can only go so far in their distortions.
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Jay Janson (105 articles, 0 quicklinks, 7 diaries, 117 comments [4 recommended, 0 rejected]) on Sunday, Dec 2, 2007 at 3:50:49 PM
Care to explore strategies for more effective ways to expose the dyfunctions of the capitalist mode of production? How about starting a group right here on OpEdNews.com to focus such a discussion? I feel the same way you do about the pervasive shallowness and ignorance exhibited by most about the controlling mechanisms we are subject to on a daily basis. Surely the means for increasing the numbers of those like us, who strive to understand how in late capitalist society uniformity masquerades as diversity and servitude as freedom, can be investigated and perhaps even implemented. I'll keep an eye out for your response.
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Cameron James (0 articles, 4 quicklinks, 2 diaries, 19 comments) on Thursday, Dec 6, 2007 at 12:52:24 AM
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