The origin may be an ancient one, that idea, peculiar to many, which asserted that making business is dirty business. Money is ugly. It appears to be a Medieval concept and a Greek and Roman notion that looked negatively upon artisans, craftsmen, merchants and other similar types who lived by toil. We hold onto this idea which equates making business with demonic greed with an equal view of the “honest living” as benefit within the context of tolerable sin. Today, there are so many critics of capitalism, in part, because it is inherently good; especially if we compare life before commerce, say Feudalism, with things like child mortality, the birth of democracy and the reduction of violence compared to its firsthand and daily experience of long ago.
Slavoj Zizek: ( see link at end) In mid-April 2011, the Chinese government prohibited on TV, films, and novels all stories that contain alternate reality or time travel. This is a good sign for China. These people still dream about alternatives, so you have to prohibit this dreaming. Here, we don’t need a prohibition because the ruling system has even oppressed our capacity to dream. Look at the movies that we see all the time. It’s easy to imagine the end of the world. An asteroid destroying all life and so on. But you cannot imagine the end of capitalism….
( response to Chris Hedges)...This is why I feel compelled to respond to your statement “The Cancer in Occupy.” This statement is not only factually inaccurate, it is quite literally dangerous. This is the sort of misinformation that really can get people killed. In fact, it is far more likely to do so, in my estimation, than anything done by any black-clad teenager throwing rocks. Read More:http://www.disinfo.com/2012/02/a-black-bloc-rebuttal-to-chris-hedges/
They are saying we are all losers, but the true losers are down there on Wall Street. They were bailed out by billions of our money. We are called socialists, but here there is always socialism for the rich. They say we don’t respect private property, but in the 2008 financial crash-down more hard-earned private property was destroyed than if all of us here were to be destroying it night and day for weeks. They tell you we are dreamers. The true dreamers are those who think things can go on indefinitely the way they are. We are not dreamers. We are the awakening from a dream that is turning into a nightmare….
We interrupt Mr. Zizek for this commercial break… Obviously we need social activists, academics, and politicians dedicated to human welfare. But, more than these occupations, it is going to be the manufacturers,buyers-sellers, and the financiers in whose domain the future of our earth lies. And with regard to OWS movement, a nihilistic demise of capitalism is not desirable. Maybe more Small is Beautiful, a redemptive form of capitalism engaged in the questions that Jefferson raised about stewardship, and the turning over of the earth and financial system in better shape than it was received, is where we should be looking.
The reason is that capitalism needs consumers, and the very poor can’t afford to consume. Also, capitalism requires an educated workforce, which means education beginning at an early age. Capitalism requires renewable resources, which unsustainable, non-ecological practices cannot furnish over the long run. We just have to figure out how to make the best of it, without scrapping it for some pie in the sky anarchism of a Noam Chomsky or replacing the money and banking system with Zizekism. Any perusal through the works of Milan Kundera should be enough to convince that Socialism is about as depressing as it gets.
---And, importantly, people in black blocs don’t have “unity” with one another about politics. This is another bizarre part of Hedges’ hatchet job. He goes on this long diatribe about what “The Black Bloc Movement” (this weird straw Frankenstein he’s created) believes. We learn in his piece that this Frankenstein is “against organization” when members of the black bloc, anarchists included, have all kinds of ideas about organization (none of which are “against organization”). If Chris did a little research, he’d find that “The Black Bloc Papers,” for example, were edited and compiled by two members of a formal political organization. And while many anarchists do reject formal political organizations, no anarchists oppose “organization” as such. Rather, we have disagreements over organizational form, duration, formality, purpose, and so on. Not to state the obvious, but considering our collective failure to smash capitalism, the state, and all other manifestations of coercive power over others, uh, shouldn’t we be building those kinds of critiques? If Hedges were interested in honesty, he might know that’s also why many anarchists are critical of the Left (I imagine dishonest and divisive hatchet jobs by Leftist celebrities like this one is another reason why more and more anarchists reject the Left—among its many other shortcomings and failures).---Read More:http://www.revolutionbythebook.akpress.org/to-be-fair-he-is-a-journalist-a-short-response-to-chris-hedges-on-the-black-bloc/
Zizek …We are not destroying anything. We are only witnessing how the system is destroying itself. We all know the classic scene from cartoons. The cat reaches a precipice but it goes on walking, ignoring the fact that there is nothing beneath this ground.Read More:http://www.disinfo.com/2011/10/slavoj-zizek-speaks-at-occupy-wall-street/
Pieter Bruegel the Elder. Children Playing. Steven Plaut:Scandinavian “socialism” is really just capitalism with high taxes used to finance a high level of welfare state services. Scandinavian countries have low levels of nationalization of capital and also of regulation of business. - Scandinavian “socialism” has not eliminated poverty in Scandinavian countries. The poverty rates among non-Scandinavians living in those countries are rather high. Scandinavians themselves have low poverty rates regardless of the economic system under which they live or the country in which they live because they work hard and are educated. - "Soak the rich" policies generate far, far less tax revenue than the “Occupiers” and their kin think. That is partly because there are far fewer “soakable” rich people than the Occupiers think, and they are already taxed so highly that raising their taxes further could actually produce LESS tax revenue, because of “Laffer Curve” style incentive effects, especially after the first year of soakingly high taxation. - Those who whine that it is impossible to find a job in America will have to explain how it is that every single illegal immigrant in the US who does not even speak English manages to find a job....Read More:http://ceuweekly.blogspot.ca/2012/02/polemic-professor-steven-plaut-shares.html
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