dagNotes: On Using Capitalist Rhetoric; or, Stop using “The Fed”
Only the Sith deal in absolutes. Having problems with capitalism in its current form, which one can argue from a number of angles isn’t actually capitalism and certainly isn’t a free market economy, does not mean advocating socialism. If anything, it’s the corporate bailouts and subsidies to industries that most resemble socialism.
…full of shit. The fed is the real problem and the massive distribution inequalities. The fed are putting us in never ending debt. The bailouts go to the banks and back to the rich. The problem is trickle down economics and the idea that capitalism isn’t the problem. Because it is impossible to stop monopolies and big business from killing it’s people. For profit healthcare? For profit innovation? For profit non-sustaining food production? Control over oil and other resources still making profit while we pay highest gas prices and see no new hydrogen powered cars that were created in the 80’s? Fuck capitalism and it’s division it’s about time we learn to share and start saving this planet now. Capitalism and corporate greed go hand in hand it’s inevitable as long as there are huge disparities in wealth.
^ That commentary. I have nothing to add.
There is no such thing as The Fed. Start speaking about how things like the banking system and the money economy actually work and stop using hollow, meaningless rhetoric that was made up by capitalist libertarians to spook people into thinking about bad ideas like returning to the gold standard. The federal reserve is a problem, but you need to be able to discuss why.
And I’m beginning to think that many people don’t really understand what’s wrong with capitalism because they don’t really understand what a market is and how exchange works. Rhetoric replaces the need to know anything. It’s easy to learn how to use without the need to understand what it means. We use it because it’s efficient, but in using it we are failing to educate others. Let’s educate one another.
No offense to the two responders. It’s a wonderful sentiment in philosologic’s post. But I cringe when I read things like “Capitalism and corporate greed go hand in hand it’s inevitable as long as there are huge disparities in wealth.” I mean, this is treated like some kind of conclusion rather than the very beginning of the examination.
Inequality is a problem. But we should be explicit about what needs to be changed. We have a system of cooperation in capitalist society between employees and employers that lends itself to cultivating a myth of upward social mobility. The vertical integration of society insists wealth be redistributed upward. Corporations and The Fed, whatever that is, are not to blame for this social organization. So why link huge disparities and wealth to things that are the result of human action? Why do these corrupt organizations exist when so many people hate them? (The key is that capitalists have organized society to work on behalf of capitalism. The Austrian ethos is anti-social. Nature is organized by the social order of the market. Liberalism itself is capitalist-ic.)
The problem with crass libertarianism is that it relies on a capitalist framework of the liberal social order of the free market to construct a critique of capitalism itself. And you can’t very well be anti-capitalist while uncritically using capitalist language, capitalist metaphor, capitalist symbols. The Fed is a capitalist symbol that represents a coercive state apparatus that burdens an ideally constructed free individual (heterosexual, white male and his family) from achieving wealth. It’s a key symbol in capitalist libertarianism. It’s not anti-capitalist.
Let’s get this shit right. Take the time to type good explanations, strong arguments, in meaningful language. Confronting capitalism begins with your desire to act out against it in public and to reject its pervasive language.
(via reasonedoverreaction)
