[Quinny]

KJ is set in his ways, no way he wants to learn. Capital like it's title is still the best analysis of the system to date. It's also studied by many who are very successful in the City!

[KaiserJeep]

I have no interest in reading a philosophy that does not work. Always remember that a book that fails when it is used as a manual for living, is just an entertaining read. It has no significance whatsoever in the real world.

If you disagree, point to any country that is based upon Marx's theories, and explain why it's a success. Because I find that number to be zero. Either (as you noted) they didn't do it right or (the usual case) they did it right and failed.

Communism has no successes whatsoever. Get a clue, Marx was wrong.

I also don't buy that things are going to change a whole lot, or very suddenly, when oil gets very expensive. I think we are looking at a period of several decades during which the infrastructure we have, the social conventions we have, the economic system we have, all evolve as a response to extreme stress. People are not given to changing things, instead they cling to what possessions, habits, beliefs, and customs they have. The world will still be divided into the haves and have-nots, and politics will be practiced, and wars will be fought, and people will sicken, grow old, and die as they always have. Unless you are one of the very few privileged to leave this increasingly squalid globe and live in a good neighborhood.

After which, the odd thoughts of an obscure 19th century writer will have even less relevance than they do today.

[Lore]

Modern capitalism has yet to prove it's a success. It's still a work in progress that depends on a ponzi scheme for it to survive. Pull the plug on out of control growth and it will fail like any other system that loses its underpinnings. Mankind has yet to compromise in order to establish its true social economic equilibrium.

[Subjectivist]

The profit motive has always been a motivator from the day money was invented. To pretend it will stop motivating some people in the future is unrealistic in my view, unless you manage to create a barter only society. Even then some people love stuff so much they would look for ways to get more than they physically need.

[Quinny]

In what way was Marx wrong?

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('KaiserJeep', 'I') have no interest in reading a philosophy that does not work. Always remember that a book that fails when it is used as a manual for living, is just an entertaining read. It has no significance whatsoever in the real world.

If you disagree, point to any country that is based upon Marx's theories, and explain why it's a success. Because I find that number to be zero. Either (as you noted) they didn't do it right or (the usual case) they did it right and failed.

Communism has no successes whatsoever. Get a clue, Marx was wrong.

I also don't buy that things are going to change a whole lot, or very suddenly, when oil gets very expensive. I think we are looking at a period of several decades during which the infrastructure we have, the social conventions we have, the economic system we have, all evolve as a response to extreme stress. People are not given to changing things, instead they cling to what possessions, habits, beliefs, and customs they have. The world will still be divided into the haves and have-nots, and politics will be practiced, and wars will be fought, and people will sicken, grow old, and die as they always have. Unless you are one of the very few privileged to leave this increasingly squalid globe and live in a good neighborhood.

After which, the odd thoughts of an obscure 19th century writer will have even less relevance than they do today.

[vision-master]

A cruel joke set up to reduce or strip average people of the ability to purchase heat in the winter through extra taxation. Which is more than cruel, because people will die.

They have died in Africa, already, because we won't allow them to build any new coal powered plants or they lose their IMF loans. This keeps them so poor they are literally starving to death by the tens of thousands. In some African countries they can't even cook their evening meal anymore because their little bit of charcoal has been outlawed due to AGW threats. Most that manage to survive in these areas are consigned to a very poor quality of life that they could have improved markedly by themselves, had we had never "helped" them in the first place.

[Timo]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Quinny', 'I')n what way was Marx wrong?

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('KaiserJeep', 'I') have no interest in reading a philosophy that does not work. Always remember that a book that fails when it is used as a manual for living, is just an entertaining read. It has no significance whatsoever in the real world.

If you disagree, point to any country that is based upon Marx's theories, and explain why it's a success. Because I find that number to be zero. Either (as you noted) they didn't do it right or (the usual case) they did it right and failed.

Communism has no successes whatsoever. Get a clue, Marx was wrong.

I also don't buy that things are going to change a whole lot, or very suddenly, when oil gets very expensive. I think we are looking at a period of several decades during which the infrastructure we have, the social conventions we have, the economic system we have, all evolve as a response to extreme stress. People are not given to changing things, instead they cling to what possessions, habits, beliefs, and customs they have. The world will still be divided into the haves and have-nots, and politics will be practiced, and wars will be fought, and people will sicken, grow old, and die as they always have. Unless you are one of the very few privileged to leave this increasingly squalid globe and live in a good neighborhood.

After which, the odd thoughts of an obscure 19th century writer will have even less relevance than they do today.

[Quinny]

So are you saying selfishness is the natural state of affairs?

[americandream]

I will try and explain Marx's key points:

1 All of nature is governed by objective forces circumscribed by the material context (a non-mystical form of Hegelian dialecticism) or a variant of Darwinism (we look at Darwinism and immediately see it as validation selfishness in the survival of the fittest principle. That is incorrect as that particular principle also expresses itself in the selfless love of a parent or the bold valour of a comrade on the battle field, to name 2 common examples.).

2 Man's sentience captures and expresses these objective forces in the sense world of ideas. Nonetheless these forces circumscribe the sense world of man to its confines. So each epoch of mans cultural evolution has been marked by a crisis in the material context. Capitalism had a similar birth and what follows will similarly arise.

3 Marx then proceeds to define capitalism's contours, applying dialectic thought to the larger contextual picture. He describes the globalising picture thus:

Modern industry has established the world market, for which the discovery of America paved the way. This market has given an immense development to commerce, to navigation, to communication by land. This development has, in its turn, reacted on the extension of industry; and in proportion as industry, commerce, navigation, railways extended, in the same proportion the bourgeoisie developed, increased its capital, and pushed into the background every class handed down from the Middle Ages.

We see, therefore, how the modern bourgeoisie is itself the product of a long course of development, of a series of revolutions in the modes of production and of exchange.

He goes on to add:

The bourgeoisie, wherever it has got the upper hand, has put an end to all feudal, patriarchal, idyllic relations. It has pitilessly torn asunder the motley feudal ties that bound man to his “natural superiors”, and has left remaining no other nexus between man and man than naked self-interest, than callous “cash payment”. It has drowned the most heavenly ecstasies of religious fervour, of chivalrous enthusiasm, of philistine sentimentalism, in the icy water of egotistical calculation. It has resolved personal worth into exchange value, and in place of the numberless indefeasible chartered freedoms, has set up that single, unconscionable freedom — Free Trade. In one word, for exploitation, veiled by religious and political illusions, it has substituted naked, shameless, direct, brutal exploitation.

The bourgeoisie has stripped of its halo every occupation hitherto honoured and looked up to with reverent awe. It has converted the physician, the lawyer, the priest, the poet, the man of science, into its paid wage labourers.

The bourgeoisie has torn away from the family its sentimental veil, and has reduced the family relation to a mere money relation.

And then he lays out the framework within which nationalism makes ways for globalisation, much to the consternation of the parochial nationalist, something we see on here daily:

The need of a constantly expanding market for its products chases the bourgeoisie over the entire surface of the globe. It must nestle everywhere, settle everywhere, establish connexions everywhere.

The bourgeoisie has through its exploitation of the world market given a cosmopolitan character to production and consumption in every country. To the great chagrin of Reactionists, it has drawn from under the feet of industry the national ground on which it stood. All old-established national industries have been destroyed or are daily being destroyed. They are dislodged by new industries, whose introduction becomes a life and death question for all civilised nations, by industries that no longer work up indigenous raw material, but raw material drawn from the remotest zones; industries whose products are consumed, not only at home, but in every quarter of the globe. In place of the old wants, satisfied by the production of the country, we find new wants, requiring for their satisfaction the products of distant lands and climes. In place of the old local and national seclusion and self-sufficiency, we have intercourse in every direction, universal inter-dependence of nations. And as in material, so also in intellectual production. The intellectual creations of individual nations become common property. National one-sidedness and narrow-mindedness become more and more impossible, and from the numerous national and local literatures, there arises a world literature.

These paragraphs capture, presciently, the unfolding of capitalism in its last days:

Into their place stepped free competition, accompanied by a social and political constitution adapted in it, and the economic and political sway of the bourgeois class.

A similar movement is going on before our own eyes. Modern bourgeois society, with its relations of production, of exchange and of property, a society that has conjured up such gigantic means of production and of exchange, is like the sorcerer who is no longer able to control the powers of the nether world whom he has called up by his spells. For many a decade past the history of industry and commerce is but the history of the revolt of modern productive forces against modern conditions of production, against the property relations that are the conditions for the existence of the bourgeois and of its rule. It is enough to mention the commercial crises that by their periodical return put the existence of the entire bourgeois society on its trial, each time more threateningly. In these crises, a great part not only of the existing products, but also of the previously created productive forces, are periodically destroyed. In these crises, there breaks out an epidemic that, in all earlier epochs, would have seemed an absurdity — the epidemic of over-production. Society suddenly finds itself put back into a state of momentary barbarism; it appears as if a famine, a universal war of devastation, had cut off the supply of every means of subsistence; industry and commerce seem to be destroyed; and why? Because there is too much civilisation, too much means of subsistence, too much industry, too much commerce. The productive forces at the disposal of society no longer tend to further the development of the conditions of bourgeois property; on the contrary, they have become too powerful for these conditions, by which they are fettered, and so soon as they overcome these fetters, they bring disorder into the whole of bourgeois society, endanger the existence of bourgeois property. The conditions of bourgeois society are too narrow to comprise the wealth created by them. And how does the bourgeoisie get over these crises? On the one hand by enforced destruction of a mass of productive forces; on the other, by the conquest of new markets, and by the more thorough exploitation of the old ones. That is to say, by paving the way for more extensive and more destructive crises, and by diminishing the means whereby crises are prevented.

The weapons with which the bourgeoisie felled feudalism to the ground are now turned against the bourgeoisie itself.

But not only has the bourgeoisie forged the weapons that bring death to itself; it has also called into existence the men who are to wield those weapons — the modern working class — the proletarians.

In proportion as the bourgeoisie, i.e., capital, is developed, in the same proportion is the proletariat, the modern working class, developed — a class of labourers, who live only so long as they find work, and who find work only so long as their labour increases capital. These labourers, who must sell themselves piecemeal, are a commodity, like every other article of commerce, and are consequently exposed to all the vicissitudes of competition, to all the fluctuations of the market.

In other words, each element in this process, each stage in this process is a necessary function of capitalism's transition through material conditions, the conditions that gave it life and will ultimately destroy it. The fact that the bourgeoisie and working class are the key players is no less relevant despite the relabelling of these workers, "middle class". They still exist by the sale of their labour, albeit in a more genteel context.

The revolutionary segment of his ideas largely relate to the call to the working class to recognise these forces and harness modernity to their collective benefit, in essence pre-empting the fate that will befall capitalism as its destroys its value base, the commodities (resources) that it transforms.

Over the century or so, this simple message has been lost in the accumulating baggage of propaganda and hysteria and of course, the gross misinterpretations in its application. Still does not alter the underlying message though.

[vision-master]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Quinny', 'S')o are you saying selfishness is the natural state of affairs?

[KaiserJeep]

Self-interest, including the welfare of your family, clan, village, and country is the natural state of affairs.

Communism is about as anti-natural a state as can be imagined. It also has a rotten track record:

Current Communist Countries: China, Cuba, Laos, North Korea, and Vietnam.

Formerly Communist countries (by current name):

Formerly part of the Soviet Union: Armenia, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Estonia, Georgia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Latvia, Lithuania, Moldova, Russia, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, Ukraine, and Uzbekistan.
Other Asian countries: Afghanistan, Cambodia, Mongolia, and Yemen.
Soviet-controlled Eastern bloc countries: Bulgaria, Czech Republic, Germany (East), Hungary, Poland, Romania, Slovakia.
The Balkans: Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Bulgaria, Croatia, Rep. of Macedonia, Montenegro, Serbia, and Slovenia.
Africa: Angola, Benin, Dem Rep. of Congo, Ethiopia, Somalia, Eritrea, and Mozambique.

Known successful Communist countries (arbitrarily defined as prospering for 100+ years): Zero.

The philosophy of Marx quite simply is a bust. It does not work. Hard times make it even less likely to work.

If you disagree, go try living in North Korea.

Again, reality intrudes upon a delusion.

[americandream]

Read what I have written KJ. I know you feel a petulant sense of self entitlement at the approaching and inevitable collapse of capitalism but knowledge of these forces is a powerful tool for making sense of these natural developments. It also explains the bizarre attitudes you see displayed in our press toward one "communist" country China, as opposed to another, Cuba or say N Korea.

Irrational behaviour will become a telling feature of capitalism's last days. Black becomes white and vice versa. As Marx says, all sacred cows will fall before the force of accumulation. As a working man it would pay to understand where you fit in the scheme of things.

[Strummer]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('KaiserJeep', 'C')ommunism is about as anti-natural a state as can be imagined.

[Timo]

All good discussion about various forms of economics, but i'll simply point out the title of this threa, and that is GLOBAL WARMING and the end of Capitalism. Global warming will be the end of capitalism, and communism, and socialism, and every other "ism" you can name. I'm thankful i'm on the downward slope of life and won't live to see how bad things will ultimately get. If you can't chew on that, eat cake.

[americandream]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Timo', 'A')ll good discussion about various forms of economics, but i'll simply point out the title of this threa, and that is GLOBAL WARMING and the end of Capitalism. Global warming will be the end of capitalism, and communism, and socialism, and every other "ism" you can name. I'm thankful i'm on the downward slope of life and won't live to see how bad things will ultimately get. If you can't chew on that, eat cake.

[Lore]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Timo', 'A')ll good discussion about various forms of economics, but i'll simply point out the title of this threa, and that is GLOBAL WARMING and the end of Capitalism. Global warming will be the end of capitalism, and communism, and socialism, and every other "ism" you can name. I'm thankful i'm on the downward slope of life and won't live to see how bad things will ultimately get. If you can't chew on that, eat cake.

[Quinny]

If you believe that self interest is the natural state of affairs your selfish reasoning will obviously prevent you from considering a more reasonable approach. As I said waste of time trying with some people.

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('KaiserJeep', 'S')elf-interest, including the welfare of your family, clan, village, and country is the natural state of affairs.

Communism is about as anti-natural a state as can be imagined. It also has a rotten track record:

Current Communist Countries: China, Cuba, Laos, North Korea, and Vietnam.

Formerly Communist countries (by current name):

Formerly part of the Soviet Union: Armenia, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Estonia, Georgia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Latvia, Lithuania, Moldova, Russia, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, Ukraine, and Uzbekistan.
Other Asian countries: Afghanistan, Cambodia, Mongolia, and Yemen.
Soviet-controlled Eastern bloc countries: Bulgaria, Czech Republic, Germany (East), Hungary, Poland, Romania, Slovakia.
The Balkans: Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Bulgaria, Croatia, Rep. of Macedonia, Montenegro, Serbia, and Slovenia.
Africa: Angola, Benin, Dem Rep. of Congo, Ethiopia, Somalia, Eritrea, and Mozambique.

Known successful Communist countries (arbitrarily defined as prospering for 100+ years): Zero.

The philosophy of Marx quite simply is a bust. It does not work. Hard times make it even less likely to work.

If you disagree, go try living in North Korea.

Again, reality intrudes upon a delusion.

[americandream]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Quinny', 'I')f you believe that self interest is the natural state of affairs your selfish reasoning will obviously prevent you from considering a more reasonable approach. As I said waste of time trying with some people.

[KaiserJeep]

Today, the countries practicing Capitalism are those with a long line of people waiting to cross over and live there. They are also the places where doomers have the right and the ability to move wherever they wish, live however they wish, and make any preparations for the coming conniptions that result from the lack of fossil energy.

I don't happen to believe that mankind's burning of fossil fuels is warming the Earth. The primary reason being that all indications are that we are in a cooling trend, that no warming is occurring. Secondarily, I believe that even if mankind's burning of fuels has any global warming/cooling effects whatsoever, those fossil fuels will be exhausted within a few decades, which exhaustion will both render the AGW debate moot and end forever the possibility of proving or disproving that unproven theory.

The apocalypse I do believe in is the end of cheap energy and the ability to feed 7-10 billion humans. I also believe that in their struggle to live, those humans will pretty much complete the destruction of this globe. I hope that widespread nuclear war is not part of that destruction, but honestly I see no evidence that we are wise enough to prevent such a disaster. Personally I believe that an Iran/Israel nuclear conflict has about a 50% chance of occurring in the next decade, and that conflict in turn has a 50% chance of going global in scale.

And even if that frightening scenario comes to be, I believe that in those countries where Democracy and Capitalism have taken hold, elections will be occurring and new "one percenters" will be rising to the top, perhaps via developing new means of energy production, food production, material recycling, or cheaper forms of electronic technology.

Because the coming disaster is not the End of Capitalism. It is instead the fertile ground upon which Capitalism will thrive, and the final end of the entirely defective theories of Karl Heinrich Marx.

[ralfy]

I can't reply to KJ readily because his account is in my ignore list, but I'd like to add some more points:

Marx did not simply espouse a "philosophy" but, more important for this thread, explained the origins of modern capitalism and how it operates. Other posts by others explain Marx's views in detail.

Several "communist" countries mentioned are actually state capitalist.

The reference to Graeber is notable as well as some studies concerning hunter-gatherer groups in contrast to the idea of self-interest.

Given these points plus a combination of predicaments (global warming, peak oil, increasing debt), then localization is inevitable.