by
CrimethInc.
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The bankers who set out to cash in by ripping off homebuyers were simply obeying the imperatives of financial capitalism--those who didn't were replaced by less scrupulous competitors. The same goes for the homebuyers who took out loans beyond their means and the insurers whose guarantees only made things worse. All of them were acting rationally within the capitalist framework. The problem was that the framework itself is senseless.
[...] illegal capitalists are no different from their legal counterparts. If General Motors had no legal system through which to enforce patent rights, they would surely take matters into their own hands, or be supplanted by a company that would. The legal apparatus of the state is like a vast, monopolized version of the same structures used by the mafia. The black market isn't necessarily any more violent than the rest of the economy: what are drive-by shootings next to the prison-industrial complex? The same violence that shocks us in criminals is invisible in society at large because it is ubiquitous and constant.
[...] When the International Monetary Fund forces austerity measures on a country, it's not like there's less food, housing, or education to go around than before--the problem is that the current economic system can't distribute access to these according to human need. The same goes for famines that plague one nation while another pays farmers subsidies not to grow crops: the means exist to eradicate famine once and for all, but they will never be used for this so long as resources flow according to the laws of profit.
drift! a great instance of capitalism dominating us because we let it
"Anyone whose goal is 'something higher' must expect some day to suffer vertigo. What is vertigo? Fear of falling? Then why do we feel it even when the observation tower comes equipped with a sturdy handrail? No, vertigo is something other than the fear of falling. It is the voice of the emptiness below us which tempts and allures us, it is the desire to fall against which, terrified, we defend ourselves."
you could say it's the fear of something immanent in ourselves
quoting Milan Kundera in Unbearable Lightness (chapter end quote)
[...] The reforms sought by the Sierra Club would not fundamentally change how our society relates to the environment any more than the reforms called for by the Human Society would alter the position of animals relative to human beings. Reforms such as these are chiefly aimed at easing the consciences of middle-class liberals for whom being socially responsible is a consumer option like any other.
damn
[...] Everyone would have his own property, his own investments--everyone would be a capitalist. We took out loans to get degrees for jobs that didn't exist, took on mortgages we couldn't afford, racked up credit card bills pretending that we, too, were middle class.
Now it's clear there's no room for us at the top. Capitalism is a pyramid scheme that has run out of ways to expand. People are rioting in Greece, striking in Quebec, overthrowing governments in North Africa. Revolt is ricocheting back and forth across the world as the effects of the recession sink in. This wave of uprisings will reach the US last of all, but it's on its way. The ruling order will seem unshakable until the day before it collapses.
So long as they don't confront capitalism itself, identity-based liberation movements won't put an end to injustice and inequality. Being exploited by people like yourself is hardly an improvement on being exploited by people different from you. Even if we could all experience equal opportunity within capitalism--even if domination and exploitation could be distributed without reference to race, gender, or any other axis of oppression--capitalism itself would still be oppression.
[...] If we want to transform our society, we must not only overturn institutions but also identify the functions they serve, lest we end up taking on these roles ourselves. Even without capital or police, entirely new currencies might arise to impose oppression and alienation.
There's no reason to believe the downfall of capitalism will automatically bring about a free world. That part is up to us.
I must admit that there is very little time for the higher life for myself, but my soul cries out for it, and my heart is not in my homely duties; they are done in a mechanical, abstracted way, not worthy of a woman of high ambitions; but my ambitions are along other lines.
I do not mean to say that I have no ambition to do my work well, and to be a model housekeeper, for I would scorn to slight my work intentionally; it is just this way: There are so many outdoor duties that the time left for household duties is so limited that I must rush through them, with a view to getting each one done in the shortest possible time, in order to get as many things accomplished as possible, for there is never time to do half as much as needs to be done.
All the time that I have been going about this work I have been thinking of things I have read; of things I have on hand to read when I can get time, and of other things which I have a desire to read, but cannot hope to while the present condition exists.
:(
The scars, psychic as well as physical, brought home to the suppér table and the TV set, may have touched, malignantly, the soul of our society. More or less. (“More or less,” that most ambiguous of phrases, pervades many of the conversations that comprise this book, reflecting, perhaps, an ambiguity of attitude toward The Job. Something more than Orwellian acceptance, something less than Luddite sabotage. Often the two impulses are fused in the same person.)
It is about a search, too, for daily meaning as well as daily bread, for recognition as well as cash, for astonishment rather than torpor; in short, for a sort of life rather than a Monday through Friday sort of dying. Perhaps immortality, too, is part of the quest. To be remembered was the wish, spoken and unspoken, of the heroes and heroines of this book.