[1996sp:255]

This question <240|57> overall <254|256> Peace: <253|257>.

Question 301: Thread 301

[255] Peace: How to beat capitalism in less than 50 years. Kalispel said in [240]:

Peace, I appreciate your comments. I can see where you disagree, but I am having a hard time understanding where you are going.

Yes so do i. But the point i initially attempted to make is a protest against the form of emancipation you but forth.

i think i also said that our differences are one of abstraction. This is propably true. However, there are also some ontological differences involved. That is to say i don't believe terms like “freedom” and “emancipation” actually characterize your arguments. You are talking about practical types of survival within material conditons.

i guess that i want to use such terms in a more traditional philosphical sense. In this sense i do not think you are being very philosophically careful in your use of such terms. We can agree that being rich has certain advantages (but we could also talk about disadvantages); but i do not want to use “freedom” and “emancipation” to charactize the arguments you are attempting to put forth.

The argument you are making has to do with social mobility, but not emancipation and freedom. i want to say or argue that the slave-master himself is not emancipated until the slavery itself is an absence. If slavery is present then there is no emancipation and freedom is the absence.

This is not merely a philosophical argument, but i believe it to be a religious position also. That is for example, most religious people would hate the notion of Jesus coming back as a capitalist. In fact, this seems quite contradictory.

When you say: “Inequality is immoral and we all know the capitalistic system thrives on this inequality. It's the root of the motivation.” Then emancipation is absent in a philosohical sense. But again this is not merely a differenece in abstraction or defination. The difference is ontological, i am arguing that emancipation and freedom, in the sense that economic liberalism promised and in the sense that neo-liberialism (i.e. political conservativism) promises can be achieved within capitalist relations cannot be achieved; it is an absence of the system in an ontological sense.

i am fond of saying it this way: in capitalist relations some notion of limited freedom for any individual can be achieved; but freedom, even limited in a capitalist sense, cannot be achieve for all individuals. That is merely to say that capitalism is a class society, and when one person's success is achieved by the exploitation of others, (in a dialectical sense) there exists no freedom, or freedom is absent in that society.

Thus, i agree when you say:

“This would mean that true virtue and ethics appear in multivariate forms within each and every religion. [...] If a person enters immorally into capitalistic relations and knows these relations are immoral, and the person does this because the alternatives reveal a harder life than what they desire what kind of happiness will this person have. If virtue and ethics create happiness then there are portions of human happiness that cannot exist under capitalism. In fact, the bible points this out. For example, the city of Enoch.”

However, we should not have to rely on religion for your morality, nor virtue. In saying this, i reveal that i am in some way a moral realist.

i believe this statement has nothing to do with the point: “If I am able to get the same pay no matter how hard I work most people will simply not work hard.” Humanism (in a philosophical or religious for) has nothing to do with making human being work hard(er); any more than animal right activism has to do with getting animal to do better tricks.

When you say the following it reminded me of the questions that Wight put forward:

I was talking to a friend about Marxist theory and they said, “I do not believe in exploitation and do not believe Marxist theory.” I asked them why and they said, “There are only a few bad capitalists we cannot give them all a bad rap.” This may be naive, but I questioned further and my friend said this, “Why would anyone want to believe in Marxism. Who wants to believe they are being exploited and being ‘used up’ by the greedy capitalist. This would make me very angry and unhappy to believe this.” Here's the thing, if you accept what Marx wrote then you must make a choice to either be immoral by accepting and living peacably under capitalist relations (this will cause you to suffer self-enstrangement), or you can pay a heavy price by leaving the system. Making a statement by the way in which you live your life.

I think the less you know the better off you are because this leads to self-enstrangement and anger. Maybe I should just refute Marxism and convince myself that inequality is good and equality is bad.

i would not put it exactly the way you have above, but these are the general problems. If we understand capitalism as a system of crisis (and exploitation); then we must struggle to absent these social ills and attempt to construct better ones. One big problem is that we do not very well understand exactly how capitalism functions, but empirically we know it is a system of crisis and welfare (or misery without welfare); there is no reason that we have to understand everything about an alternative, anymore than we need to understand everything about capitalism before we change. The point would be to create a system and structure that we can change in the future and not create and build ideologies to protect and reproduce it.

We know there will be mistakes, but it seems silly to believe, or have such a loss of faith in human beings, that their ultimate fate is capitalism and market relations.