Comments on: Analysing capitalism

By: Tom Dumble

Tom Dumble — Mon, 06 Oct 2008 04:34:23 +0000

Karl Marx vs Adam Smith and the economic collapse. Karl Marx’s word “Capitalist” had a definition cleverly designed to nix one of the main points of Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations. A capitalist in Marx’s world is any owner of capital, even a small bakery shop owner.
Adam Smith’s praised the multi-competitor industries such as the bakery industry and condemed the Merchantile or Crony Capitalist system. The very name “Capitalist” to this day confuses economic discussions. While the world’s multi-competetor system has brought lower prices to billions of consumers, crony capitalist, merchantilists and monoplies are on the verge of destroying the gains. Because on part of Marx’s definition has failed us doesn’t mean the other part has.

By: Seth Edenbaum

Seth Edenbaum — Fri, 03 Oct 2008 23:56:38 +0000

The post WWII European bourgeois/anti-bourgeois left-wing intellectuals learned a lot from the 18th century anti-bourgeois right. That’s what underlies their sense of irony that Americans schoolmen have never figured out. Neoliberals and Neoconservatives both have a very confused relation to history. Wall Street Burkeanism is a contradiction in terms; and as I try to remind people, defenders of liberal technocracy don’t really understand the conservative roots of the rule of law. The rule of law does not support the rule of reason, it opposes it. Which is why defenders of reason [cf. the “brights”] make pronouncements that are more and more explicitly anti-democratic, and why I repeat myself in saying as a secularist that I’m more offended by Richard Posner than I am by born again christians.
I have no faith in anything, especially not my capacity for reason. Wanting to be rational does not make it so. My fellow trolls here have a point.
And the market’s still tanking.

By: Walt

Walt — Fri, 03 Oct 2008 22:40:54 +0000

Well, this was a good thread, but I guess we’ve reached the trolling phase of our discussion.

By: virgil xenophon

virgil xenophon — Fri, 03 Oct 2008 22:29:20 +0000

“seeing life as a series of problems to be solved, results in a deeply simplistic and deeply unpleasant, authoritarian philosophy of governance.”——Seth Edenbaum

Truer words were seldom spoken——VX

“The end result of progressive politics is totalitarianism.”———-Eric Voegelin

By: HH

HH — Fri, 03 Oct 2008 20:17:06 +0000

If I may offer another pompously didactic observation, there is a profound distinction between ideologues and pragmatists (and no, pragmatism is not an ideology). Ideologues worship schemes and models as ends in themselves, and pragmatists adopt schemes and models as disposable means to ends. There is an unfortunate tendency for pragmatic schemes to be adopted by ideologues and turned into petrified dogmas. The “free market” worship of the Chicago School economists suffered this fate, and is in large measure the cause of much of our present difficulty.

By: J Thomas

J Thomas — Fri, 03 Oct 2008 20:03:10 +0000

And no, I’m not particularly interested in the opinions concerning intersubjectivity and the relation of individual to democratic society of a person who says she understands cows more than people.

Humans have a variety of available behavior patterns. We can act alone, or we can run in packs. We can plant and hunt. Sometimes different patterns get emphasized. Doesn’t it seem in recent years that large numbers of americans are acting more like herd animals?

We might learn a whole lot about conservatives by studying cows. I’d be interested in the insights of somebody who’s good at it.

By: roy belmont

roy belmont — Fri, 03 Oct 2008 18:18:11 +0000

s.e.#91:
If I’m the “you” in that then no. I’m pointing out to the pompously didactic HH that the combat binary he’s trying to establish is dimensionless and fictive, then I’m sort of defending Grandin against your aspersions, implied as they are. In neither case was I attempting to address present economic circumstances or theory. Certainly not to defend in any way the insectivization of food production.
I’m an agrarian populist with post-Christian/neo-Maoist tendencies, and Aquarian communalism’s fine by me, as are idealized, even mythic hunter-gatherer economies, and bio-regionally diverse nomadics.
My McDonald’s life-list is in the low teens, even though I was alive and scarfing burgers when it was founded by Mr Kroc et al., though not in my vicinity or my tally would be a lot higher. I’ve never willingly entered one as an adult, and I never bought anything at WalMart the one time I was in one.
Wendell Berry will have my proxy vote to use as he sees fit as long as he’s engaged in these issues.
Speaking way outside my mandate, not that you asked, the present state of things Wall Street looks an awful lot like something you’d see around the base of the tower of Babel just before the lightning hit.

By: seth edenbaum

seth edenbaum — Fri, 03 Oct 2008 17:31:00 +0000

You’re making an argument quite literally for autistic economics.
Productivism via the McDonaldization of everyday life.

Economics is the study of the theoretically predictable behavior of incurious but aggressive minds, under the assumption that they will always be with us and that their banal desires are better harnessed than ignored. I was not raised to nor will I ever nor will my friends ever live by the rules laid down as mandates for homo economicus. How anyone with any pretensions to calling himself an intellectual could imagine viewing Warren Buffet or the oligarchs of google with anything other than at best bemused detachment is beyond me.

What this crisis marks is not the end of capitalism but the end of American ideological capitalism. Even jackass neoliberals are saying the answer is what Sweden did in 92.
Capitalism is an absurd joke that won’t ever go away. Better to treat it that way.

By: matt

matt — Fri, 03 Oct 2008 17:27:02 +0000

Naomi Klein’s book is right up there with Mike Davis’ work–if not more important–no?

By: Roy Belmont

Roy Belmont — Fri, 03 Oct 2008 06:40:06 +0000

“Temple Grandin’s day job is as a designer of slaughterhouses.” Full stop.
This is a complete rebuttal and a powerful dismissal because everybody knows that’s bad, to do that, designing slaughterhouses, or even the ramps leading into them.
It gets its power from everybody knowing that that’s bad because slaughterhouses are bad and everybody knows that, because they have slaughtering in there. And slaughter is always bad, that’s all.
The distance between a person and a cow is not as great as you think, maybe.
On the other hand maybe the reason slaughterhouses are bad is because you think the distance between a person and a cow is not that great.
That might be why your attitude toward Grandin seems facile and unthoughtful.

By: s.e.

s.e. — Fri, 03 Oct 2008 05:41:33 +0000

The condemnation in my dismissal gets its power from the distance between a person and a cow, that’s all.

By: Roy Belmont

Roy Belmont — Fri, 03 Oct 2008 04:45:34 +0000

S.Edenbaum:
As you know, slaughterhouses produce meat by butchering animals, and are thus just an extension of the individual slaughtering done by carnivores everywhere, of which we are one, as a species. To get the meat you have to kill the animal and cut up its body. Certainly very few if any people reading this come from multiple generations of exclusive-by-choice vegetetarians.
The condemnation in your dismissal gets its power from the distance between table and field, a distance so great it’s as though they’re not connected at all anymore. Slaughterhouses are metaphors as much as actual places now, glimpses into the dark side. But then so are trucks full of battery chickens headed toward the poultry plant, transported in the middle of the night so kids won’t see where their lunch comes from.
A point could be made that Grandin’s making the process more humane is enabling the factory farm system, but that would be a weak point held almost exclusively by confused urbanized children who’ve been raised divorced from the reality of the food chain they crown.
And really the point was the helicopter.
Grandin’s about as much a democratic outlier as we’re ever going to hear from, and if her voice, and voices like hers, is ignored entirely it will be our loss.
Why someone, admitting they understand cows more than people, who then made a career out of eliminating unnecessary pain and suffering in their lives, should ignite so much contempt is maybe a kind of outlier flag in itself. Having generated this professed disinterest in “the opinions concerning intersubjectivity and the relation of individual to democratic society of a person who…”. Which seems to have no antecedent but your own private thoughts.

By: seth edenbaum

seth edenbaum — Thu, 02 Oct 2008 22:20:42 +0000

Temple Grandin’s day job is as a designer of slaughterhouses.
And no, I’m not particularly interested in the opinions concerning intersubjectivity and the relation of individual to democratic society of a person who says she understands cows more than people.

By: MarkUp

MarkUp — Thu, 02 Oct 2008 21:45:31 +0000

“The academic world is fraught with the peril of idolatrous worship of faulty intellectual tools.”

Interesting parallel in the Google 2001 thread as concerns search ranking and algorithms; of course we see this spill in to finance as well.

By: Roy Belmont

Roy Belmont — Thu, 02 Oct 2008 19:16:54 +0000

Out of the pieces of a broken balsa-wood model airplane kit Temple Grandin, when she was a child, constructed a, self-engineered, model helicopter with a rubber-band wind-up propeller, that rose 100 feet into the air.
Temple Grandin being, in addition to someone with a solid career and many successes in the field of animal husbandry, an autistic woman whose life and life obstacles were made famous by Oliver Sachs.
Keywords: tools, defective, precision-focused, ruin, work, peril, fraught, faulty.