[Peace-discuss] [Peace] "Is Capitalism Necessary?"

[unionyes]

When we were returning to C-U from our friend's house in Florida, there was 
a billboard 50-miles or so south of Atlanta that said ; " GOD IS NOT A 
SOCIALIST " " Voters against Obama . com. !

What ignorance and / or propoganda !

I mean, just the statement alone.

First of all, I WISH Obama was a Socialist ( nothing could be further from 
the truth ),
and second, does this person or organization have regular political 
discussions with GOD, and hence know what GOD's political views are ?

I could though actually make an intelligent arguement that Jesus was a 
Socialist-Anarchist !

After all, Jesus chashed the money lenders out of the temples with a whip. 
Fed and organized the poor, and was murdered ( tried and executed ) by the 
Roman occupation army via the Judea / Israeli puppet government. He did all 
of this with no formal organization, based on a decentralized informal 
network of people.

David J.


----- Original Message ----- 
From: "C. G. Estabrook" <galliher at illinois.edu>
To: <Peace at lists.chambana.net>
Sent: Friday, July 02, 2010 6:07 PM
Subject: [Peace] "Is Capitalism Necessary?"


"Is Capitalism Necessary?" (or, "Do We Wish Obama Really Were a Socialist?")

Carl Estabrook, David Green, and David Harvey (by recording) will discuss 
that
question on tonight's "News From Neptune" on Urbana Public Television, cable
channel 6, at 7pm (and soon on Facebook & <www.newsfromneptune.com>).

Our program is named in honor of Noam Chomsky, who has remarked that in the 
US
media, “Either you repeat the same conventional doctrines everybody is 
saying,
or else you say something true, and it will sound like it’s from Neptune.”

Today is Friday, July 2. On this day in 1776 the congress of English 
colonies in
North America voted to declare independence from Great Britain, more than a 
year
after the outbreak of war between Americans and the British army . The 
birthday
of the United States of America ("Independence Day") is celebrated on July 
4,
the day a statement about the matter was approved by the congress - but they
didn't actually get around to signing it for another month, on August 2.

The statement begins with what it takes to be an obvious point, viz. that no
state has "a right to exist":

"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men [sic] are created 
equal,
that they are endowed by their creator  with certain unalienable rights, 
that
among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness; that to secure 
these
rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers 
from
the consent of the governed; that whenever any form of government becomes
destructive of these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or to 
abolish
it, and to institute new government, laying its foundation on such 
principles
and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to
effect their safety and happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that
governments long established should not be changed for light and transient
causes; and accordingly all experience has shown, that mankind are more 
disposed
to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by 
abolishing
the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and
usurpations, pursuing invariably the same object evinces a design to reduce 
them
under absolute despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off 
such
government, and to provide new guards for their future security."

Obviously, this argument applies to the inhabitants of the territory between 
the
Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea today.

NOTES ON "IS CAPITALISM NECESSARY?"

[1] "...humankind must first of all eat, drink, have shelter and clothing,
before it can pursue politics, science, art, religion, etc. ... therefore 
the
production of the immediate material means, and consequently the degree of
economic development attained by a given people or during a given epoch, 
form
the foundation upon which the state institutions, the legal conceptions, 
art,
and even the ideas on religion, of the people concerned have been 
evolved..."

[2] Capitalism = a process of production that depends on the relations of 
two
groups: (1) a group that claims to have exclusive rights the materials 
needed
for production - land tools, resources factories ("they own the means of
production"); and (2) a much larger group without those rights who have to 
work
at the direction of the first group in order to receive the means of their 
own
existence - food, clothing, shelter ("they have to sell their labor-power in
order to receive back the means of subsistence.")

[3] "Capitalism is an economic system in which the means of production are
privately owned ...  developed incrementally from the 16th century in Europe 
...
dominant in the Western world following the demise of feudalism" ... through 
a
series of bourgeois revolutions, beginning with the Dutch in the 16th 
century
... in the 19th and 20th centuries European & American colonialism made
capitalism world-wide.

[4] Some terms:
class = a group with same role in process of production;
wage-contract = "the equal exchange between free agents which reproduces,
hourly and daily, inequality and oppression" (Perry Anderson);
alienation = under capitalism most must sell what makes them human, their
purposeful work of head and hands, to someone else in order to have food,
clothing and shelter;
socialism = a common-sense critique of capitalism that says the society (not
individuals) owns the means of production and that work should be organized
democratically; democracy and capitalism are contradictory;
Marxism - a theory of history and of capitalism (not socialism); transformed
into a authoritarian political program in the 20th history
(Leninism/Bolshevism/"Communism").

[5] The earliest use of the word "socialist" in English seems to be by 
William
Hazlitt in 1826: recalling a conversation from 1809, he refers to "those
profound and redoubted socialists Thomas Aquinas and Duns Scotus." (I'll 
save
that lecture for another time.)

[6] Patricia Hogue Werhane, "Adam Smith and His Legacy for Modern 
Capitalism"

[7] In this RSA Animate [which concludes the program], radical sociologist 
David
Harvey asks if it is time to look beyond capitalism towards a new social 
order
that would allow us to live within a system that really could be 
responsible,
just, and humane? This is based on a lecture at the RSA (www.theRSA.org):
<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qOP2V_np2c0&feature=player_embedded>
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