[Peace] "Is Capitalism Necessary?"

[C. G. Estabrook]

"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>