Capitalist Crisis and Suicide

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We forget that nature is a limited, makeshift kind of thing , that our
bodies are held together with pins, and that history has often gone
backwards. The good, if it cannot be applied to all, is evil. The
beautiful, if it costs the lives of many people, is ugly. The true, if it
is unjust, is false. Faced with this unattainable historical triad, we
should opt for the ordinary, the pretty, the approximate, as the only things
really compatible with the survival of nature and of human civilisation. For
this reason, the ordinary is better than the good. The pretty is more
beautiful than the beautiful. The approximate is more true than the true.

The contrary of krisis is kairos, which in Greek and Roman philosophy meant
“opportunity” or “the right moment”, the temporal crack that lets divine
intervention in. The krisis is also our kairos. Will we know how to make
the most of it?

Apart from that embryonic light which is growing slowly and unsteadily in
Latin America, the world situation does not inspire hope. Resistance, as we
have said, resembles the world it is rising against. The good, the
beautiful, the true are concepts associated with advertising and consumerism
and thus with individual reflexes - whether painful or pleasurable. In a
world that is globalised and transparent they now make up the dominant
ideology of the dominated classes. We are separated from the ordinary, the
pretty and the approximate, so essential to any kind of political salvation,
not only by the Forbes list, but also by the subjective desire of human
beings themselves, a desire that is trapped in the intrinsic irrationality
of capitalism and its suicidal dependencies: “I will seek my own survival,
even if I have to kill myself too in doing so.”

The solution of "let's stop" is a rather weak effort to a monumental problem. I don't hear any effective alternatives.

I'd say "honest business" but no one will ever go for that.

As we have seen throughout the Bush administration and before (and probably subsequent), corruption is so rife throughout government that business is pretty free to do whatever it desires.

Revisit the lamentable histories of Stalinist Russia or Nazi Germany to see what happens when government can do whatever it desires.

Revisit the lamentable histories of Stalinist Russia or Nazi Germany to see what happens when government can do whatever it desires.

The real problem is in human nature itself. We are incapable of feeling the pain we inflict on others as vividly as the pain felt by the victims, themselves. The feedback loop is not closed. As long as humans favor their own cause above the causes of others, what you describe will happen. Thomas Hobbes was right on the mark.

ruveyn

The US government has been doing whatever it wants: being in bed with large multinational corporations and creating a corporate welfare state where the automatic solution to any business/economic crisis is to print up and throw more money at it rather than allowing the institutions of bankruptcy to take its course.

This is the system Enamdar and Sand would equate with Capitalism? Sounds like a strawman to me.

Capitalism hasn't failed. The "Coporate Welfare State" has failed.

Capitalism has never been the problem. It's the solution.

The US government has been doing whatever it wants: being in bed with large multinational corporations and creating a corporate welfare state where the automatic solution to any business/economic crisis is to print up and throw more money at it rather than allowing the institutions of bankruptcy to take its course.

Where to begin commenting on this stuff?

Which nicely explains your enthusiasm for nuclear bombing all Muslim countries.

Cherish your friends and destroy your enemies. If thine enemy smite thee on thy cheek, decapitate him and urinate down his neck.

ruveyn