Tag: Quote of the Day

Quote of the Day: Difference of the two capitalist systems

Db01 Comment

Either as a welll-treated slave or as a worked-to-death animal, your options are not very good under currently existing capitalism.

Kevin Carson spot on as usual

The main difference between the social democratic or New Deal corporate liberal model, and the Reagan-Thatcher model, is that the faction of organized capital that controls the former is like a humane farmer who thinks he’ll get more work out of his animals in the long run from taking good care of them; the faction that controls the latter is like Jones in Animal Farm, thinking it’s more profitable to work them to death and replace them.

.

Quote of the Day: Consumables and Property

Db0

Propertarians always like to compare issues about ownership of land to issues about ownership of consumables. This is flawed.

Quoth Voltairine, my favourite redditor, in reply to a propertarian:

My eating an apple prevents someone else from eating that same apple, or entraps them in their “ghetto” as you call it.

A one time consumable good is not the same as an indefinitely productive property. Every major thinker in anarchist history that I can think of has always considered the consumable goods to be important, but ultimately small potatoes in comparison with what is truly critical. This is the reason behind the possession/property distinction that most anarchists find critical going all the way back to Proudhon, while so-called “anarcho”-capitalists seem to think it is a clever plot to make them look like jerks. Indefinite private dominion over all productive resources, enforced upon the unwilling, is hardly legitimated by your need to eat apples.

This is the kind of issue skirting in fact that subconsciously annoy me when arguing with AnCaps and the like. Usually I can’t put my finger on it but Voltairine immediately calls it out.

Quote of the Day: Convenient shifting of laws

Db02 Comments

A quote about how countries modify their laws when it’s convenient for their own ruling elite.

Quoth Anna Nimus

Intellectual property laws have shifted with the winds of history to justify specific interests. Countries that exported intellectual property favored the notion of authors’ natural rights, while developing nations, which were mainly importers, insisted on a more utilitarian interpretation that limited copyright by public interest. During the 19th century, American publishing companies justified their unauthorized publication of British writers on the utilitarian grounds that the public’s interest to have great works available for the cheapest possible price outweighed authors’ rights. By the beginning of the 20th century, as American authors became popular in Europe and American publishing companies became exporters of intellectual property, the law conveniently shifted, suddenly recognizing the natural rights of authors to own their ideas and forgetting previous theories of social utility.

This example should nicely show you how the laws of capitalist states are always modified to help the resident bourgeoisie make as much profit as possible. It was the same thing with tarriffs and corporate laws. They just paint them in a thin coat of populism and let the suckers who still believe that the common law is for the benefit of the common peopl, support them.

Anyway, read the whole thing. A very interesting take about the way the copyrights developed and what their real purpose has always been. Hint: It was never to promote creativity but to preserve existing monopolies and facilitate the exploitation of artists.

Quote of the Day: Natural Hierarchies

Db07 Comments

A quote on the naturalness of hierarchies in humans

opposable thumbs
Image by lucianvenutian via Flickr

Hold on guys and gals. This is a big’un.

A Redditor asks:

I just think back to my earliest times of hanging out with friends, organizing baseball games, and working on group projects, and the utility and convenience of creating hierarchies seems like a part of the “natural order”

And another responds:

The hierarchies you speak of are, in many ways biological. Packing orders of other primates (baboons for example) also have hierarchical social systems. This doesn’t mean that they are desirable or unavoidable.

There are many natural symbiotic systems (bees and flowers for example) which are purely cooperative, with no top-down, pyramid hierarchies. They are complex systems and each entity needs to maximize it’s own natural abilities to take advantage of the others’ but in taking advantage of one another, neither entity is put at a disadvantage.

Even in primate packs there are no artificial governing rules that the individuals follow, they evolve naturally based on genetic predispositions of strength and intellect as well as factors like age and sex.

But one of the major evolutionary stepping stones on the way to becoming homo sapiens sapiens was the evolved ability of homo erectus so-called beta pack members to band together and form units that were, through strength in numbers, able to overpower individual alpha male “rulers” to form egalitarian hunter-gatherer communities that could successfully fend of warring packs and hunt large mammals without aid of alpha males or single centralized leadership.

This particular trait precipitated many evolutionary milestones in communication and technology. Coordinated hunts, for instance, require linguistic ability which in turn breeds technological advances.

That is not to say they didn’t have leadership or complex social structures it’s just that the responsibilities of leadership were divided amongst many and the social structures naturally evolved from that. This made homo erectus one of the most successful and long-lived species of hominid of all time, as well as, gave rise to the most successful branch of the homo genus and the entire Animalia kingdom – modern day humans.

And while modern day humans retain the tendency for hierarchical pecking orders inherited from primate orders that are still visible today, that tendency is, in fact, a primitive feature, like the opposable thumb.

Cooperation and egalitarianism are derived, advanced features, like the opposable pinky.

This a very succint explanation of what people like Engels was writing about in the Origins of the Family. This is a very good explanation on why humans have a far greater attunement with cooperation and egalitarianism than we have with hierarchies and competition, even though for some (not all) of our closest cousins, this is not the case.

Reblog this post [with Zemanta]

Quote of the Day: Crooked system

Db04 Comments

George Monbiot gives us two humorous quotes about the avaricious rich.

Quoth George Monbiot

Executive flight is the corporate world’s only effective form of self-regulation: those who are too selfish to pay what they owe to society send themselves into voluntary exile. It’s an act of self-sacrifice for which we should all be grateful. It’s hard on the Swiss, but there’s a kind of mortal justice here too: if you sustain a crooked system of banking secrecy and tax avoidance, you end up with a country full of crooks and tax avoiders.

And for a 2-hit combo:

International attempts to close down tax havens remain half-hearted. But if by some miracle these measures were to succeed, one haven – let’s say St Helena – should be kept open. It should be furnished only with rudimentary homes. All who chose to could live there in peace. Every penny they possessed would remain safe from the taxman, as long as they never set foot in another land. They could sit in their cells and count their money for the rest of their lives. Parties of schoolchildren would be brought to the island to goggle at these hermits, and learn some lessons about the follies of wealth.

On a related note, we need more humor in the anti-capitalist movement.

Quote of the day: Competitive Metaphor

Db05 Comments

A quote likening competition as an evolutionary principle to the rockets of a launching space shuttle.

frack0verflow asks in /r/anarchism:

Surely it could be argued that competition is an evolutionary imperative?

and ytinas responds:

Perhaps it was, but even if that were the case it wouldn’t mean we still need it. When a (US) shuttle launches into space it has huge rocket boosters/tank attached. Without these it couldn’t overcome earth’s gravity, but at some point they become a drag on progress.

It may well be that we needed war, state and conflict to get us going down the technology road. Once upon a time capitalism gave us the light bulb, the phone, the car, the computer. Today it gives us the DMCA, DVD region codes, copy rights, Internet censorship. It’s very clear (at least to me) that it has stopped rapidly moving us forward and is actually slowing down progression. It’s time to disconnect the boosters and move to the next stage.

Quote of the Day: USA bullying

Db0

Noam Chomsky explains why the USA can always be seen bullying small nations around.

Quoth Noam Choamsy (as seen in this post)

Why was the U.S. so intent on destroying northern Laos, so poor that peasants hardly even knew they were in Laos? Or Indochina? Or Guatemala? Or Maurice Bishop in Grenada, the nutmeg capital of the world? The reasons are about the same, and are explained in the internal record. These are ‘viruses’ that might ‘infect others’ with the dangerous idea of pursuing similar paths to independent development. The smaller and weaker they are, the more dangerous they tend to be. If they can do it, why can’t we? Does the Godfather allow a small storekeeper to get away with not paying protection money?

Read the whole article too. It’s very RRRRAAAAGE inducing and it nicely exemplifies how imperialism, even violent, army-backed imperialism is only the reality even to this day and age.

Quote of the day: Soviet Train

Db0

What would USSR look like if it was a train?

Quoth Thehellezell

Russia is like a malfunctioning train, and Stalin tried to make it move by putting a gun to the engineer’s head. It moved fast for a while, but then sputtered. Khrushchev noticed something was wrong, attempted to alert the other passengers, but was booted off of the train for being a nuisance. The train slowed to a crawl, then stopped. A man named Brezhnev stood up and addressed the passengers: “Pay no mind to the outside scenery! The train will arrive to our destination soon!”

Brilliant metaphor but the rest of the comment is really worth reading. The whole thread is pretty good as well, diving into the familiar argument of “Communism failed because USSR failed.”

Quote of the Day: Eco-Terrorists

Db01 Comment

The ones truly pointing the problems about environmental problems were first called crazy and later terrorist.

Quoth Peter Gederloos (@ Counterpunch. h/t Nihilo Zero)

The few people who were talking about pollution, ecological collapse, and related issues thirty years ago—generally radical ecologists, anarchists, and indigenous communities—were ignored or dismissed as crazy. Nowadays, they have no time to say “I told you so,” because members of those three groups are investigated as terrorists and locked up in prison.

Truly a great piece connecting the dots between the environmental problems and the systematic failures of Capitalism. Gogogo.