Are capitalism and democracy even compatible?

[eynon81]

[eynon81]

student debt seems to be affecting the high end more. law/med/grad/professional class. traditionally the big spenders the big investors the big creators.

http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/arc ... on/309060/

[broken robot]

[broken robot]

[broken robot]

okay my own thoughts are that this shouldn't be a debate about capitalism as based on a series of contingent choices versus an over-bureaucratized yet "democratic" apparatus that distributes goods a la dharma's system. there's no blueprint for a perfect society, so in that sense the former have it right, yet they completely ignore the fact that capitalism itself is a very, very inefficient system of distribution that imposes its own nasty set of conditions. the fact that we can't imagine a historical alternative yet doesn't mean we should give up the spirit of critique. in fact the very fact that working class resistance has been decimated in western countries is one reason for the current crisis, and everything leading up to it including deregulation, privatization, corporate scandals, and the massive dispossession that is occurring in the name of rebalancing the national debt and implementing austerity. so yes, capitalism imposes its own iron laws on people, it's not about "choice." it's a historical system and must be analyzed as such.

instead, we might want to consider how rights and responsibilities are historically evolving. even though feudalism was an exploitative and brutal system, peasants had some notion of reciprocal obligation with their lords, and the former even rebelled from time to time when they felt this had been violated. liberalism did give us the proper notion of rights as intrinsically valuable, but it didn't say what it should cover. yes in its classical formulation perhaps "the" right has been the right to own private property. but who's to say there couldn't be some other set of rights based on the notion that on a more abstract level we are all collectively involved in each other's welfare? far from sacrificing individual self-possession and autonomy, i think this could in fact strengthen it to say that our rights are inherently conditioned by our involvement in a greater collectivity. acknowledging those constraints, rather than sweeping them under the rug where they then become massive inequalities (such as the notion that it's perfeclty acceptable for CEOs to set their own exorbitant rates of remuneration), would i think in the long run go a long way to actually giving people more say over their lives.

oh and last thing, we always have an implicit understanding of collectives that undergirds rights. contra margaret thatcher's claim that "there is no such thing as society," we are inevitably shaped by collective attachments. the reason why rights in america makes sense to people is because they view it through the lens of "patriotism", the idea that god bestowed on us greatness, and whatever other legitimating myths. for the longest time scholars were confounded by the fact that communists in places such as cambodia and vietnam were attacking each other when these were supposed to be the guys supporting "proletarian internationalism" but as benedict anderson has since long ago pointed out, even they were shackled by the imaginary of the modern nation-state. communism couldn't exist except as some form of "national liberation," which is also why it greatly appealed to anticolonial movements of the day.

whether we imagine it to be the nation or some alternative imaginary, collectives are okay. in fact as galt would say it's an intrinsic aspect of human society. the question is though how we constantly critique exclusions, and how we determine who it is we exclude and how we exclude them from our conception of the good society (for example, saying we should fight back against bankers and the elite is far different from saying we should hunt mexicans--though this is not to advocate "revolutionary violence" against culturally constituted classes, akin to the soviet period of repression against kulaks). inevitably the configuration of classes and groups change in society through these struggles, and you have new struggles, and the cycle goes on, because power and resistance is also an intrinsic aspect of society. we must recognize division and conflict are inevitable, it's the attitude with which we approach them that matters.

[The Dharma Bum]

[The Dharma Bum]

[The Dharma Bum]

[The Dharma Bum]

[eynon81]