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20 October 2008

Antagonista TV #911: Capitalism Hits the Fan

It's probably time for a few words on the global financial meltdown cutely named the "credit crunch" but, in the interim, have some words on the same crafted by a bona fide professor.

The sound and video quality on the video below is average -- actually, it's of a better standard than the BBC's recent high-technology, high-quality foreign news reports that look like they were recorded on early incarnations of mobile phone cameras -- but if it's a little rational commentary, a quick oversight of recent history and a few crumbs for compiling into morsels of food for thought you're after, then it's worth persevering with.
Capitalism Hits the Fan A Marxian View
Oct 7, 2008 - 39 minutes

Richard Wolff a professor of economics at UMass Amherst talks on the current "financial" crisis and capitalism in general. A form of socialism is presented as a possible alternative. This talk was presented by the Association for Economic and Social Analysis and the journal Rethinking Marxism.


That videos such as the one above appear from out of nowhere, for all to see, and that such things are free to watch, listen to and learn from is yet another manifestation of the new economy of community outlined here some time ago. This is the same new economy of community for which plans exist, among small groupings of paranoiacs with access to the “paraphernalia of paranoia”, to bring it all to a crashing end.

5 comments:

Bridget said...

A sign of the Times? (Expect a load of cynicism):

Karl Marx: did he get it all right?

Anonymous said...

Watched the vid afer B posted it on StefZ's site. It was good BUT he didn't nail the most significant aspect of the miserable "crunch" that that is the trade in derivatives. Yeah the working class hav been ripped off from the 70's its the inherent nature of the system, bit just because wages were frozen.

Commune-ism has its merits but the good prof cast the bermuda short wearing workers as operating within the curent system - commune-ism within a capital sctucture.

Ultimately then, it too would fail as it is the system of money and trying to extract the largest amounts of money from a position of advantage that feeds this devour-all beast.

Still... Very well delivered :)

Bridget said...

Another video to ponder:

Why Wont The Bail Out Work? MUST SEE!

Includes the quadrillion dollar derivatives bubble.

The Antagonist said...

Bridget: Almost 50/50 amongst readers of the Times in competition with the usual raft of paid keyboard monkeys.

LWTC247: Rather than focusing on specific aspects of what might have led to this point, the issue is instead that the entire system is screwed, inherently corrupt and always has been. As if that wasn't enough to be getting on with, its value is based on nothing more than invented nonsense mutually agreed by small groupings of interested parties.

Money has no inherent worth other than that arbitrarily decided by those who control the money. It is after all nothing more than a piece of paper or a metal token that acts as an arbitrarily decided representation of real material value.

Many hark back to the days of Bretton Woods yet, as hinged on the material wealth of gold as that is, irrespective of how long it has operated as such, the system is no better than the invented numbers of today. Gold has no inherent value other than that associated with the amount of oppression and destruction required to extract it from the earth.

Effectively, we're at financial ground zero with our eyes fully open to the fact that the various value exchange mechanisms upon which we have been suckled for millennia are quite obviously not ones that best serve the greater mass of humanity.

It is time for a new world order, but it's not going to be the one that ruling elites have been crowing about for a good number of years because it is the greater mass of humanity that does all the things that do have real, provable, useful, material value.

Simply, they need us and we don't need them.

The Antagonist said...

Ho ho ho! Marx appears to have tipped the balance a little. It seems people, even among readers of the Times, have recognised the limitations and self-serving nature of the beast.

So the best course of action, obviously, is if we all pretend it isn't happening and piss about blogging about the puppetry of the penises that is the dwindling days of the four years in the making Red, White and Blue "election" in the United Mistakes of America.