It's Capitalism, Not Globalism

Typo correction:

... However, such a substantial core is a fiction, and practicing a deep empiricism reveals rather that our fundamental existentially, like the fundamental nature of existence in general, is ...

should read:

... However, such a substantial core is a fiction, and practicing a deep empiricism reveals rather that our fundamental existentiality, like the fundamental nature of existence in general, is ...

 

The corporate elite appreciates your thinking here.

 

That is the fundamental reason that we created the notion of a "corporation".

It was created in order to protect the owners and employees from liability for acts of the corporation.

 

So, you say robber barons were a myth, but the evidence is not on your side. It is your opinion, an opinion contrary to reality, IMO.

You seem to want to believe that wealthy elites, the cream at the top, has never influenced public policy and law to their exclusive benefit, while it hurt others that live in the society that they operate in.

You write very well, but IMO do not have a good grasp of the real world, past and present. For I could not disagree with you more on most of the ideas you posted. For one thing, a free market has never existed for long, anywhere, at any time. It is a mental construct, an ideal, which has never been viable in the real world, for human nature corrupts ideals, in the self interest of some human beings. What those books I mentioned contain is the reality of the world that you actually have to live in. The world that has no place for the ideal of free market. A free market could only exist if human nature saw a revolution, and it changed. In fact much of what you probably believe in cannot exist until human nature changes. But until that happens we have to police the child molesters, the rapists, and other criminals as we have to police capitalism which is the perfect medium for greed to literally destroy everything of value. You are actually policing the capitalists, which should eliminate the influence of robber barons upon gov't that is supposed to represent the best interests and common good of the people, not just a set of robber barons.

 

The most well known wealthy business titans of the 19th and early 20th centuries greatly improved the value of the goods and services they offered. When you look into some of the accomplishments of these vilified men, you simply couldn't have the modern economic giant that is the US without them.

Where did I say that? I loathe government involvement in the free market. Almost all actions taken by government are to provide an advantage for a small segment of the citizenry at the expense of the rest with the ultimate goal of law makers being increasing or at least holding on to their power. IMO, the more the government is involved, or the more capitalism is compromised, the more the wealth disparity widens.

Really? I disagree. Free markets built this nation.

Isn't this what laws are for? I agree, governments are inherently evil, but protection from force, fraud or coercion is required for a free market to thrive.

You think a small group of noble people simply given power will better run the country than millions of entrepreneurs. I just don't think you know what you are talking about in this last paragraph. You seem to devolve into a moral argument for the heavy hand of government. That just seems ridiculous to me.

 

The naive hero-worship of the capitalist. Need I say it, LOL!

 

Don't blame me for your terrible education. Further, most of these men had to compete with subsidized or granted monopoly competitors.

 

A rather weak ad hominem.

 

Hillary wants open borders.

 

I see, this is what the simple-wittedness and the anti-Hillary obsession of the rightist mentality is inclined to dismissively reduce the enlightened leftist viewpoint to. Oh dear.

 

Sure is a lot of words for not saying anything.

 

Oh ye of little comprehension.

 

Here's another wordy bit that I posted in another thread, hopefully it will help to clarify my views on globalism:

My reply:

The problem is precisely that they are not, never were "our" factories. Rather, under capitalism we're dispossessed of the means of production, the means of production become the private property of capitalists and corporations, who, driven by the sociopathic-making drive for profit maximization and the accumulation of capital will engage in globalizing practices of the type that adversely affect the welfare of the rest of us, such as outsourcing production to countries in which there's plenty of cheap labor to exploit. Well, what do you expect but a distressed working class in a system in which those who control most of the economic wealth and power are a separate and small class whose members aren't required to care one whit about the economic well-being of their society and its working-class population; a system in which, rather, it's insanely taken to be the capitalist's prerogative to do whatever is dictated by private self-interest, with no regard for the common good?

Now then, a sentence such as "Send our factories to Mexico" takes our thinking away from the recognition of all of the above, and interprets the exportation of factories and jobs as an us vs. them proposition, us being members of our nationality group, and them being members of any national outgroup (such as "Mexicans"). However, the us vs. them proposition that we're actually presented with, and would be zeroing in on if we were properly conscientized is the conflict of interests and the class struggle between workingpeople and capitalists. Well, it's indeed the harsh objective reality that capitalist elites have and are actuated by class interests and an imperative to accumulate that are often seriously at odds with the interests and needs of workers, and the dangerous fact that capitalists are excessively at liberty and empowered to only abide by their own class concerns, economic egoism, and drive for accumulation that accounts for the increasing precarization and immiseration of the laboring little guy/gal. The penchant of the nationalistic mentality for instead misidentifying foreign workers as the source of our economic pain is obviously counterproductive because it misdirects our disgruntlement and allows capitalists to carry on practicing a ruthless MO geared only for their own enrichment.

Why is it that so many wage-earning folks go in for this counterproductive nationalistic interpretation of the working class' plight? Well, underlying the nationalistic mentality is a threat-oriented and xenophobic cognitive style that's inclined to be on the lookout for threats and enemies foreign rather than domestic, and which overrides the commonsense awareness of being immiserated by one's own capitalist countrymen. Then of course there's our indoctrination to view capitalists positively, and to even vicariously identify with them, rather than identify them as the true enemies of our socioeconomic well-being. And of course there's the very effective job of promoting this pro-capitalist, pro-business indoctrination that the conservative movement has been doing for decades. And, tragically, there isn't much of a left in our society to countervail against the right's efforts to brainwash us to love capitalist big brother; to conscientize us, i.e. promote a class consciousness which would help to keep us from falling prey to a superficial nationalistic analysis of our economic situation. Consequently, a great many working-class folks do get taken in by the nationalistic interpretation, and become an unwitting part of the problem, rather than a conscientized part of the solution.

At any rate, it does workingpeople no good whatsoever to be drawn into the xenophobic scapegoating of immigrants – who've by the way been driven to become immigrants by the poverty inflicted upon them by the capitalist world order, another way in which it's actually the capitalist system and its elites who are ultimately responsible for the economic grievances that nationalists try to blame on the alien other. It would behoove us to instead begin to focus all of our ire, critical thinking, and desire for change on our socioeconomic system and its capitalist ruling class. As long as we continue to preoccupy ourselves with the racist red herrings of the alt-right, and to give the capitalist system and elite a free pass, the working class will never be rescued from its increasingly dire straits.


(And, btw, in case I need to spell it out, electing a race-baiting capitalist elite like The Donald certainly isn't going to help matters.)

 

ROFl you seem to think there are "capitalist" and "corporations" and then the rest of us. Well I'm a rest of us and a capitalist and I am an owner in LOTS of factories and corporations and have accumulated wealth because I am.

You do not have such ownerships and have not accumulated any wealth?

 

Whenever possible, in all ways possible, I choose to refrain from being complicit in the capitalist system and status quo.

 

So much this.

Capitalism is the enemy of Nationalism. Capitalism requires unhappy people to function, and thus has married itself to profit driven depression machines in mass advertising, trying to convince everyone we are incomplete without the products they are pitching.

Capitalism is the enemy of free thought. It is the enemy of parenting, subverting our control as parents by maliciously appealing to our children. Capitalism is the worst, most abusive, corrupt system in the world.

Only in a capitalist arena can a bottle of water cost more then a bottle of coke, or the desire to create sugar addiction be used to weaponize food against the public, and then sell the cure in various medical schemes.

Capitalism. The CANCER masquerading as the cure.

 

If that were true, which I doubt, then you are part of the maybe 2% that some of us stand completely opposed to and your words show who you are. But if you are a capitalist and so damned successful and rich, you aren't "a rest of us".

 

Again, I thank you for being an incisive and straight-talking critic of capitalism, our society indeed needs plenty more fully conscientized folks like you.

 

Btw, the egoistic and materialistic ethos and form of life fostered by capitalism is also quite clearly the vicious enemy of most of the traditional values that conservatives profess to believe in, but alas they have an enormous blind spot for the axiological and ethical badness of our faux free enterprise system that prevents them from appreciating how seriously incompatible their pro-capitalism is with their moral and religious worldview.

 

Just as the internal and incurable dynamics of capitalism are indeed responsible for the outsourcing of production to the sweatshop factories of the semi-periphery (to use world-systems theory lingo), they're also the cause of the conditions in semi-peripheral countries that drive the immigration that you-all with a xenophobic, threat-oriented cognitive style are so distressed about.

Perhaps this might enlighten you in this regard,
http://www.politicalforum.com/showthread.php?t=480894&p=1066789244#post1066789244

 

How about producing evidence to the contrary instead of your own opinion?

 

Btw, are you aware that her statement regarding open borders has been grievously taken out of context?

- - - Updated - - -

As if the rightist mentality deals in facts and evidence!

 

This indeed pretty well sums it up, and sums up why the actually-existing globalism that I critique in the OP is so dreadful for billions of human beings, and in the process of producing an ecological-climatological apocalypse.

 

capitalism

noun
cap·i·tal·ism \ˈka-pə-tə-ˌliz-əm, ˈkap-tə-, British also kə-ˈpi-tə-\

a way of organizing an economy so that the things that are used to make and transport products (such as land, oil, factories, ships, etc.) are owned by individual people and companies rather than by the government

SOURCE

For some reason, few seem to know what it means.

Capitalism, simply put, is the free exchange of goods and services between individuals. It is the natural state of trade.

At a 52% taxation rate, a state monopoly of force, as well as a state controlled monetary system that is designed to siphon wealth from capitalist we do not have capitalism in the United States, as the existence of a government (force) precludes capitalism in its natural state.

For the communist that state we do have capitalism in the United States, then you are being hypocritical by stating the the USSR (for an example) was not communist. It is applying a purists ideal to one, ans a cynics ideals to another and is being absolutely hypocritical and inconsistent.

 

Actually-existing capitalism of course doesn't conform to the free-market fundamentalist's idealized image and definition of capitalism, however it's the reality that capitalism inherently preordains itself to produce, therefore actually-existing capitalism, not your dictionary definiton or what you term a simple natural state of trade = capitalism. And even if the free-marketarian's idealized image of capitalism could be sustainably actualized in the real world, well, it would still suffer from the quite serious shortcoming of being a system grounded in and that would promote certain erroneous ethical and ontological preconceptions, namely egoistic individualism and the substantialist idea that reality consists of separate substantial entities. That is, it would still be at odds with the ethical and ontological insight that the fundamental MO of existence is creative interrelationality, i.e. that being and beings consist of intercreative energy events, processes of creative experience actualizing themselves in collaboration, and organizing into macroentities such as ourselves, which of course also creatively interact and interdepend; i.e. that we all, all entities socially co-create ourselves. And of course social co-creativity indeed being the fundamental nature of nature, of life, of reality, any form of economy and society geared for individualism is attempting to make the collective lives of human beings work in a way that simply doesn't work, and is therefore quite doomed to failure. Undertaking to devise a deeply social, communal form of society (namely, authentic communism) in which human beings instead embrace a creatively collaborative approach to being in the world that reflects the fundamental social-creative modus operandi of existence would be much more advisable.