Global Problems and the Culture of Capitalism

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Each of the following statements should provide the stimulus for some good discussion.  We will continue to add to the list and welcome any suggestions for additional quotes.  Just send them to Richard Robbins.

 

A really good education makes kids subversive. That’s why so little really good education goes on.
    Chris Satullo

I have read in E.P. Thompson’s "The Making of the English Working Class" that the first man who attempted to establish a labor union in England at the end of the 18th century was arrested, tried for sedition, found guilty, drawn and quartered in a public square by attaching draft horses to each of his arms and legs and pulling him apart. He was then disemboweled and his guts were burned. Then they hanged what was left of him. One gathers from this that the propertied classes were slow to accept the idea of organized labor.

    SAN FRANCISCO EXAMINER, B-2, Wednesday, September 8, 1999
    THE POET’S CHOICE ROBERT HASS

Labor is prior to, and independent of, capital. Capital is only the fruit of labor, and could never have existed if labor had not first existed. Labor is the superior of capital, and deserves much of higher consideration.

Abraham Lincoln

"At this point, I would like to emphasize that our emergency planning {for a nuclear attack by the soviets} is predicated on the idea that it is possible for our nation to survive, recover, and win and that our way of life, including free enterprise, the oil industry, and Socony Mobil Oil Company, can survive, recover, and win with it.

-- Maxwell McKnight, Mobil, 1963

"For globalism to work, American can’t be afraid to act like the almighty superpower that it is....The hidden hand of the market will never work without a hidden fist McDonald’s cannot flourish without McDonnell Douglas, the designer of the F-15. And the hidden fist that keeps the world safe for Silicon Valley’s technologies is called the United States Army, Air Force, Navy and Marine Corps."

-- "What the World Needs Now," Thomas Friedman, New York Times, March 28, 1999

Personally, I’m in favor of democracy, which means that the central institutions of society have to be under popular control. Now, under capitalism, we can’t have democracy by definition. Capitalism is a system in which the central institutions of society are in principle under autocratic control. Thus, a corporation or an industry is, if we were to think of it in political terms, fascist; that is, it has tight control at the top and strict obedience has to be established at every level—there’s little bargaining, a little give and take, but the line of authority is perfectly straightforward. Just as I’m opposed to political fascism, I’m opposed to economic fascism. I think that until the major institutions of society are under the popular control of participants and communities, it’s pointless to talk about democracy.

from Noam Chomsky Language and Politics (1988) p.162.

Let us not forget the entertainment value of democracy. It keeps the masses amused. What would you rather have: misery and corruption in a circus setting or misery and corruption under the leaden gray of an authoritarian sky? Give me the circus any time.

-- Azaz Amir (a popular Pakistani journalist commenting on the current state of affairs in Pakistan...)

Covert action is nothing more than "a semantic disguise for murder, coercion, blackmail, bribery, the spreading of lies, whatever is deemed useful to bending other countries to our will."

--Former Senator Frank Church, 1982

"We still maintain a republican form of government, but who has control of the primaries that nominate the candidate? The corporations have. Who control the conventions? The corporations. Who control the machinery of elections? The corporations. Who own the bosses and the elected officials? The corporations. Are they representatives of the people or of the corporations? Let any fair-minded man answer that question truthfully."

"If the corporations do all this—and they surely do—can we any longer maintain that this is a government by the people? It is a government by a distinct class, but not a government for the greatest good of the greatest number but for the special advantage of that class. Laws are passed for the benefit of the corporations, and such laws as are not to the advantage of the corporations are ignored. The people are neglected because they have ceased to be important as a factor in the government."

-- William Randolph Hearst    (qtd. in _Forerunners of American Fascism_ by Raymond Gram Swing. Freeport, NY: Books for Libraries Press, 1969; page 139-140.)

"A scientifically ordered society has little room for democracy because rationality is inevitably totalitarian."

Mary Dixon 1812 quoted in The maze of Ingenuity; ideas and idealism in the development of technology by Arnold Pacey MIT Press 1993

"In the United States, elections are basically debates between the haves, among the haves, about how best to keep the have-nots from having anything."

--Michael Albert, editor of *Z Magazine*, in an interview with KPFK’s Frank Stoltz, Thu 15 Feb 96.

"There are people in the world so hungry that God cannot appear to them except in the form of bread."

-- Mahatma Gandhi

Source: *Unitarian Church of Orange County Newsletter*, vol. 40, no. 13 (July 17, 1998), p. 1.

"All the evidence suggests that we have consistently exaggerated the contributions of technological genius and underestimated the contributions of natural resources. We need [...] something we lost in our haste to remake the world: a sense of limits, an awareness of the importance of earth’s resources."

-- Stewart Udall

"Nor do piecemeal steps however well intended, even partially resolve problems that have reached a universal, global and catastrophic Character. If anything, partial ‘solutions’ serve merely as cosmetics to conceal the deep seated nature of the ecological crisis. They thereby deflect public attention and theoretical insight from an adequate understanding of the depth and scope of the necessary changes."

Murray Bookchin, In The Ecology of Freedom (Palo Alto: Cheshire Books, 1982) pg. 3

"People who respond most favorably to such statements are older, less-educated males from larger households, who are not typically active information-seekers... another possible target is younger, lower-income women [who are] likely to soften their support for federal legislation after hearing new information on global warming. These women are good targets for magazine advertisements."

-- Leaked document from the National Coal Association,

on targeting strategy for a campaign to convince Americans that global warming is not a problem. Cited by Senator Gore in his book _Earth in the Balance_.

"Of all the forms of inequality, injustice in health care is the most shocking and inhumane."—Martin Luther King

- from Physicians for a National Health Program

In 1991, the Centers for Disease Control published a study showing that the nation’s taxpayers would save $60 billion in health-care and special-education costs by spending $32 billion to eradicate lead from inner city homes.[9] Congress has never been willing to adopt this cost-effective prevention strategy, evidently preferring to produce generation after generation of black inner city children with diminished intellectual capacity and a propensity toward violence.

Children, can you spell R-A-C-I-S-M?

Peter Montague, Rachel’s Environmental and Health Weekly (rachel@rachel.org)

Excerpts from letters to Amnesty International:

"When the first two hundred letters came, the guards gave me back my clothes. Then the next two hundred letters came, and the prison director came to see me. When the next pile of letters arrived, the director got in touch with his superior. The letters kept coming and coming: three thousand of them. The President was informed. The letters still kept arriving, and the President called the prison and told them to let me go."

  • A released prisoner from the Dominican Republic

"We could always tell when international protests were taking place... the food rations increased and the beating s were fewer. Letters from abroad were translated and passed round from cell to cell, but when the letters stopped, the dirty food and repression started again."

A released prisoner of conscience from Vietnam

"For years I was held in a tiny cell. My only human contact was with my torturers... My only company were the cockroaches and mice... On Christmas Eve the door to my cell opened and the guard tossed in a crumpled piece of paper. It said, ‘Take heart. The world knows you’re alive. We’re with you. Regards, Monica, Amnesty International.’ That letter saved my life."

  • A released prisoner of conscience from Paraguay

 

"Amnesty International has concluded that the Salvadoran ‘death squads’ are simply used to shield the government from accountability for the torture, ‘disappearance’ and extrajudicial executions committed in their name. The squads are made up of *regular army and police agents*, acting in uniform or plain clothes, *under the orders of superior officers*." [emphasis added] [Who Runs the "Death Squads"", pp. 8-9]

--Amnesty International, _El Salvador: "Death Squads"—A Government Strategy_

"It is organized violence on the top which creates individual violence at the bottom"

-Emma Goldman

"What can I tell you? Cubans always speak of defending The Revolution. I speak of defending ourselves from the grief and heartbreak of being accomplices to evil acts done in our name and with our hardearned cash. I speak of defending our right not to be murderers. If I would rather die myself than run over a child in the street, how can I possibly accept squashing a million children from forty-five thousand feet? And to celebrate such a feat, I assure you, is quite impossible. To see the anti-abortion forces, including Bush, rage against poor and scared women, some of them homeless, who refuse to give life to a child they cannot support, while not even planting symbolic crosses for the actual children bombed to death in Iraq, is to witness cynicism in its most unconscionable form. I speak of defending our right to praise and uphold what is good about any other people’s way of life, even as we recognise and criticize what is bad. ...

"I speak of defending the Earth, our Mother God. I speak of defending and loving the Earth’s children: All of us."

(From "The Story of Why I America Here: or A Woman Connects Oppressions" by Alice Walker, published in the Monthly Review, June 1994. Originally a speech delivered at a Peace for Cuba Rally on February 1, 1992)

"The simple presence of subversion can never be a lasting remedy for it fails to take into account of the cause of subversion. Most of the causes reside in our situations of institutional violence. Thus radical changes for subversion is the radical suppression of social inequality."

-Declaration of International meeting of Latin American Bishops

"That God is on the side of the poor and that the Scriptures are uncompromising in their demand for economic and social justice is much more clear biblically than most of the issues over which churches have divided. The Scriptures claim that to know God is to do justice and to plead the cause of the oppressed. Yet this central biblical imperative is one of the first to be purged from a church that has conformed and made accommodations to the established order."

-Jim Wallis "Agenda for Biblical People"

Let me reiterate what is central to my thesis and so overlooked in much academic cultural criticism. We were not suddenly transformed from customers to consumers by wily manufacturers eager to unload a surplus of crapular products. We are many things, but what we are not are victims of capitalism. With few exceptions (food, shelter, sex), our needs are cultural, not natural. We have created a surfeit of things because we enjoy the process of getting and spending. The consumption ethic may have started in the early 1900s and hit full tilt after the mid-century, but the desire is ancient. Whereas kings and princes once thought they could solve problems by possessing and amassing things, we now say, "Count us in." Whereas the Duchess of Windsor once said, "All my friends know that I'd rather shop than eat," we now say, "Hey, wait for me." 

--James B. Twitchell from Lead Us Into Temptation: The Triumph of American Materialism

"Too much and too long, we seem to have surrendered community excellence and community values in the mere accumulation of material things. Our gross national product ... if we should judge America by that - counts air pollution and cigarette advertising, and ambulances to clear our highways of carnage. It counts special locks for our doors and the jails for those who break them. It counts the destruction of our redwoods and the loss of our natural wonder in chaotic sprawl. It counts napalm and the cost of a nuclear warhead, and armored cars for police who fight riots in our streets. It counts Whitman's rifle and Speck's knife, and the television programs which glorify violence in order to sell toys to our children.
 "Yet the gross national product does not allow for the health of our children, the quality of their education, or the joy of their play. It does not include the beauty of our poetry or the strength of our marriages; the intelligence of our public debate or the integrity of our public officials. It measures neither our wit nor our courage; neither our wisdom nor our learning; neither our compassion nor our devotion to our country; it measures everything, in short, except that which makes life worthwhile. And it tells us everything about America except why we are proud that we are Americans."

--Robert Kennedy, Address, University of Kansas, Lawrence, Kansas, March 18, 1968

The use of money is all the advantage there is in having it.
   -- Benjamin Franklin

Our thesis is that the idea of a self-adjusting market implied a stark utopia.  Such an institution could not exist for any length of time without annihilating the human and natural substance of society; it would have physically destroyed man and transformed his surroundings into a wilderness.  Inevitably, society took measures to protect itself, but whatever measures it took impaired the self-regulation of the market, disorganized industrial life, and thus endangered society in yet another way.  It was this dilemma which forced the development of the market system into a definite groove and finally disrupted the social organization based upon it.

--Karl Polyani, The Great Transformation (1944)

Throughout the world, on any given day, a man or woman, or child is likely to be displaced, tortured, killed, or "disappeared," at the hands of government or armed political groups.  More often than not, the United States shares the blame.

---Amnesty International, 1996

The American victory in the soft war creates the desire of the citizens of the world to become American, with its values, wealth and security umbrella. However, it is impossible for America to grant the American dream to all people who dream it, either in the U.S. or abroad. The danger of creating a desire that cannot be satisfied—whether desire for a certain product or a certain civilization—is the backlash that will follow: waves of protest and dissatisfaction that will translate into a wish to return to one’s own history.

-----Francesco Sisci (2002)

Cigarettes have certain advantages over other consumer products, not the least of which is that they are addictive. They are inexpensive to make, require almost no innovation, there is a global market for them, and cigarette makers can raise prices without seeing much of a drop in business.

Andrew Martin (NY Times, January 31, 2007)

 

 

 

 

 

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