On Apr 20, 2014, at 1:51 PM, raghu <[email protected]> wrote: > > When one is wealthy under ANY rules, one has immense claims on the lives of > other people, and not just on their "labor time". If I am a wealthy guy, who > buys up land in Africa, and push the native people off their land, I *may* > choose to control the labor times of the displaced people. Or, even worse for > the displaced people, I may choose not to control their labor time and simply > push them into refugee camps and hope they will disappear.
======== No disagreement; I’m all too familiar with Joan Robinson’s quip about the only thing worse than being exploited is not being exploited... > > You have a singular focus on capitalist modes of wealth accumulation, and > capitalist forms of exploitation, and that's fine. I'd go further and argue > that wherever great inequalities of wealth exist, it must necessarily be > accompanied by coercion, exploitation and control of the non-wealthy. This I > believe is also the big claim of Piketty and his fans like Krugman. ======== That would be because capitalism as a system of wealth accumulation is dominant across the planet at this point in history[ies]. The varieties of coercion, exploitation and control of non-wealthy persons has been a problem for millennia; the issue is what is to be done about it in our own time. > > You may think that "exploitation", "coercion" etc are legitimate analytical > concepts only within the framework of capitalism, but I disagree. I think > these concepts can be usefully generalized. ======== Well at least we agree on something. One of the problems is the way apologists for capitalism have struggled since Ricardo to obscure and deny the reality of exploitation at the point of production as one of the main wellsprings of wealth. Since we live within a global capitalist *system*, that is a big problem. > > > > Coercion and authority are *the big* problems in contemporary societies; > [...]. One need only think of the enslavement of the masses of labor in Saudi > Arabia in order to build the world’s tallest building to get a sense of how > useless a concept ‘sociopath’ is when trying to put a stop to such suffering > and the immense waste of time that such a project entails. > > > You really can't see how patronizing, arrogant and obnoxious this kind of > attitude is? ========== No I can’t, anymore than I think it would be arrogant to judge the production of the F-35 a waste of money and labor time. Or the quest to ship vast quantities of coal on Warren Buffet’s toy railroad to ports on the west coast so they can be shipped to societies in Asia. But coming from you, who wants to paint the really rich as sociopaths, I do find it puzzling that you would want to exempt the Saudi Royal family from such a characterization. I don’t see why anyone should be restricted in their condemnation of exploitation, coercion etc. to just the country they happen to live in. Cosmopolitics is indispensable going forward. > > Our ideological frameworks lead us to some things that we may consider "the > big problems". If other people arrive basically the same politics as us, but > from different analytical frameworks, shouldn't we be looking for common > ground? > -raghu. > ========== Yes, but when analytical frameworks are themselves subjects of political dispute some concepts may need to be abandoned in order achieve common ground. E.
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