Taylor J. Smith wrote: > Mauro Lacy wrote: > > > >> As I said before, the concept of "class struggle", and the use that is >> made of it, does not promote an harmonious way to resolve conflicts. >> History also supports this, and I think that it is one of the main >> reasons Marxism is discredited today. >> > > Hi All, > > The main reason that Marxism is discredited is > laid out in "Darkness at Noon". Certainly it was > not Kondratieff's discovery that capitalism was > not on a one-way path to destruction, for which > Stalin sentenced him to Siberia. Russian > thinking is no more objective than our own. > > While it is impossible to overestimate American > stupidity and cupidity, it is also a mistake > to ignore American genius. Some may argue that > it could never be repeated; but the creation of > our current American constitution by men schooled > in government, especially the classics, and > motivated by a desire for individual freedom, > is a marvel of history. > > Our founding fathers well understood human evil, > and created a system of horizontal and vertical > checks and balances so that the thieves could > blow the whistle on each other. Moreover, our > founding fathers highly valued personal freedom, > and were motivated by a burning opposition > (Masonic) to King and Pope. These libertarian > traditions are still alive and pose a formidable > challenge to the arrogance of the Middle Kingdom. > > Jack Smith > Hi Jack, I concord with you that the model of democracy and the constitution the US has established is a great achievement. Indeed, it forms the basis and the example for the constitutions of many other democratic countries.
But the economical system generically known as capitalism it's not so well suited and thought of for considerations of common human prosperity and stability. Specially, things that I've mentioned before, as the exponential growth of the monetary base (due to compound interest) lead to a compulsion for growth that's not only anti natural, but damaging, as it promotes short term profit oriented goals, and forgets about the human, social and natural consequences of them; i.e. it's only profit related. It also leads to concentration of wealth, which means: relative general poverty. Finally, it leads to its own demise, as it is unsustainable in the medium/long term (when there are no more resources to appropriate easily). These problems are systemic, inherent to the actual economic system, and in that sense cannot be solved inside the same system which as developed them in the first place. All this is what we're seeing today, with the added bonus that now it is a global problem. A truly systemic global crisis. Unless we face this without any kind of self delusion, we wouldn't be able to solve it. In the best of cases, we'll be able to postpone the unavoidable. But not for much longer, as systemic effects don't "go away" when you are not paying attention. They persist, and indeed aggravate with time. As Charles Eisenstein puts it: "Unless there are realms of wealth I have not considered, and new depths of poverty, misery, and alienation to which we might plunge, the inevitable cannot be delayed much longer." We can also "reboot" the system, so to speak, and start it over again. That reboot means a big destruction of both, real wealth, and virtual one(i.e. money). That's the most likely scenario, and that's what we must try to avoid. The only good way to avoid it is to really change the system. I.e. to prepare and develop an ordered collapse of capitalism, and its replacement for a new economic system not based in exponential growth. Indeed, that's exactly what I expect from American genius, as you called it. That will be, in my opinion, a real proof of genius, intelligence, sense of reality, humanity, and courage.
