A Recipe For Fascism

[Jonathan E.]

I think this

Commerce cannot be the sole guide of human behavior. This utopian fantasy, embraced by the tea party as well as the liberal elite, defies 3,000 years of economic history. It is a chimera. This ideology has been used to justify the disempowerment of the working class, destroy our manufacturing capacity, and ruthlessly gut social programs that once protected and educated the working and middle class. It has obliterated the traditional liberal notion that societies should be configured around the common good. All social and cultural values are now sacrificed before the altar of the marketplace.

is the key para in the Chris Hedges' piece that Adam began this thread with.

[Hugh Weldon]

Jon

the key para

Thanks, haven't had time to read the whole thread, but couldn't disagree with that neat summation. I see it around me day in and day out. I rail and rant about it with growing regularity. But how's a guy to make an honest living without being deeply involved in the whole racket?

One of my facebook friends put this up today, interesting and very relevant I think.

http://comment.rsablogs.org.uk/2010/06/ ... apitalism/

[Adam Blake]

That's a great cartoon, Hugh! Thanks for posting it.

Yeah, dear old Oscar W said something about knowing the price of everything and the value of nothing - but he said a lot of things...

[Jonathan E.]

What a great site and organization, Hugh. Thanks. I'd never heard of them. RSA seems almost like a sort of TED with roots, which is exactly what TED needs. Along with purpose and integrity — instead of just being a bunch of smartypants showing off. Anyway, now I'm left with the difficult decision of whether to read More Miles Than Money (which just finally came in at the library after my request in August) with all Garth's "improvisations" on the American landscape and music or to investigate RSA in more depth. WWJD — that's What Will Jonathan Do, nothing else. What were you thinking?

[Jonathan E.]

. . . But how's a guy to make an honest living without being deeply involved in the whole racket? . . .

Perhaps it's not an honest living then.

I always recall the well-worn line, "To live outside the law you must be honest." Perhaps one can no longer live honestly inside the law, such as it is.

[Des]

Oh dear, this misanthropic and deeply reactionary idea that ordinary working people are somehow dishonest just because they are trying to have a decent standard of living within an existing economy makes me very angry. I'm sick to the back teeth of proponents of 'alternative' lifetyles lecturing the rest of us on how we are destroying the planet or perpetuating capitalism when they have done sod all themselves to organise any kind of resistance to the prevailing system. Until nu-greens come up with some positive solutions to the problems of the world instead of projecting their own guilt on the rest of us they can just sod off.

There I've said it.

[Adam Blake]

You HAVE said it, Des, and well done!

I like the Dylan quote but I don't think it's true. It's just food for thought. The Oscar Wilde quote, however...

[Hugh Weldon]

My question was of course rhetorical - though I sometimes entertain fantasies of being a hermit in the woods or engaging in something dodgy and underhand I know can only survive by selling my skills, time and effort. Which is easier in this strange thing called a job.

Three cheers Des for your comments. There is a difference between the guzzling greedheads and those with the more modest ambitions who are nevertheless being made to feel guilty by some people because they spend too much money on Christmas presents for the kids or find having a car useful.


Sod off. I've said it too.

[Pete Fowler]

Oh dear, this misanthropic and deeply reactionary idea that ordinary working people are somehow dishonest just because they are trying to have a decent standard of living within an existing economy makes me very angry.

I don’t think anyone on this thread has ever suggested this: the comment to which you refer, from Jonathan, was, actually, a simple statement of fact – you can’t get out of this loop. Every single time I trot down to Tescos I’m participating; everytime I succumb and buy a new version of ILife I’m part of the problem. We live in what the American sociologist Paul Goodman called an ‘apparently closed room’, though, fifty years on, I would imagine he’d drop the adverb. Come on, even Thoreau, sitting there with his fishing rod by Walden Pond, knew the game was up and that he could not, actually, run from the disturbance of the thoughts of the society he was trying to escape. And that was well before the days of monopoly capitalism began to swallow us up, day on day.

Someone said, ‘do something’. I don’t know what to do, do you? I feel as trapped in the logic of the times as those crazy kids from Bradford, even though any ‘analysis’ I might dream up would be a million miles and a thousand years from their model of seeking revenge on the crusaders fighting Saladin. But their sense of alienation is shared, admittedly at different emotional levels, by many, many people.

I know why people get cross with snotty greens. Riding a bike and dressed in Cath Kidston, top to toe. And I even know, from working in Universities for so long, why people get cross with equally snotty academics, jealously holding on to their reputations and sneering at outsiders. But, I’m sorry, the central thesis of the Fucked World is far too strong to deny. I sat here, drunk at two in the morning, just last week with a guy who’d been out there to the Poles, and down there in the coral reefs, and he looked at me and said, ‘Five Hundred years, max….that’s what we’ve got left…probably be a lot shorter, but, let’s say it, five hundred years, top whack…’

There’s so many fronts to fight on: the end of the world, the growing inequalities in the world, the rich getting infinitely richer, the poor being sacrificed on an ideology that would have shamed Hobbes, let alone Adam Smith.

But the problem is this: sorting the second major set of problems – the desperate need to get out of an economic situation that reeks of echoes of the initial writings of Marx – cannot be achieved within any growing prosperity (which is precisely what happened in the successful deflection of Marxism in the western world); because a continually growing prosperity can only be built on a consumerism destined to shorten our time in this world.

It’s that conundrum that is paralysing; but it’s that paradox that desperately needs to be explored in order to shut up those screaming tea baggers and those bastards who fund them.

[AndyM]

I won't be here in five hundred years.

I don't have any kids.

The world without me in it won't be tolerable anyway.

Frownlines are so unflattering.

Off I go to the Easyjet website..................


(Readers: some of this post might be ironic. But how much ? Submit your percentage estimates to the usual address.)

[Des]

The world without me in it won't be tolerable anyway.

How true, Andy, how true....

[Neil Foxlee]

For Des and Andy:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aVbLNPwi_r0

[Adam Blake]

We are all of us cogs in the wheels of commerce, but I still haven't got a Tesco Club card.

[AndyM]

We are all of us cogs in the wheels of commerce, but I still haven't got a Tesco Club card.

Don't blame you, but the Boots Reward card is excellent. The times I've picked up a free tube of Pronamel toothpaste!

As for Peter & Gordon - the only duo where both of them were the ugly one ??

[Neil Foxlee]

As for Peter & Gordon - the only duo where both of them were the ugly one ??

]

That's a very attractivist remark. What about the feelings of the pulchritudinally challenged?

And while I'm at it, what's the recipe for socialism then? (Answers referring to Lenin and Trotsky will not be accepted on the basis that despite breaking lots of eggs, they didn't come up with the perfect omelette.)