Tuesday, May 23, 2006

Capitalism.....

posted by Mr. Vidiot @ 1:07 PM Permalink

This article gets somethings right and some things wrong:
Excerpt: The American government in its various incarnations was not created to serve the interests of the people. It was designed to serve capital and to create wealth for the upper echelon by exploiting the working class and plundering the earth. In fact, it is a voracious predatory crime syndicate devoid of conscience that creates perpetual war while simultaneously pilfering the public treasury. It remains in power only through the collusion of its obedient servant, the commercial media and a disengaged public.
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Because capital finances and controls the major political parties, it is always assured of both power and control, regardless of which party is in power. Thus capital will never allow meaningful reform that could usurp some of its power and redistribute it among the people. Capital demands complete power and total control over the political process. It will allow no more than minor change within narrow predefined limits that create the illusion of reform. Beyond those limits capital feels threatened and reacts with violent brutality.


This is in large part true though with flaws. This excerpt forgets the power of agency and resistance among many working class people. Hegemony is never complete, never static but rather a fluid equilibrium adapting and changing, incorporating and digesting as a bulimic while purging out the unwanted it creates. The expelled remains do not vanish; they continue to resist making American hegemonic control always problematic for the power elite.

Agency is always operating and threatening now more than ever corporate control, state power, and the legitimacy of our political economy. This excerpt is a half-truth, and is stifled by its own logic. There is never complete control, never complete power, never complete rule, never throughout all of history. The article forgets those that are silenced, and only adds to their silence by its refusal to admit their existence. The voices of the silenced exist where the cameras do not exist, where the eyes of the world fail to turn. We are well aware of what the writer is trying to convey, yet the writer must take a step further and realize the power of the marginalized and dispossessed, it is where the true battle is fought, not in the political arena, not in the global media, but in the streets where the so called left and right equally hate and ignore. The battle is fought in the social cracks in the urban landscape that has yet to be consumed with global capitalism and American hegemony. It is in these ignored social spaces where true resistance is found and power is challenged every day, every minute, and every moment.

And there are more cracks and fractures everyday to the logic and legitimacy of our social foundations. Failure to recognize this is failure to give our current system of power too much credit over the power of human agency -- our capacity to think, to fight, and for humanity to triumph.

And triumph we will.

1 Comments:

At 2:23 AM, Anonymous Anonymous said...

I'm sorry but you know I love you and your rants but I think a couple of days in Israel will change your view as to the ways and means of the militia.. er police... er EVERY SINGLE CITIZEN in that country (after all they ALL serve in the military and they all know how to handle weapons).
Being an ex military man (and peacenik) I am not in the least bit threatened by these exercises or by the (finally!) well instituted practice of "body language" profiling that this "urban militia" is instituting on our city streets.
All it takes is a couple of fireballed busses (God forbid) and we'll have a right wing stampede that will make the dark ages look like Pat Boone's closet (who's he??).
Mannerisms of people wired to the nose hairs with plastic you-know-what are eeriely similar on any shore and I feel a red c-hair safer when I know that the corn fed "elite" are finally getting the crib notes to what those persons look like before they push the infernal detonator. Sadly it's a new century of fear but still free of the daily numbing torrent of body parts that our fellow humans are having with their morning coffee and paper in less fortunate locales.
I'd rather see the SUV with jack-booted mititary boys pulling up to my starbucks than spend the morning calling my friends and family to find out if they made it through the morning commute.
Keep the tomatoes in the sauce!

 

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