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Joe Bageant: Corporations Are Now After Our Very Beings
Cognitive capitalism -- just when we thought there were no new ways to get screwed
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Corporations are now, for all practical purposes, the only way anything can get done, made or distributed, or even imagined as a way of anything coming into being (except babies). Look around you. Is there anything, from the food in the fridge to the fridge itself, from the furniture to the very varnish on the floors or the clothes we wear that was not delivered unto us by corporations?
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Enter yet a third phase: Consciousness Capitalism! The private appropriation of human consciousness as a "nonmaterial asset." Or cognitive capitalism, in nerd and pinhead speak.
Which goes to show you can never underestimate the dark bastards at the helm. Yes, these guys are good.
Essentially, we're talking about stripping the human experience from life, then renting it back to humans. So how does one do that? Through the same Western European historical process used to fuck over the world in the first two rounds of capitalism -- propertization. Denying access to something because it's MINE-MINE-MINE-MINE!
Lance Mannion: A nation of soloists
The human being losing his job is expected not just to understand but to approve. The nature of the business has become the nature of our society---we are all expected to understand that we are each expendable and replaceable, that our sole (soul's) purpose is to be at the service of the business and we should appreciate it when we are expended and replaced because aren't we lucky to live in a society where our being expendable and replaceable so improves the common good? Stock prices go up, someone else gets to keep his job---probably the guy telling you you've just lost yours---money's being made and spent and somewhere someone will eat well tonight because we have served the business by accepting that we are no longer of use to it.
FT.com / Comment / Opinion - Debt is capitalism’s dirty little secret
The answer is capitalism’s dirty little secret: excessive lending was the only way to maintain the living standards of the vast bulk of the population at a time when wealth was being concentrated in the hands of an elite.
Ah, Wall Street. Seeing the real you at last. » New Deal 2.0
Financial innovation was presented to us in a way that suggested that great things were happening for mankind. The presentations were usually vague. To understand them, we had only the power of our own imaginations, or perhaps, failing that, our awe in the face of this powerful expertise, confidently propelling us to a greater future....
Malarky. This is all code for defer to the wishes of those who make money from these techniques.
Long Sunday: What's so critical about critical theory?
chapters of Alex Honneth's recently published collected, Pathologies of Reason: On the Legacy of Critical Theory. In these two chapters, Honneth lays out what he takes to be two core concepts in Critical Theory: the idea of a social pathology of reason and, of course, the idea of critique.
Jonathan Wolff: Greed is good (sometimes); but regulation is better | Education | The Guardian
But suppose you are buying meat that won't be supplied for 20 years? Still want to rely on the greed of the butcher? Thought not. By the time you have found out if he is cheating you, it will be too late to switch supplier. When there is a substantial time lag between purchase and consumption, as there is for pensions, savings schemes and sub-prime debt, the market loses its magic and the purchaser is vulnerable.
Book Review - 'Methland - The Death and Life of an American Small Town,' by Nick Reding - Review - NYTimes.com
The agricultural conglomerates that have gobbled up Oelwein and similar farm towns may feed the world, but they starve the folks who work for them, breeding a craving for synthetic stimulants that conveniently sap the appetite while enlarging the body’s capacity for toil.
The Old Solutions Have Become the New Problems - BusinessWeek
by Shoshana Zuboff. She diagnoses the problem of waning trust but proposes solutions that are over marketized.
Friendship and commercial societies -- Badhwar 7 (3): 301 -- Politics, Philosophy & Economics
Critics of commercial societies complain that the free-market system of property rights and freedom of contract tends to commodify relationships, thus eroding the bonds of personal and civic friendship. I argue that this thesis rests on a misunderstanding of both markets and friendship. As voluntary, reciprocal relationships, market relationships and friendship share important properties. Like all relations and activities that exercise important human capacities and play an important role in a meaningful life, market relations and activities are essentially structured and supported by ethical norms and, in turn, support these norms. The so-called norms of the market, such as instrumentality and fungibility, come in varying degrees and characterize not only market, but also nonmarket, relationships, including friendship. Furthermore, although market relationships are primarily instrumental, the individuals involved are not. The virtues of markets have their counterparts in friendship, as do their vices. For these and other reasons, market societies are not only not inimical to friendship, they create a more secure matrix for civic and personal friendship, as well as for other important values such as art, science, or philosophy, than any other developed form of society.
Douglas Rushkoff » Life Inc: Introduction
, but people of all social classes making choices that go against their better judgment because they believe it’s really the only sensible way to act under the circumstances. It’s as if the world itself were tilted, pushing us toward self- interested, short- term decisions, made more in the manner of corporate share-holders than members of a society. The more decisions we make in
this way, the more we contribute to the very conditions leading to this awfully sloped landscape. In a dehumanizing and self-denying cycle, we make too many choices that—all things being equal—we’d prefer not to make.
Liberal Conspiracy » Markets can also serve the poorest | creating a new liberal-left alliance
Open Left:: Industrial Capitalism Has A Black Book, Too
The capitalist industrial revolution would simply have not happened on a scale anywhere approaching the levels it achieved unless the industrializing nations had not conquered huge tracts of land and, through the use of force, either heavily exploited, or entirely cleared out, the native populations. The capitalist industrial revolution, and the worst economic devolution ever experienced by the peoples of Africa and Asia, are two sides of the same coin.
Matthew Yglesias » The Ethics of Homo Economicus
. These are people primarily motivated in life by greed. Not just by a desire to make some scratch, mind you. These aren’t immigrants who walked through the desert from Mexico in order to earn more money by washing dishes in a San Diego hotel. They’re not 24 year-olds looking for a hefty salary in order to pay off student loans. They’re multi-millionaires who want to earn millions more.
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