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Joel Andreas - Addicted to War.pdf
19.9 MB
Joel #Andreas - Addicted to War: Why the U.S. Can't Kick Militarism
Forwarded from Dead Lasagna (Kozy Raccoon)
A surprisingly decent introduction to US militarism up until 2002-2003
"Honestly at this stage we don’t have any other option asides from rapid reduction in the amount of resources and energy we use. It will take too long for solar to come online. It will take too long for nuclear to come online. We do not have the luxury to keep consuming resources at the rate we are going.
I don’t think there is a contradiction between massively improving living standards and rapidly reducing the amount of resources it requires to reproduce us as a society. Too much emphasis is placed on the use of resources at the point of consumption rather than at the point of production. The problem is we are making too much crap and working too much, doing things which are ultimately rather pointless.
I think the key is the prioritisation of essential work and the shutdown of harmful and non-essential industries. The first lockdown shows that this is something that can be done and can reduce emissions quickly. Reallocating people’s time away from non-essential work towards essential work could be used as a way of reducing the working day, leaving us more time to ourselves. This would give us time to have fun in ways which aren’t mediated by the market (and therefore are based on using up resources), to look after the things we own and engage properly in society.
I think the second part is shifting resources to services which are free at the point of use, reducing the need to individual buy private resources which spend most of their lives not in use, and provision of a universal income where everyone has enough to live on regardless of whether they are taking part in the wage system. Why do we produce millions of cars a year which spend 94% of their lives parked? Wouldn’t it be easier if we could just borrow resources from a collective pool and then return them when we don’t need them? By making it so people have access to enough resources to live a good life without having to sell their labour to an employer, we can actually ask ourselves whether the work we are doing is necessary and whether we need to burn resources doing it. We can also start working on things which we know are necessary and need to happen, but aren’t being paid for through the wage system.
The economic consequence of enacting these policies is that there would be a collapse in GDP (as there was in the first lockdown) and an accompanying collapse in the value of pound. This would reduce our ability to import goods from abroad. Currently the UK subsists on its bloated financial sector and sits on top of global supply lines, sucking labour and resources out of the rest of the world and consuming resources in an entirely wasteful manner (much of our GDP is just consuming resources - a shirt sold here adds more to our GDP than making it does adds to Bangladesh’s). It would be a good thing if this consumerist nightmare would end. Do we even have the time or the energy to enjoy any of this stuff? Is this really living, buying products which are designed to break and made by slaves, to fill the void that living in this world leaves?"
- source
I don’t think there is a contradiction between massively improving living standards and rapidly reducing the amount of resources it requires to reproduce us as a society. Too much emphasis is placed on the use of resources at the point of consumption rather than at the point of production. The problem is we are making too much crap and working too much, doing things which are ultimately rather pointless.
I think the key is the prioritisation of essential work and the shutdown of harmful and non-essential industries. The first lockdown shows that this is something that can be done and can reduce emissions quickly. Reallocating people’s time away from non-essential work towards essential work could be used as a way of reducing the working day, leaving us more time to ourselves. This would give us time to have fun in ways which aren’t mediated by the market (and therefore are based on using up resources), to look after the things we own and engage properly in society.
I think the second part is shifting resources to services which are free at the point of use, reducing the need to individual buy private resources which spend most of their lives not in use, and provision of a universal income where everyone has enough to live on regardless of whether they are taking part in the wage system. Why do we produce millions of cars a year which spend 94% of their lives parked? Wouldn’t it be easier if we could just borrow resources from a collective pool and then return them when we don’t need them? By making it so people have access to enough resources to live a good life without having to sell their labour to an employer, we can actually ask ourselves whether the work we are doing is necessary and whether we need to burn resources doing it. We can also start working on things which we know are necessary and need to happen, but aren’t being paid for through the wage system.
The economic consequence of enacting these policies is that there would be a collapse in GDP (as there was in the first lockdown) and an accompanying collapse in the value of pound. This would reduce our ability to import goods from abroad. Currently the UK subsists on its bloated financial sector and sits on top of global supply lines, sucking labour and resources out of the rest of the world and consuming resources in an entirely wasteful manner (much of our GDP is just consuming resources - a shirt sold here adds more to our GDP than making it does adds to Bangladesh’s). It would be a good thing if this consumerist nightmare would end. Do we even have the time or the energy to enjoy any of this stuff? Is this really living, buying products which are designed to break and made by slaves, to fill the void that living in this world leaves?"
- source
Forwarded from Dead Lasagna (Kozy Raccoon)
Marx
- on 'state socialism' and the state:"where the state is itself a capitalist producer, as in the exploitation of mines, forests, etc., its product is a ‘commodity’ and hence possesses the specific character of every other commodity."
"Marx stressed the parasitic and transitory character of the state:[...] the seeming supreme independent existence of the state is only seeming and that it is in all its forms an excrescence of society; just as its appearance itself arises only at a certain stage of social development, it disappears again as soon as society has reached a stage not yet attained"
"For Marx, it was clear that the establishment of a socialist system of production and consumption would be a long and complex process, certainly not achievable simply through the capture of the palace of power. Indeed, there would be nothing “specifically socialist about [it].”"
On racism:"Marx copied George’s observation that “communism or socialism ”had failed to win the support of most workers, because “the presence of the Chinese ha[d] largely engrossed the attention of the labouring classes, offering what has seemed to them a sufficient explanation of the fall of wages and difficulty of finding employment.” Marx was well aware that conflicts among workers, particularly after waves of migration, were a powerful weapon that the bourgeoisie could use to distract them from the real problems of capitalist society."
On Communism and Socialism:
Marx understood communism as "a higher form of society, a society in which the full and free development of every individual forms the ruling principle."
"Marx carefully avoided formulations that might suggest a universal model of socialist society [...]. This is why [...] he intimated that “writing recipes for the cook-shops of the future” was by no means one of his interests, and why in 1879–1880 [...] he wrote categorically: “I have never established a ‘socialist system.’”"
On the idea that a country needs to go through fixed stages of development to bring about a socialist society:
“events of striking similarity, taking place in different historical contexts, [lead] to totally disparate results.” To understand real historical transformations, it was necessary to study individual phenomena separately; only then could they be compared with one another. It would never be possible to interpret them “with the master-key of a general historico-philosophical theory, whose supreme virtue consists in being supra-historical.”"
"a key conclusion that Marx reached: hypotheses about the possible course of history should not base themselves on abstract laws but always be commensurate with the diversity of existing contexts. [...] Guided by doubt and hostility toward past schematism and new dogmatisms arising in his name, he thought it possible that the revolution would break out in conditions and forms that he had never considered before. The future was in the hands of the working class and depended on the capacity of its organizations and struggles to bring about profound social upheavals"
- The Last Years of Karl Marx, Marcello Musto
The book also talks about other subjects, in particular Marx's condemnation of colonialism and imperialism in his trip in Algiers
- on 'state socialism' and the state:"where the state is itself a capitalist producer, as in the exploitation of mines, forests, etc., its product is a ‘commodity’ and hence possesses the specific character of every other commodity."
"Marx stressed the parasitic and transitory character of the state:[...] the seeming supreme independent existence of the state is only seeming and that it is in all its forms an excrescence of society; just as its appearance itself arises only at a certain stage of social development, it disappears again as soon as society has reached a stage not yet attained"
"For Marx, it was clear that the establishment of a socialist system of production and consumption would be a long and complex process, certainly not achievable simply through the capture of the palace of power. Indeed, there would be nothing “specifically socialist about [it].”"
On racism:"Marx copied George’s observation that “communism or socialism ”had failed to win the support of most workers, because “the presence of the Chinese ha[d] largely engrossed the attention of the labouring classes, offering what has seemed to them a sufficient explanation of the fall of wages and difficulty of finding employment.” Marx was well aware that conflicts among workers, particularly after waves of migration, were a powerful weapon that the bourgeoisie could use to distract them from the real problems of capitalist society."
On Communism and Socialism:
Marx understood communism as "a higher form of society, a society in which the full and free development of every individual forms the ruling principle."
"Marx carefully avoided formulations that might suggest a universal model of socialist society [...]. This is why [...] he intimated that “writing recipes for the cook-shops of the future” was by no means one of his interests, and why in 1879–1880 [...] he wrote categorically: “I have never established a ‘socialist system.’”"
On the idea that a country needs to go through fixed stages of development to bring about a socialist society:
“events of striking similarity, taking place in different historical contexts, [lead] to totally disparate results.” To understand real historical transformations, it was necessary to study individual phenomena separately; only then could they be compared with one another. It would never be possible to interpret them “with the master-key of a general historico-philosophical theory, whose supreme virtue consists in being supra-historical.”"
"a key conclusion that Marx reached: hypotheses about the possible course of history should not base themselves on abstract laws but always be commensurate with the diversity of existing contexts. [...] Guided by doubt and hostility toward past schematism and new dogmatisms arising in his name, he thought it possible that the revolution would break out in conditions and forms that he had never considered before. The future was in the hands of the working class and depended on the capacity of its organizations and struggles to bring about profound social upheavals"
- The Last Years of Karl Marx, Marcello Musto
The book also talks about other subjects, in particular Marx's condemnation of colonialism and imperialism in his trip in Algiers
#extract
"The problem with practice what you preach capitalism is that it has been tried, and the results are well-documented. It was under this approach that financial markets collapsed regularly throughout most of the history of capitalism."
"The problem with practice what you preach capitalism is that it has been tried, and the results are well-documented. It was under this approach that financial markets collapsed regularly throughout most of the history of capitalism."