147 comments on Osama Bin Lowrider: Its All the Same Culture
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147 comments on Osama Bin Lowrider: Its All the Same Culture
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Some suggest that modern progressive exuberance has replaced Christianity as the modern culture or religion.
Capitalism, and the need to expand production to increase the ratio of user value and exchange value, to extract surplus value, arose only under Christianity, and many scholars have said capitalism needed the mass compartmentalization of Christianity, to be able to arise.
This is speculation. However, capitalism first arose in the Italian City states of the 15th Century, which had rediscovered Greek thought and technology, and combined it with Christian compartmentalism and extreme anthropocentric view toward reality.
However, we are all takers, it's just capitalism is the extreme form of this short term survival strategy.
There are probably infinite ways to define capitalism, but I would contend that the simple charging of interest on loans is capitalism -- getting money for doing nothing except tying up capital. And interest goes back further than Christianity.
http://ezinearticles.com/?The-History-Of-Interest-Throughout-Time&id=160818
We are talking about ownership of the means of production, not interest.
Profit is extracted through surplus value on labor.
But, I agree, as long as interest is involved, economies need to expand to pay that interest off.
That has been arranged in numerous ways.
"Profit is extracted through surplus value on labor."
Which means the person(s) receiving the profit have selfishly kept it for themselves and not distributed it back to the labor which produced it, or they charged too much for it in the first place. Either way, it is disgraceful behavior.
Lovely campfire post, BTW. Totally agree with it, but there are too many humans now to go backwards, and most of the damage to the planet has been done.
Actually, it is about the people doing the labor keeping the profit, not having someone take it from them. If you participated in the organization and creativity of the process, you are also part of the labor process. If you just abstractly own the means of production through a financial instrument, you are extracting wealth.
"Interest" is only another form of "profit"; both are equally illusory, just another iteration of a perpetual-motion machine. Until humans get the Second Law in their bones, there will be no change, just more rainbow-chasing.
The vast diversity and exuberance of life on Earth is nearly all down to the energy profligacy of the Sun (the small remainder due to Earth's own energy surplus, and that mostly in the distant past). THAT is the only real "profit" we have ever had, and can ever hope to have. Any culture without this realization, and its honoring, at its core is doomed, regardless of whatever other merit it may have.
Humans have lived, and "thrived" (or at least vastly increased our numbers), by usurping whatever pockets of current and past "profit" we have discovered, in the forms of cultivated biomass and fossil fuels. Our numbers are now so great, and the usurpations now so extensive, that The End has come into view, at least for those with eyes to see. It may, and probably will, take generations to unfold, but it has begun, and cannot now be stopped, even with all our cleverness.
But, in my view, that is a Good Thing, and our only real hope. Nothing short of a hard crash, with 95%+ population loss, will ever disabuse humans of the pathological notion that they can get something for nothing.