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Capitalism!? More like… CRAPitalism!! Am I rite, fellas?

May 1, 2015 //
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The fundamental aspect of capitalism is supposedly competition. Businesses compete against each other for customers, and it is that competition that keeps the game fair. If one company behaves poorly, customers will take their dollars elsewhere and that company will fail. This keeps companies honest in order to maintain a solid customer base. This competitive drive to succeed among all participants creates a so-called “Invisible Hand” of the market that keeps it fair as companies compete against other companies, and the aggregates of supply and demand will fall into harmony to provide a equitable cost for everyone involved.

However, competition is just a euphemism, or a deliberate deception depending on how cynical you want to be, for the real essence of capitalism: conflict. A “by-any-means-necessary” attitude is taken towards financial gain, and governments must impose very strict regulations on companies in order to prevent them from undercutting their “competition.” Corporate espionage, predatory pricing, monopolization, etc. are all fraudulent, non-competitive methods of achieving victory that are quite illegal (regardless of how frequently they might still happen). This is technically considered government regulation, which pure capitalism would frown upon. If businesses act closer to rival gangs than two opponents having a race, then this illustrates the non-competitive nature of capitalism, because in a race, you don’t win by cutting the Achilles tendon of your opponent. Well, maybe you do, but you’d have a hard time legitimately defining it as a fair competition. Capitalism, left to its own devices, would not achieve harmonious balance, it would devolve into the last scene of The Godfather. Or… whichever scene is the one where Michael has all the other heads of the families killed. It’s near the end, anyway.

Conflict also appears between businesses and employees. Adam Smith suggested in the Wealth of Nations that business owners will try to get as much out of their employees for as little pay as possible, and employees will try to do as little for as much pay as possible. When both sides are attempting to gain exponential financial growth, this conflict is surely to blossom. Problems of course arise when employers hold all the cards, and this one-sided battle will naturally escalate into as close to slavery as the company is socially allowed to get away with.

Smith writes that if there are fewer people around to do the work, then employers will have raise wages and working conditions in order to get employees to work for them; after all, a business will not function without workers. This will allow families to grow and people to immigrate, increasing the population, and allowing wages to be lowered. On the flip side, if there are too many people around, then wages and working conditions will decrease. The Invisible Hand will create balance this way by having people starve to death until the number of people decrease to accommodate a natural wage/workload equilibrium. The problem that Smith is forgetting, outside of this abhorrent solemn acceptance that people are just going to have to suffer and die for this system of economics to function properly, is the unwavering spirit to live that human beings possess. We do not just lay down to starve and die when things are oppressive and tough. A good many Jewish people survived the Holocaust if they weren’t killed outright. Therefore all the oppressive measures will forever remain in place if businesses are allowed to have their way, unchecked. Also, considering the globalization that has occurred since Smith’s time, businesses can now just move their production to parts of the world where the human capital is highest, and can exploit the world to their hearts content.

To even things up a bit, workers have come up with their own solution: unions. Unions were invented to create an opposition to the tyranny of management. Within a capitalistic system, unions are a definitive necessity to avoid the inevitable slavery that allowing management to have absolute power would produce, but this is replacing slavery with strife. Unions are not designed to work with management, but against it. Allowing either side to “win” this capitalistic conflict would either bankrupt the company financially or morally. Within capitalism, for it to be “fair”, workers and management need to be forced into an eternal struggle wherein neither side can emerge victorious.

If we are trying to avoid this union/management rivalry, the government can regulate businesses to provide humanistic working conditions and wages, which again is outside of pure capitalism.

To further show the all-encompassing nature of conflict within capitalism, we come to the remaining participants of the economic system: the patrons. The very essence of supply and demand is that customers will try to get the best product for the least amount of money, and businesses will try to get the most money for the cheapest product. This means that businesses will cut corners to provide substandard products, and use guile and propaganda to persuade the masses to purchase their products regardless. Businesses work under the mantra to buy from the lowest bidder and sell to the highest one. This creates inferior, often dangerous products, that only through government regulation can be reigned in. The “Buyer Beware” practice of the past proved fatal, as all businesses will invariably take the cheapest route, and when that route involves lead, for example, and consumers have no other alternatives, it is up to an overseeing, regulatory body to make sure companies do not put literal poison in their products.

As in all conflicts, there are losers. What capitalism fails to take into account, either through apathy or ignorance, is what to do with those losers. The only solution capitalism offers is to try again within the same framework. Pull yourself up by your bootstraps. But those who lose in a conflict will always be starting again with much less, and in a dog-eat-dog system that is just a set-up for further failure.

Alternatively, a government which provides for those who slip through the cracks, such as through a welfare system or other social programs, could potentially salvage the losers from the depths of the capitalistic war.

There are social costs to capitalism as well: We are alienated from our neighbours by having our typical everyday social interactions with strangers taking place within the realm of conflict. It’s why both people on either side of the Starbucks counter hate each other. The division of labour, though it cuts costs and increases production, means that the people we depend on are strangers a thousand miles away, rather than those who live within our community. Friends and families are often torn apart over issues of money because each transaction will always be tainted with self-interest and greed; the fundamental tenets of capitalism.

Capitalism also prioritizes short-term gains over long-term problems. We destroy the environment, our planet, for the sake of a few dollars. We create economic bubbles by creating and profiting off of a market of debt. We lay off employees to save a few bucks, and then go under completely because we now deliver a shoddier product (eg. the entire state of Michigan).

There is planned obsolescence, where new products are designed to either break or go out of style so that the consumer will have to purchase a new one. Repairing items now is more expensive than a new purchase, furthering this drive to consume more, and in the end, waste more.

There are so many more examples of the inherently flawed aspects of capitalism. I am probably missing some key elements already, and I’m not even bothering to cover distinct examples of companies doing atrocious things for the sake of profits, or how governments subsidize big businesses to the point where even calling it capitalism is a joke. Some argue the capitalism works because it plays to our human nature: self-interested and savage, and that any other system we try would inevitably follow the same patterns. I disagree, but getting into what I believe constitutes human nature is a tangent that will be discussed in a future blog.

Some might argue that without capitalism we would not have the advances in our society that we all enjoy, that it is because of the promise of wealth and fame that people are inventing things. But studies have shown us that money as motivation is actually counter-intuitive to the creative process, and only works for menial, brainless labour. What is necessary for inventive creation is freedom, and capitalism works as a barrier to that freedom because of the walls that those we are in conflict with place in front of us. How much better would computing technology be if Microsoft and Apple didn’t manhandle the market so that no new contributors could participate? How would the electric car be doing if the oil and gas industry didn’t have their say?

As we have seen, the only way for capitalism to “work” is with heavy government regulation and social programs to make sure that we don’t devolve in corporate feudalism and gang wars. And by that point you’re already basically at socialism. So why bother?

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Categories Politics, Uncategorized

Um… maybe Straight/White/Men SHOULD get a month

Jan 21, 2015 //
1

It seems that every single group of people gets their own month, their own week, or their own day. I mean, what do white people get, outside of the Oscars? Why don’t WE get a month? Well, there are a couple reasons. But I recently read an interview with Chris Rock that illuminated something about race, and really gender and sexuality as well, that suggested to me that straight/white/men need more of a focus than they are currently receiving.

I’ll give you the relevant text from the interview:

When we talk about race relations in America or racial progress, it’s all nonsense. There are no race relations. White people were crazy. Now they’re not as crazy. To say that black people have made progress would be to say they deserve what happened to them before.

What Chris Rock is saying is that, in regards to race, white people are the ones doing the progressing. Black people have always been human, with the capacity for intelligence and emotion that was long ignored in them, and to phrase race relations as black people making progress is to give the illusion that black people are the ones improving, whereas the opposite is true. White people have made great strides in becoming less moronic about the human beings that surround them, and it is white people who need to be the ones to continue to make great strides.

So why give us a month? Feminists have long argued, probably rightly so, that men do not take women seriously. There’s the old chestnut of the female executive saying something at a meeting, being ignored, and then a male colleague repeating her exact idea and being listened to, often taking the credit. It happens. However, if progressive change is to be made, would it not be logical for a male ally to be a prominent mouthpiece for the feminist movement? If feminists want to be taken seriously, and women aren’t taken seriously, why not use a man?

The artist Macklemore wrote a song called Same Love that advocated for same-sex relationships. It was a considerable blow in the fight to overcome homophobic cultural norms, but it received a great deal of criticism from gay-rights activists because Macklemore is straight. A suggestion I read was that if Macklemore wants to be an ally to the gay-rights movement, he should push homosexual rappers into the limelight, rather than hogging it for himself. Regardless of the impact that Same Love had on our culture, it was rejected by some of those that it was trying to help.

Is the goal not to overcome prejudice? Who cares who the messenger is? Well, some people do.

There is term called the Great White Saviour, and what this refers to is a white person, typically portrayed in films, that comes to care for and fight for either the Noble Savage, or the Oppressed Minority, or whoever it happens to be. You get the idea. Ol’ Whitey rolls in to town, and the great guy that he is, saves the minority and is revered as a hero. What this signifies is that white people are honourable, compassionate, moral beings, and minorities are weak and unable to do anything about their own condition.

This, of course, could apply to any such dominant figure, such as a straight person rapping about gay rights, or a man advocating for feminism, etc.

Do the voices of the dominant detract from the voices of the oppressed? Can we only ever steal credit? Comparing Hollywood’s crushing inability to properly convey progressive messages to the real-life work of advocates is a little unfair. Like relates to like, and the dominant group is going to relate most to others from the dominant group, and it’s the dominant group that needs to change. In my personal experience, it was Dr. Jackson Katz that was my first, real introduction into the world of feminism. He’s a man, by the way, if the name wasn’t a big enough indicator. The message was an important one, and because it was delivered by somebody I could relate to, I was able to listen.

If the message is good, why not pick the messenger that the people most needing to hear it will listen to?

Post-script: I am aware that this is not a new idea, and that many social justice advocates are desperate for the voices of allies. Maybe if there was a month celebrating those allies, the quieter ones would be more likely to pipe up?

I’m also not trying to disparage the work that minority rights activists do. We wouldn’t have any allies at all if they weren’t doing all the heavy lifting.

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Categories Gender and Sexuality, Politics

Freedom to Hate

Jan 9, 2015 //
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The big news of the day seems to be the Charlie Hebdo shootings, and what has erupted is a big hullabaloo about free speech, and how it is necessary and super awesome and how all the cool kids have it. However, there is a catch: it is a packaged deal that allows terrible people to espouse their terrible opinions.

America is the prime example of this. America is a country that allows a certain crazy-as-fuck family to protest the funerals of soldiers, not because they’re against war, but because they believe that God is punishing America for not murdering all the gay people. The belief is that if we disallow people to say crazy, offensive and oppressive shit, all of a sudden we won’t be able to say bad things about the government and we will literally become Stalinist Russia.

In Canada, however, we have hate speech laws that forbid certain aspects of speech. For example, that crazy-as-fuck family is not allowed into our country. We also can’t spray-paint swastikas on synagogues for reasons other than trespassing or defacing private property. The idea behind hate speech laws is that when people engage in hate speech, it propagandizes that belief, normalizes it, and either incites violence or fosters apathy towards other violence that might be going on elsewhere. For example, if you were exposed to the open and unquestioned public ridicule of Islam, you might be more apathetic to the subjugation of the Palestinian people. Think of it like anti-bullying. It would be like if the suicide of Amanda Todd went unpunished, as the man who harassed her was merely expressing his freedom of speech. Or if sexual harassment laws were merely suggestions rather than the rule.

Anwar al-Awlaki is an American who quite voraciously engaged in hate speech against the USA. He was a normal, everyday Imam that was actually interviewed as a moderate Muslim after the 9/11 attacks on the WTC, but became disenfranchised with the West, to say the least, and went over to join Al-Qaeda. Anwar al-Awlaki’s main function was to serve as an English-speaking mouthpiece for the organization, and he espoused all sorts of terrible things: saying America sucked and deserved bad things to happen to it, this and that, you know, regular terrorist-y type stuff. The US, recognizing the power of hate speech, sent al-Awlaki a firm cease and desist order via the courts to put an end to his widespread hate-mongering. This surprised the world because America is so firm on its beliefs in regards to freedom of speech, and to impinge on someone’s right to vocalize their hatred goes dead-against those beliefs.

Of course I am kidding. America straight-up murdered Anwar al-Awlaki in a drone strike, and then drone-striked his teenage son. They’re dead now. They didn’t get a trial.

So it seems that America doesn’t really love its free speech as much as it might think. Even outside of the extrajudicial assassination of its own citizens, people are punished socially for hate speech all the time. Has Michael Richards had work since he called that heckler a “nigger”? Wasn’t the owner of the Clippers banned from the NBA after he made a racist comment? The social cost for hate speech is quite high, and the completely insincere public apologies that inevitably follow are proof that pure free speech does not exist, even in the States.

Is that bad? Well, killing folks for talking is probably a little much, as both the Charlie Hebdo and Anwar al-Awlaki incidents are both horrific tragedies in their own separate ways, but I believe that quashing hate speech trumps freedom of speech. Perpetuating oppression and instigating violence/hatred are, you know, bad things. If you believe that those are necessary evils for civil discourse and dissent, well here’s a little test for you. Since this began with a cartoon, let’s see if you can tell the difference between these two images:

AntisemitismCriticism of Israel

To the untrained eye, these two images appear identical. However, upon closer examination, one can be identified as hate speech, and the other as criticism. See if you can work out for yourselves which is which.

The common example of an acceptable exception to the rule of free speech is yelling “FIRE!” in a crowded movie theatre. I honestly don’t know how this example came to be, because honestly why a movie theatre? Why not just a generic room? But anyway, the idea is that it would cause a panic and could potentially injure somebody. Yelling “FIRE!” is usually done for superficial or trivial reasons, without much logic behind it. So superficial reasoning leading to potentially injurious actions is an exception to free speech. To me, that sounds an awful lot like hate speech, especially if the intent is the injurious actions.

Post-script: I don’t know how much this is actually in contention, but a depiction of Mohammed, especially a vile one, would be considered hate speech. Islam has a long, proud history of avoiding imagery in its art, and has made-do with beautiful text-based artwork. There have been a few exceptions to this rule, but to trivialize the anti-idol mandate of the Quran is to be ignorant of the history of that belief, as well as to purposefully disrespect, degrade, and further disenfranchise the already internationally ostracized culture of Islam.

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Categories Politics
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