From Ian Walsh some truthful riffing on Capitalism:
The UK is experiencing some of the worst shortages of oil. One contributing factor is that the old strategic reserve of oil was privatized, then when it was considered unprofitable to keep it running (repairs and maintainence were needed) most of it was gotten rid of.
A totalizing principle, or system, reduces every part of society to one value, or relationship.
In capitalism, the principle is profit.
In capitalism the assumption is that if something is making a profit, it’s also providing value. You should only do things that provide value and the more money something makes the more value it has. So, the strategic reserve wasn’t providing profits, and had to go, since it provided no value.
The next piece of logic is that someone who is making a profit obviously knows how to provide value. The more money someone has, the more control they have, and the more money they should have. The tendency of capitalism to lead to money concentrating in a few hands is good: those are the people who know how to create money and thus value.
Capitalism, like other totalizing systems, works best when it’s kept in check by something else: religious values, democratic values, enlightenment values, or whatever, backed up by forces powerful enough to resist totalization: governments or churches, for example.
When it doesn’t it tends to destroy the conditions for its own functioning: all the wealth goes to the top, for example, and you get a Great Depression due to a demand crash, as happened in the 30s.
Or capitalism makes massive profits based on damaging the environment, and you have an environmental collapse — ongoing and upcoming.
Capitalism tries to reduce all relationships to monetary ones. When you privatize trains, or healthcare, you’re following the profit motive. When you make everyone work, then have their childrens raised by strangers (daycare, and to an extent school) you’re totalizing it. When people say domestic and emotional work should be paid, they’ve bought into a totalizing system: since they’re creating value, money should pass hands.
Capitalism thus reduces everything to money: if it has value it should involve money, and if it pays little or nothing it obviously doesn’t have value. So if you’re low paid, and you want to be seen as valued, you want money.
Even when we try to fix the problems of capitalism we try to do so thru money: so we have carbon offsets (paid), and there is a movement for a carbon tax, and so on.
Comments