Approaching
Political
Philosophy (via a question by an American Indian)...
Think about what Plato said about a "Noble Lie" being necessary for a
political system to govern. Also, keep in mind our discussions about
"Mythos-Logos"...
Now, Imagine that like the Indian (Oren Lyons) said, “of the
hundred
dominant ‘economic units’ in the world today 49 are countries and 51
are corporations.”
As Mr. Lyons asks: “What
does that mean?” In other words, if such corporations and
bankers are dominant in the world, how do you think they would like us
to see the world? How would they like us to see and understand Nature?
Does it mean that corporations are the driving force of decision-making
today?
What do you think this would mean in terms of controlling the media,
decisions in the government, decisions about education and the framing
of how ‘we’ “see” and “understand” the world around (and in) us? Are we
dependent upon corporations, banks and money for our survival?
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We watched most of the following video in class. I'd advise you to
watch the other ones below, also...
Money as Debt I
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jqvKjsIxT_8
"What we have been taught to believe is democracy and
freedom,
is, in reality, an ingenious, invisible form of economic dictatorship"
(39 mins.).
Money as Debt II
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dPtt7JC2TiA
Money as Debt III
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EbrI3jr47bs
Another very good one (more entertaining) that explains it (with
English & Spanish subs/transcripts):
97% Owned - Positive
Money Cut
https://www.youtube.com/watch?annotation_id=annotation_401576&feature=iv&src_vid=XcGh1Dex4Yo&v=d3mfkD6Ky5o
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Seeing that "Money is Debt" does this suggest that our entire
economic-political system is based upon a "Noble Lie" - a complexly
(and slyly) constructed mythological structure (when I say mythological
structure, I mean a very real contemporary belief system)?
Here is a bit more "political philosophy" to ponder:
You might like to start out by reading this article:
The bank bailout and the
Forbes 400
http://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2014/10/08/pers-o08.html
And this:
Number of the Week: Total
World Debt
Load at 313% of GDP
http://blogs.wsj.com/economics/2013/05/11/number-of-the-week-total-world-debt-load-at-313-of-gdp/
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Is Money a Fetish?
Fettish:
1. a : an
object (as a small stone carving of an animal) believed to have magical
power to protect or aid its owner; broadly : a material
object
regarded with superstitious or extravagant trust or reverence
b : an object of irrational reverence or obsessive devotion
: prepossession
http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/fetish
Fetishism generally incorporates a very real intermediary object to
symbolize and re-enforce the "object of desire."
Fetishism:
(left) a South
African fetish figurine whose supernatural powers protect the owner and
kin in the natural world (ca. 1900)
To make this clearer, Marx
said that
fetishism is "the religion of sensuous appetites", and that the fantasy
of the appetites tricks the fetish worshipper into believing that an
inanimate object will yield its natural character to gratify the
desires of the worshipper. (Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, On
religion. Atlanta: Scholars, 1982, p. 22.) One participates in rituals
honoring the inanimate nature of the fetish by means of go-between
objects/images which "embody" or "represent" it.
In the manuscript of "Results of the Immediate Process of
Production" (ca. 1864), an appendix to Capital: Critique of Political
Economy, Volume 1 (1867), Marx said that: "... we find in the
capitalist process of production [an] indissoluble fusion of use -
values in which capital subsists [as] means of production and objects
defined as capital, when what we are really faced with is a definite
social relationship of production. In consequence, the product embedded
in this mode of production is equated with the commodity, by those who
have to deal with it. It is this that forms the foundation for the
fetishism of the political economists."
Theodore
Adorno speaks of commodity fetishism in which he
describes how
the forms of commerce invade the human psyche; how commerce casts a
person into a role not of his or her making; and how commercial forces
affect the development of the psyche.
He further describes how the human imagination (artistic, spiritual,
intellectual activity) becomes commodified when subordinated to the
"natural commercial laws" of the market.
Lukács
argues that the capitalist economy is no longer one sector of society
alongside others. Rather, commodity exchange has become the central
organizing principle for all sectors of society. This allows commodity
fetishism to permeate all social institutions (e.g., law,
administration, journalism) as well as all academic disciplines,
including philosophy.
Could it be that the capitalist economy is the contemporary myth that
the majority of the world lives by today? And that money, as a
commodity, is a fetish???
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"$223.3
trillion: The total indebtedness of the world, including all parts of
the public and private sectors, amounting to 313% of global gross
domestic product." Such an amount of money can never possibly
be
printed; and it's certainly much more than the value of all of the gold
in the world: around $7 trillion worth...
Even Marxism can not provide a solution for this because it is also
based upon the monetary system. All they want, supposedly, is that the
proletariat takes control of the productive forces - in order to get
"their fair share," i.e., a re-distribution of wealth in some kind of
"democratic economic planning–socialism":
"If the producers as such knew how much the consumers required, if they
were to organize production, if they were to share it out amongst
themselves, then the fluctuations of competition and its tendency to
crisis would be impossible. Carry on production consciously as human
beings–not as dispersed atoms without consciousness of your species–and
you have overcome all these artificial and untenable antitheses. But as
long as you continue to produce in the present unconscious, thoughtless
manner, at the mercy of chance...crises will remain; and each
successive crisis is bound to become more universal and therefore worse
than the preceding one; is bound to impoverish a larger body of small
capitalists, and to augment...the numbers of the class who live by
labor alone." (Engels, "Outline
of a
Critique of Political Economy", ¶48.)
http://www.isreview.org/issues/32/crisis_theory.shtml
That is to say, Marxism is also based upon the fetishism of money which
begins “with the elementary value form itself, 20 yards of linen = 1
coat.”(1)
Accordingly, a
re-distribution of wealth within an economy based upon the production
of imaginary debt, means that debt will also have to be re-distributed;
i.e., no matter what, there will have to be a new generation of debt
slaves.
In other words, in order for usury and debt to be removed, an entirely
new "value" system would have to be initiated - beyond monetary value,
or even a "gold standard"(2)
--
and obviously, the banks and corporations would have to be taken out --
in a "classless" global society -- governed by ________ (oops, same
problem, different context)...
As the first documentery suggets
(33-38mins.) there are alternative monetary systems that can
"theroetically" be implemented:
- LETS
- Government itself creates interest-free money - not created
as
debt, but as value.
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Money, its a gas... (Pink Floyd) ; )
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1. Marx’s task was to reveal the origin of [...] reification in its
most simple form, commodity production. Let us begin with the simplest
expression of this perversion which reaches its high point in capital –
that is with the elementary value form itself, 20 yards of linen = 1
coat. This is the first expression of the ‘externalization’ or
‘alienation’ of the opposition between value and use-value which exists
in every commodity. From this point all the higher forms of fetishism
can be considered as a growth in the contradiction between the
production of use-values and the social forms through which that
production develops. When commodities come into the world as use-values
this is merely their ‘plain, homely, bodily form’.
They are, however, commodities only because they are something
two-fold, both objects of utility and at the same time depositories of
value. They manifest themselves therefore as commodities, or have the
form of commodities only in so far as they have two forms, a physical
or natural form and a value-form. (I, p. 47)
https://www.marxists.org/archi...
2. ‘although gold and silver are not by Nature money, money is
by
Nature gold and silver’.
https://www.marxists.org/archi...
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American
Indian perspective
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