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Thinking inside a box Wednesday August 31 What's all this about capitalism and anti-capitalism? About a month ago I met an American anti-capitalist called Becky. She did not describe herself as an anti-capitalist, though I doubt she would dispute the description. Becky had been sleeping under a bush in Trinity College, and I knew she had no place to go by the particular way in which she asked me where the public library was and when it would open - so I invited her to stay at our house, since Dan was away at the time, and didn't mind. That evening we had a long discussion about politics, and since Becky was a thoughtful and articulate person, I asked her to give some representation of how most 'anti-capitalists' might understand their cause. We never really managed to get things very clear (though partially clear). Since then the ideas have been floating around in my head, and I think it is just about time to get them out of there. What is Capitalism? No, wait - first: what is capital? Capital is any private property that the owner uses as a 'means of production', i.e. any private property that is used to produce goods or services of economic value. Some obvious things that can potentially be used as capital are sewing machines, diamond mines and factories - but there is also such thing as non-physical capital, in particular data or intellectual property that is privately 'owned' (which I still find to be a slightly weird concept). If you own something that you use to make money, then you own some capital. However, I don't think this quite makes you a capitalist. I think a capitalist is someone who owns some means of production that other people work with to create economic value that is then the property of the capital-owner. So as a freelance editor I can own capital - my computer - but since I do all the work that is involved in producing economic value with the computer, then I am not a capitalist. I think this is a nice, clear definition of basic capitalism: capitalism is when people work together to produce and exchange economic value, but the means of production which they work through are the private property of somebody (possibly somebody who doesn't do any of the work), and that somebody therefore also owns the goods produced. So one person or group of persons controls the cash, pays a proportion of the profits to the workers, and keeps the rest for themselves. The person who owns the capital also gets to tell the workers what to do. If the things that people work with are not privately owned, and therefore there is no-one telling them what to do by right of legal ownership, then that is not capitalism. It is probably some kind of socialism (like in the Soviet Union, where all means of production were 'publicly' owned, and controlled by the government), or perhaps a form of primitive economic interaction that relies on forms of agreement and authority not enshrined in the laws of private property. What is Anti-Capitalism? Anti-capitalism, as the phrase seems be used, involves some or all of the following:
It normally appears as part of slightly longer phrases, such as 'the global anti-capitalist movement'. Its major public articulators include Noam Chomsky and Naomi Klein. Now, what has anti-capitalism got to do with capitalism? This is the question I have been trying to get to, and I want to get to it because 'the movement' (anothor of its aliases) needs to know what it is really against. I can't see anybody achieving much by just being against all the bad things in the world. Nominally, the movement has decided to be against 'capitalism', but I think that more of the movement's foot-soldiers need to think about what this means. Anti-capitalist are protesting/complaining/fighting against some or all of the following:
Are these bad things all caused by the fact that modern economics is predominantly organised around private ownership of the means of production - i.e. capitalism? Theoretically, the proposal here is this: in say, the year 1400, a man handed another man some tools and said 'if you make some valuable furniture using my tools, I will sell the furniture and give you half the money' ... and 600 years later, this same phenomenon has led to babies starving in Africa, and 'Sir' Bob Geldof on stage with a guy calling himself Bono. Is this theory reasonable? It might be. Sometimes little things, like computer chips, have drastic historical consequences. To be continued...
Tuesday August 30 I have an inexplicable compulsion to share this site with anyone who cares to look: http://www.learningfountain.com/siegel.htm I become more fascinated by Americans the more I see of them. They are an exotic and mythical species.
Thursday August 25 Some simple stuff that Australia should do: There are a couple of very simple Green policies that are in force here in Ireland, which work exceedingly well, and should definitely be taken on by Australia, if not the entire world. Firstly, supermarkets charge for plastic bags. I think this idea floated around in Australia, but was somehow rejected based on the idea that consumers would be appalled. In fact, nobody seems to mind. Each bag costs 15c, and although this is not much money, it seriously discourages people from taking bags. People used to accept so many plastic bags not because they needed them, but because they were free. When you watch the a supermarket checkout here in Ireland, you notice that only about 1 in 10 customers asks for a plastic bag. Others either bring bags with them, or simply carry the goods in their hands. I have only ever once heard someone complain about being charged for a bag, and this person was old, cranky, and quite possible not sane. Secondly, when you get rubbish collected from your house, you have to pay for the 'trash' to be collected, at a certain price per bag, while sorted recycling is collected for free. Of course, rubbish collection has always been charged for by councils, as part of the annual rates. But this new system simply demonstrates to people the economic cost of each bag of rubbish, while putting recycling in a positive light. To get the rubbish bags collected you have to buy special stickers from a shop, in cash - so you can't pretend that rubbish just 'disappears'. Unfortunately, I think a lot of things which are ultimately for the public good can't be enforced until citizens are given an economic kick up the arse. Driving cars could easily become another example. People driving cars actually costs society a lot of money. Even with all the taxes collected on petrol, registration, etc., the total costs to society in terms of road-building, accidents, congestion and inefficiency, are still far higher. And this is simply in immediate economic terms, without considering long-term environmental costs. Car driving is a subsidised activity! This is a FACT, which I gleaned from editing a substantial scholarly book on the topic last year. Car drivers need an economic kick up the arse. They should have to face the real costs of their driving - perhaps they should even be hit with extra, punitive taxation, in consideration of long-term economic damage. If our governments actually had a vision for the public good, this would be the sort of policy they would be working on. Instead, they continue playing to the lowest common denominator, deeply afraid of upsetting the electorate, continuing to indulge people as they apathetically destroy the planet... At the end of the day, the government is deeply cynical about its own electorate. The government is made up of cynical people. They don't believe that people could 'handle' being charged for plastic bags, or could face the real cost of driving their cars. But when you see these policies in action, you find that people adapt to them quite easily. People are not such pigs as the government imagines. Maybe the politicians just see the electorate in their own image.
Saturday August 20 My Flatmate Dan My flatmate is called Dan. He is a painter, and his mother is an alcoholic. I asked if she is a ‘functional' alcoholic and he said barely. He said she once stopped drinking for a while, but it didn't last. A lot of people are addicted to things. Some people are addicted to gardening. Alcohol is not a good thing to be addicted to. Make it your life goal to get addicted to something nice.
Dan is working towards an exhibition in October. It will be entitled ‘A Killing Year', and consist of 365 small paintings of death, destruction and torment. One shows a person falling from a skyscraper. Another shows diggers excavating a mass grave in Bosnia . The paintings will be grouped in lots of 30 or 31 (or 28), each group arranged like days on a calendar month. Dan is a very good painter. Sometimes people buy his paintings, giving him temporary respite from poverty. I think ‘A Killing Year' will be a triumph. Every painting I have seen from it is very intense, packed with emotion, strongly suggestive of stories going on behind the canvas. And I think it is an excellent theme; it is timely. The world is addicted to killing. Dan is a strange fellow. He is very honest, very raw, and I usually get a sense of pain from him. I would like to do something for him, but I think that just talking is probably the best and only contribution I can make. Dan has a friend called Gary who comes around once a week, usually on Tuesday or Wednesday, and the two of them always go for a genteel evening walk. Dan has no Irish brogue, but instead a refined English accent, which relates to his people having come over from England some generations back, to live in a big house in the country, where his barely functional parents live still. Dan has very refined manners, except that he sometimes bursts out with particularly obscene, unexpected comments. One morning I started to say that I had had a dream, and Dan butted in to ask, ‘What, anal sex with strangers?' His sense of humour is very jagged, and not really funny as such, by somehow endearing. Dan's friend Gary is incredibly neat and fastidious, with his hair carefully parted and combed smoothly across his head in a fashion that may have been popular in some circles in perhaps the 1950s, or maybe the 1850s. Gary is always very nervous when he comes up to the house. Actually, I suspect he is nervous at all times. He designs textiles. Dan describes his friend Gary as ‘a repressed homosexual'. * * * I will have to move out of this house in another week, as there will no longer be a room for me. I know that I am going to miss it very much. My other flatmates here are: Steve, who is a deeply committed pot-head and struggles to tell anecdotes because gets lost on tangents and forgets what he was talking about; Rachel, who broke her neck by rolling a car while drunk, soon after I moved in. She now wears a temporary metal frame around her head. She seems nicer after the accident, though she still pisses me off by hoarding all the cups, bowls, and some useful ingredients in her room. Rachel is Australian, but her boyfriend, Dermot, is Irish. That is all I will write about him because he doesn't talk to me very much, even though he practically lives here.
Thursday August 18 An email from Alex this morning stimulated me to think about what exactly I am trying to do with Total Cardboard publishing. Since thinking is not something that comes along every day, I thought I would put the results up on this blog. I want to disseminate the stories that can help move the world on to something better. I want to advance the cause of freedom, and not in the way the Americans promote it. I mean freedom of the imagination. That is where we really need liberation. Perhaps the most beastly oppression comes from the powerful forces that constrict us into boring thoughts. Their main weapon is anxiety. They cultivate insecurity, and its desperate cousin, covetousness. But these forces are impersonal, they are more like tides than consciously enacted schemes. As George Clinton of Funkadelic once said, 'free your mind and your ass will follow'. * * * Last weekend I finally made it to an outdoor party. It was in a field in County Roscommon, which is somewhere in the unremarkable green midlands of Ireland. Together with my flatmates, Steve and Dan, we arrived at the site about 10pm and got our tent up in the fading light. There were already about 100 people gathered in a large marquee, swaying slowly to some deep, dubby reggae. The customary spliffs filled the air. Over the next few hours the party filled up, to about 200-300 people. A famous musical electrician from England, known as Plaid, was billed to be playing - though as it turned out he never appeared, and nobody seemed to know anything about it. There was lots of powdered MDMA being sold, though we didn't go in for it as they were charging an outrageous €80/gram. To make matters more dodgy, the first guy who offered it to us said, 'It's really pure man ... it's not even white, like, it's brown.' And I know for a fact that pure MDMA is white. The dealers seemed very devious, and very keen to sell. Thanks to the travelling salesmen, by 2am the party was quite a mess of dislocated, crazed individuals. For those of you who aren't down with 'the scene', I should mention that MDMA causes extreme loss of balance and physical co-ordination. Peoples' bodies go all mushy. Such a crowd of whacked-out smiling zombies I haven't seen since last time I was in Nimbin. As for us three musketeers from Rathmines, we ate a few dried psylocybes that Steven had picked last Autumn, and spent the night all starey and mildly entranced. I kept needing to go off for walks in the darkness, to think, and stare at the night sky. The effect was pretty mild though. Not so for Dan, who took more than me, and started compulsively tensing his jaw and shoulders, grabbing everyone and anyone to talk to, dancing the strangest zombie jig of the night. He told me that he was having a great time though, and later he would end being given a line of MDMA, which seemed to bring him back to normal, if anything. As for the music, the reggae was nice, but unchanging throughout the night and into the morning. Later at night two more tents were set up, one with aggressive Dublin hip-hop bands who I couldn't bare to listen to on mushrooms, and one with crazed breakcore (i.e. something like the clashing metallic sounds of a giant dodgem car ride that has been filled up with real cars that are driven by drill-wielding maniacs) which was deranged enough to suit the situation perfectly, but was marred by repeated technical glitches bringing silence (or the closest you could get to silence at a party of 300 degenerates). I think my favourite thing about 'the party scene' is that you can dance any way you want to. The most twisted, awkward movements will not be derided, but if anything will be welcomed as an appropriate contribution to the atmosphere. Since most party-goers aim to become as ecstatically deranged as possible, anyone who is seen doing odd things will be admired as a champion. Though I haven't got any real quibble with drugs as such, of course it would be great if humans could achieve these situations without them.
Friday August 12 Discovered a great neologism this morning: deep-spidering. Imagine being deeply spidered. Doesn't that sound like fun? Here's a real example of its usage:
Now try to use it in a sentence yourself. Remeber: use the word three times in speech and it will be yours for life.
Thursday August 11 This morning's web browsing brought me to a sharp realisation: obscure countries have all the best flags. While major economic powers stick with dull bars of colour - most of time red, white and blue - some of the littler nations are sporting quite stunning national designs. How can a nation with all the stylish clout of France, for example, be wearing a dull tricolour, when the following can be found in tiny islands, republics and dependencies:
Antigua and Barbuda
For a country whose name means 'old', this is a really stylish piece. It's tropical paradise, it's hope for the future... it's aspirational (and we all know that's a top-shelf demographic). This little nation is definitely going places.
Isle of Man
Now this is just radical. The Isle of Man is a small island somewhere near England. They speak English and a language called 'Manx'. The nation was founded in 1846 when a gang of maurauding convicts from Manchester purged the island of the three-legged metallic beasts by which it had traditionally been infested.
Sri Lanka
Admittedly, not such an obscure nation. And though they may be poor in the scheme of international economics, they are certainly not poor in the world of flag design! Not wanting to be outdone by the nearby Bhutan, the Sri Lankans have in fact gone for three flags in one.
Seychelles
The current world champion of flag design is Seychelles, a largely unknown country that is probably somewhere in Africa. Some have argued that this is the world's only genuinely avant-garde flag. Now I should really stop. I am at work right now, and this is arguably not a good fulfillment of my job description. * * * My new favourite sandwich is tuna, tomato and tabasco. Maybe you don't care? Well, I wrote that to make a point. I have discovered a positive perspective on wage labour: that when you are at work, you are technically being paid for anything you do during that time. So I was paid to write about my current favourite sandwich. Now I am being paid to scratch my arm. Think about it.
Tuesday August 2 Yesterday I went riding around the Dublin docklands area, and I came upon a largish population of these 'traveller' people I have been hearing so much about. Travellers are 'gypsies', but more politically correct. In the ugly, industrial areas, right along the waterfront where the Liffey opens out to the Irish sea, there are rows of caravans, and the signature piles of half-burnt rubbish that everyone tells me is the sign of the travellers. I expected people with gold teeth and accordion music, so I was disappointed when all I saw was a fat man smoking in a caravan. Further along I saw more of the inhabitants out playing with their kids, and really they just seemed to be normal lower-class white Irish people. Maybe a few extra tatoos. Later, on my way home, I realised that I am still riding my bike around the streets in much the same way as I have been doing since I was about 10 years old. While 'adults' ride bikes only to get some where, or to take a 'proper' bike ride up a hill or to some scenic spot, I just ride along pavements aimlessly, looking up at buildings and wathcing the people. I wonder if I will still be doing it when I'm 50? |
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