Anarchy Bang: Introducing Episode Four - Capitalism

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This week our challenge is to stake our position on Capitalism. Great oppositional system against human self-expression and self-worth or greatest system against? Call in and let us discuss capitalism, it's strength's, which are many, and its weaknesses. What would it take to end the reification of daily life? And to end the alienation that begins at the grocery and ends with an evening of streaming video!

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There are 39 Comments

change anything, right? However, people still continue to smoke cigarettes, drive fast in residential areas, buy plastic, pollute...the list is endless. So, who knows? Smashing ATMs does nothing but smash ATMs...pure symbolism... feel good for a few moments...ok if you're a nihilist maybe!

Ch-ch-ch-ch-changes
education? what about erosion and other geological processes and OTHER STUFF IN CAPITAL LETTERS

(i am sorry this trollish ripost was lacking)

In a psychotic, drug addict way!

*riposte*

more like education is the only way to ensure the same. dissolution of education is a great step toward the dissolution of society!!111one

If you could tell how you define capitalism, then there's potential for a somewhat easy answer. But if that's to designate either (1) some ideology hanging somewhere in the sky, (2) being successful at making money in some manner, (3) taking part in industrial production processes or (4) a bunch of men in suits, well I'm not sure you can get a proper answer.

This is probably the most interesting and important question. Camatte said Capital is a despot, it’s insinuated it’s logic into every facet of life, we are all walking, talking Capital. Even rebellion seems inexorably linked to recuperation by creating new markets for Capital to strengthen itself (punk, hip hop, etc)

Capital seems to have built most of the relationships around me, how do you tell if you’re outside of it? What are true “cracks in the system”?

Nature is my only answer to that. Those relationships predated Capital and they’re not gone yet, so if there was an outside, it might actually just be the outside?

So yeah, I guess Hermitism is my answer? Wow, not a great answer, but it’s kinda working out for me. Sorry, I’d tell you to look at other non-capitalist human cultures but we don’t do so well when we use anthropology to find where Capital isn’t and extrapolate from that.

The hermit solution has always been legit, it's a classic for a reason but unfortunately, it's an underwhelming answer for the anarchist. Very bitter, a bit sad and that's ok, no judgement here, but well … anarchist hermits are defeated.

Hoboism as a form of hermitism has reigned in the wild outskirts of civilization since ancient Egyptian times!

Yeah sure, nomad warriors with Apache helicopter resistant armour, thanks.

The Maoists had no air force, or counter-air capabilities. The Vietcong didn't need an air force. Neither does the Taliban. I could turn this into a 10,000 word article listing groups that won in similar fashions. I'm not afraid of a helicopter, 'cause there's these things called bunkers. Heard of them maybe?

It can’t be denied that geurrilla warfare as a means of subversion can be necessary in certain circumstances (where the Machine is already engaged in killing). The more [networks of resistance], the more the Machine’s death instinct is awakened. But it’s already part of our defeat if we have to face the Machine with heroism and readiness for sacrifice. Somehow, we have to accept the Machine’s blackmailing. Whenever the Machine starts killing, we have to retreat. We shouldn’t frighten it; it has to die in a moment when it least suspects. This sounds defeatist, but it’s one of the lessons we have to learn from Chile, from Poland, from Grenada. When the struggle can be put on the level involving the police or the military, we’re about to lose. Or, if we do win, it’s exactly our own police or military that will have won, not us at all; we’ll end up with one of those well-known “revolutionary” military dictatorships. When the Machine takes to raw killing, we have obviously made a mistake.

This why people need to read Deleuze, on nomadology. "The Machine" comes in flavors. You correctly make certain assertions regarding the Leviathanic War Machine, but miss the mark completely in understanding the nature of the Nomadic War Machine. They're not the same. But perhaps they can shape-shift to resemble each other. Crucial point is that the State War Machine is centripetal. It isn't simply "violent", it concentrates violence into a center, thus turning violence into coercive force, something anarchists obviously oppose.

^
wrong time*

that ain't *his* Machine anyways, but that of several other thinkers and authors of the past. You probably didn't read from any of them, given you appear to be from the same old card deck of the academic radical Left, but...

Alfred Jarry was the first in Western literature/thought known to have addressed the notion of the Machine. The Machine in his views, best expressed in his fantastic novel The Supermale, was a expressed as a growing system of subjugation of humans to the imposed necessities of performance and over-production, and his reliance on drugs to these ends.

- Then there was the equally underrated sociologist Lewis Mumford, who came with the idea of contemporary industrial society as a Machine.

- Gurdjieff brought a more spiritual dimension of the machine-man with his Simianthrope, where the means to overcome the mechanics of our relations -also later redefined by Bourdieu as the constructivist-structuralist notion of "Habitus"- are more psychoanalytical, yet still the main path towards the true evolution of humans. Unlike Nietzsche, who's claimed the advent of the "Overman", Gurdjieff preferred to only refer to a coming Human being, whereas were are still being biological machines, or "monkey-men", creatures driven by programmed desires, imperatives and routines, in a process of liberating ourselves from the daily routines of the social machine.

As for the Leviathan, well everybody knows it came from Hobbes tho not in a very socially-critical approach.

I'm still investigating on anything original that Deleuze, or most of these mindfucks from the Vincennes University, may have brought to the post-'68 era, beyond just -as Debord said about Sartres- a "packaging" of older ideas. Maybe those Planes of Immanence? Not sure, but they sound sketchy a dangerous!

10:04 here, read the Art of War and apply that to fighting against psychological brainwashing. Stop reading fantasy politics!

According to some suburban or urban moron, nature is a fiction as we are now living in a fully-automated gay commie ecumenopolis of sorts... a self-serving belief that reflects their own cybernetic vision of the world, mind-raped since childhood by WORK and consumerism. Jesus Christ did those people ever ate anything straight from the wild?

system against human self-expression and self-worth...

As always here, adolescent narcissism rules O.K.

Actually Marx expressed that terminology along the lines of self-esteem, which is the context meant by "human self-expression and self-worth", and not the vain narcissistic one you interpret it as. Which means nothing to a sensualist nihilist anyway hah!

Self-esteem as in materialistic status, self-expression as in self-made, from ones own labour, pride in ones skills, creative self-reliance, some that the Luddites took from Marx's critique.

So, capitalism's first mode of labour was 1) Mass Production in segments on a production line. Division of labour and a hierarchy of wages, a fragmentation of community sentiments.

FUN COMPETITION. In as fewest words possible, describe capitalism.

Profit over the wellbeing of nature and its inhabitants

Capitalism = the freedom of things

The autonomous movement of the non-living is cool, too!

If Marx came back and saw how the world was, he'd become an anarcho-nihilist.

whoa black betty

shamalam alam

Capitalism: guaranteed anthropocide.

(Maybe it's for the best, right?)

on how capitalism exacerbates domination and hierarchy including human on human violence and human on nonhuman violence. For the anarchists who preach violence as a means even an ends, why don't you just be capitalists and pro-civ and you can meter out all the violence you wish and even get paid for it? What makes an anarchist violence any different from capitalist violence? Come on, let's have your caveats.

The corporation has unsuspected origins, that brilliantly is self-explanatory to its assumed pretense at being an immortal institution. It is a product of the 17th century totalitarian monarchies (a.k.a. "absolutism") where both civilian and private conglomerates, known as companies or congregations have in-corporated with the sacred and divine body of the monarch. This immortal and abstract body later became, with the advent of the republican era, the body of the State. The Dévots of France, according to Châtelier, formed the "Marian Congregations" as professional orders who due to their "wedding" with the institution of the King, became the exclusive profiteers of His dominion, therefore took control over most towns and cities, over the pre-industrial production processes and some aspects of lawmaking. Thanks to the congregations, the King was insured a totalitarian control over the society of that age, and thanks to their incorporations, the congregates were enjoying monopolies over production and trade. It is very noteworthy that these congregations came to be in the early 1670s, at the same time than British and Dutch Crown corporations like Hudson Bay Company and the Royal Dutch East India Company were formed during these same years. The older British East India Company was formed in a somewhat different context and was originally devoted exclusively to trade, yet there was still the principle of this dual benefits between the Crown and the Company.

The point here is that there was no clear rift between the institution of the body of the King and its later transformation as the Republic.The structure of incorporation has remain pretty much the same to this day. So the corporation, through its centuries-long parasitism of the State body, has been granted its same assumed universality and immortality.

As to Aragorn's reply, I agree it's a primordial task to be furthering and passing on anarchist discourse and experience to future generations, even tho if it only goes through books and texts, will that ever escape the cage of words and concepts? But that's another issue not related to capital accumulation of course. I was indeed NOT trying to make a point on your presumed (?) capitalism. The fact of just printing and selling books does not make one a capitalist. Not even according to the classic Marxian definition.

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