"There are two kinds of people, those who do the work and those who take the credit." -Indira Gandhi
The core argument for capitalism is that competition breeds success. Success at what? Success at playing whatever game happens to be at play. In a perfect world, there would be no question as to who would triumph. It would always be the superior, the smarter, the better. But what defines "best"? Like with communism, the idea is good on paper, but in reality disintegrates under the weight of people. Sheer stupid people. Billions of them, buying the shiniest widget instead of the best widget. Competition does not breed better mousetraps, it breeds more sellable mousetraps. It's like evolution that way. Natural selection can breed the most incredible diversity, but it cannot breed for something that is non-selectoral. You cannot breed products for quality when you select their market survival on the basis of their shininess.
Someone once said that the paramount accomplishment of capitalism will be the selling of shit in a tube. It's never a question of whether something is good. It is a question of whether it sells. The base assumption is that if it's not good, it won't sell. That is a demonstrable falsity. The salability of an item is not dependent on its quality, but upon the charisma of the packaging, the advertising, the spokesperson.
The same phenomenon is true in companies. The smartest and best workers are not rewarded, the most charismatic are. Because they sell. Not because they produce. Even the whitest collar professions are subject to this malaise. Walk into any software company in the country, a hundred brilliant minds caged in cubicles, trained to make machines think and instead producing the latest widget for the latest customer management suite. They make comfortable salaries, nice little middle class drones. The sales people can make millions. The more charismatic they are, the more software they sell, no limit on the commissions. Every unit sold dings a percentage into their bank account. Every unit sold dings the coder further down on the rung, uses up his years of productivity second by second. The man who builds something is irrelevant next to the man who sells something.
It was like that in the middle ages, see. Forging a sword required years of experience and talent, weeks of meticulous labor. But the man who forged a sword was a peasant and any dumb ox with a strong enough arm to swing it was a knight. Any industry, any company today is exactly the same. Skills that require years of mastery, the artistry of accomplishment, all subservient to any slick smiling fuck who can sell the fruits of that labor over a power lunch.
It's just might makes right all over again. That was the great innovation of the capitalist age, so carefully intertwined with the revolutions of democracy but so different at heart. We like to think that rule by force was abolished in the modern civilized age with the rise of the enlightenment, but it was another revolution entirely, couched in the guise of scientific and rational thought. We traded mastery by strength for mastery by guile all while thinking that we were adopting mastery by merit. The greatest con in all of history, when the sons of Loki dressed in the cloaks of the sons of Odin and overthrew the sons of Thor once and for all.
Read Karl Marx, vilified as he now is, he said these things a hundred years before our births, in different words that have since been cajoled into all manner of horror. The capitalist of Marx is not the middle class entrepreneur, not the self-made man cast down by jealous and ignorant peasants. The capitalist is the salesman who has never produced a thing in his life, smiling all the while as he steals companies from the engineers, products from the designers, credit from the creators. It was never supposed to be about burning the rich, tearing down the accomplished, though those damned Bolsheviks misunderstood and came closer than anyone else to creating hell on earth. It was about hunting down the snakes in the garden.
Don't kill the rich. Kill the charismatic.
At many law schools, they tell students at the very beginning, from now on never argue with anyone you love. You are being trained as warriors of the word, you will win every argument with the non-initiated. You will talk circles around your wife, your mother, your friends. You will eviscerate any rhetoric they can summon to their side. You will always win, and that does not mean that you are right. Might does not make right, regardless of what type of might it is. Only right makes right.
The ascension of the charismatic, of the salesmen, brings us inevitably to the current economy, in which trillions of dollars disappeared over night. Nothing really disappeared. We still have the same people, the same educations, the same skills, the same resources, buildings, properties. But our system isn't built on those sorts of things any longer, it's built on fictional constructions of finance. I'm not an economic Luddite, I don't hold some 19th century nostalgia for the gold standard, but neither do I see the validity of financial products. Anything sellable should in a rational economy have some value. A house has value because of its utility, because of the materials of which it is made. A computer program has value because it does something. Gold has some value, even if little more than the utility of looking really pretty. Music has value because it can be listened to. Value is relative of course, subject to whether someone is willing to pay for it, whether they perceive the value of it.
But the highest levels of finance break with this idea of value. Value in the financial world is contingent merely on the willingness of someone else to pay for the item. It's a neat trick, eliminating the various aspects and measures of value, replacing them with the more easily manageable and universal definition of value. It's the theoretical foundation of money in the first place: generalize value into an abstract currency so that barter can be eliminated. But once value is generalized away, the truly gifted are tempted to generalize further. If value just means that someone is willing to pay for something, then value is not a measure of an item's worth but of the salesman's skill. But the key is that only other salesmen would follow such tortured logic. So salesmen buy the worthless in order to sell it for slightly more money to another salesman, who in turn purchases the worthless piece of paper with the sole motivation of selling it for more to another even more charismatic and ambitious salesman. The market always goes up, they say, because the next guy in the chain always believes that he can find someone to pay a dollar more for the worthless piece of paper passed around from corner office to corner office.
Anyone can see the gaping hole in the machine, this elaborate trillion dollar game of musical chairs. But they'll mortgage their futures to save the machine because they're told that there is no other way by the smiling demons who designed the engine in the first place. And someday the imp in the bottle will have the last laugh.
"There's a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart, that you can't take part, you can't even passively take part, and you've got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus, and you've got to make it stop! And you've got to indicate to the people who run it, to the people who own it, that unless you're free, the machine will be prevented from working at all." -Mario Savio
The core argument for capitalism is that competition breeds success. Success at what? Success at playing whatever game happens to be at play. In a perfect world, there would be no question as to who would triumph. It would always be the superior, the smarter, the better. But what defines "best"? Like with communism, the idea is good on paper, but in reality disintegrates under the weight of people. Sheer stupid people. Billions of them, buying the shiniest widget instead of the best widget. Competition does not breed better mousetraps, it breeds more sellable mousetraps. It's like evolution that way. Natural selection can breed the most incredible diversity, but it cannot breed for something that is non-selectoral. You cannot breed products for quality when you select their market survival on the basis of their shininess.
Someone once said that the paramount accomplishment of capitalism will be the selling of shit in a tube. It's never a question of whether something is good. It is a question of whether it sells. The base assumption is that if it's not good, it won't sell. That is a demonstrable falsity. The salability of an item is not dependent on its quality, but upon the charisma of the packaging, the advertising, the spokesperson.
The same phenomenon is true in companies. The smartest and best workers are not rewarded, the most charismatic are. Because they sell. Not because they produce. Even the whitest collar professions are subject to this malaise. Walk into any software company in the country, a hundred brilliant minds caged in cubicles, trained to make machines think and instead producing the latest widget for the latest customer management suite. They make comfortable salaries, nice little middle class drones. The sales people can make millions. The more charismatic they are, the more software they sell, no limit on the commissions. Every unit sold dings a percentage into their bank account. Every unit sold dings the coder further down on the rung, uses up his years of productivity second by second. The man who builds something is irrelevant next to the man who sells something.
It was like that in the middle ages, see. Forging a sword required years of experience and talent, weeks of meticulous labor. But the man who forged a sword was a peasant and any dumb ox with a strong enough arm to swing it was a knight. Any industry, any company today is exactly the same. Skills that require years of mastery, the artistry of accomplishment, all subservient to any slick smiling fuck who can sell the fruits of that labor over a power lunch.
It's just might makes right all over again. That was the great innovation of the capitalist age, so carefully intertwined with the revolutions of democracy but so different at heart. We like to think that rule by force was abolished in the modern civilized age with the rise of the enlightenment, but it was another revolution entirely, couched in the guise of scientific and rational thought. We traded mastery by strength for mastery by guile all while thinking that we were adopting mastery by merit. The greatest con in all of history, when the sons of Loki dressed in the cloaks of the sons of Odin and overthrew the sons of Thor once and for all.
Read Karl Marx, vilified as he now is, he said these things a hundred years before our births, in different words that have since been cajoled into all manner of horror. The capitalist of Marx is not the middle class entrepreneur, not the self-made man cast down by jealous and ignorant peasants. The capitalist is the salesman who has never produced a thing in his life, smiling all the while as he steals companies from the engineers, products from the designers, credit from the creators. It was never supposed to be about burning the rich, tearing down the accomplished, though those damned Bolsheviks misunderstood and came closer than anyone else to creating hell on earth. It was about hunting down the snakes in the garden.
Don't kill the rich. Kill the charismatic.
At many law schools, they tell students at the very beginning, from now on never argue with anyone you love. You are being trained as warriors of the word, you will win every argument with the non-initiated. You will talk circles around your wife, your mother, your friends. You will eviscerate any rhetoric they can summon to their side. You will always win, and that does not mean that you are right. Might does not make right, regardless of what type of might it is. Only right makes right.
The ascension of the charismatic, of the salesmen, brings us inevitably to the current economy, in which trillions of dollars disappeared over night. Nothing really disappeared. We still have the same people, the same educations, the same skills, the same resources, buildings, properties. But our system isn't built on those sorts of things any longer, it's built on fictional constructions of finance. I'm not an economic Luddite, I don't hold some 19th century nostalgia for the gold standard, but neither do I see the validity of financial products. Anything sellable should in a rational economy have some value. A house has value because of its utility, because of the materials of which it is made. A computer program has value because it does something. Gold has some value, even if little more than the utility of looking really pretty. Music has value because it can be listened to. Value is relative of course, subject to whether someone is willing to pay for it, whether they perceive the value of it.
But the highest levels of finance break with this idea of value. Value in the financial world is contingent merely on the willingness of someone else to pay for the item. It's a neat trick, eliminating the various aspects and measures of value, replacing them with the more easily manageable and universal definition of value. It's the theoretical foundation of money in the first place: generalize value into an abstract currency so that barter can be eliminated. But once value is generalized away, the truly gifted are tempted to generalize further. If value just means that someone is willing to pay for something, then value is not a measure of an item's worth but of the salesman's skill. But the key is that only other salesmen would follow such tortured logic. So salesmen buy the worthless in order to sell it for slightly more money to another salesman, who in turn purchases the worthless piece of paper with the sole motivation of selling it for more to another even more charismatic and ambitious salesman. The market always goes up, they say, because the next guy in the chain always believes that he can find someone to pay a dollar more for the worthless piece of paper passed around from corner office to corner office.
Anyone can see the gaping hole in the machine, this elaborate trillion dollar game of musical chairs. But they'll mortgage their futures to save the machine because they're told that there is no other way by the smiling demons who designed the engine in the first place. And someday the imp in the bottle will have the last laugh.
"There's a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart, that you can't take part, you can't even passively take part, and you've got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus, and you've got to make it stop! And you've got to indicate to the people who run it, to the people who own it, that unless you're free, the machine will be prevented from working at all." -Mario Savio
The government contract is also responsible for the inflated value of services whether they end up producing a subpar product or a good or service at all.
I like some of the ideas presented in participational economy. It has some roots in Marxist thought, and is probably best undertaken with a J-curve frame of mind. Basically, it states that the thing lacking form Socialism is the basis and reward of incentives. Parecon suggests that since middle-developed countries(sector,regions) will always need to be subservient to high-yield juggernauts, offering proles communal castes according to their areas of production could make the productive seat uninhibited in commercial and industrial growth. So you get another regions produce in exchange for your microchips, but that doesn't mean that your region is not growing produce, it just means that mine is better. Since you are making the best microchips, your region can accept software engineers from other regions, consequentially boosting your productivity and raising your regional caste. People are not highly advanced enough for this kind of system yet, and indeed, we would probably see many of the Socialist queue problems or Communist Party elite corruption problems, but it is good at least consider ways to finagle the capitalist system.
The most interesting conjecture I've ruminated is the idea of Reform Capitalism as it pertains to this administration's need for breakthroughs. It isn't being used yet, and I haven't heard any Obama official embracing the idea outright, but the idea follows a profit-sharing model for companies by resetting industry standards. The idea I had for its application was in the automotive industry. We need a new paradigm for car engines and home central heat and eventually power plants. Cars seem most feasible, and since this administration is unwilling to forgo the potential profits from a technological breakthrough in the auto market, it would be a better idea to use the money a leverage to force the car companies into socializing their R&D at least until we have our engine. And before the rest of the world does it. Reform capitalism also has more crazy ideas like government imposed economic morality that somehow solves the evils of speculative living, but one thing at a time.
I apologize if I went on too long. I am was a self-loathing charismatic, but now I'm a bit of an anti-social lout.
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