Posts by BenWilson
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Hard News: London's Burning, in reply to Simon Grigg,
Imagine if MLK had moved 50,000 marchers into Wall Street and Times Square for two months
I can imagine a swift and violent response. I think the same thing might happen here too.
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Hard News: London's Burning, in reply to DexterX,
The idea that we can't shape our future better is something that might be true, but it's also apathetic, setting up a self fulfilling prophecy. Again, I think we can do better. There are any number of tweaks that would make an enormous difference. You have mentioned many of them yourself.
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Hard News: London's Burning, in reply to Sacha,
I'm sure of it, although there was grim irony there.
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Hard News: London's Burning, in reply to DexterX,
Deepening the recession is the only way to get out of the recession – refer GST increase. The slashing of benefits will help foster the recovery in the longer term, it will work the same way that throwing human sacrifices into the volcano, time and time again, made it rain and stopped the crops from failing. Eventually you make a human sacrifice and it rains.
Can I just say for the record that I think these ideas suck arse? I think you were somewhat joking but in some ways it's no joke, that really is the way capitalism gets out of recession, left to its own devices, just as the way that nature copes with overpopulation is through mass starvation. We're fucking HUMANS! We can do better.
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Hard News: London's Burning, in reply to DexterX,
This is a bit broad and unconnected, what is or where would you set an unsustainably high income and who gets paid it.
I'm pretty much referring to GDP per head, which has been historically been high for NZ and many other Western nations. For a long time this was because of high industrial development and high skill levels. This has not kept pace with emerging industrial nations, nor could it, realistically, with globalized labour and capital. Not without actually fucking those countries up deliberately, which has been a favored tactic in the past in economic rivalry between nations. Or nicking their resources, which is another way of fucking them up.
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Hard News: London's Burning, in reply to Simon Grigg,
Asia isn't in crisis, quite the opposite.
For many people I know, it's the place to be.
From Indonesia north, with the possible exception of Japan, Asia isn't in crisis, quite the opposite.
And Japan's crisis is very similar to the Western one. Unsustainably high incomes leading to unrealistic expectations of constant growth, whilst at the same time being uncompetitive. It's a crisis they've been in for quite some time.
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I suspect Western capitalism is probably less in crisis at the moment, than it was just before/at the beginning of the Great Depression.
Not sure about that. The option of war has been a constant feature of the system, as a way of stimulating production when the natural tendency towards imbalance becomes excessive. But the kind of wars that major powers get into now just don't cut it either as excuses for rationalization of production, nor as ways of controlling internal unrest.
Also, the existence of major non-Western rivals who are militarily unassailable has meant that the ridiculously high incomes enjoyed by quite a lot of the population just can't be sustained.
I hope this will actually lead to a realization that those ridiculous incomes didn't really make the societies much happier, that all kinds of excess can be done away with without really losing much at all, that being a low wage economy really isn't that awful if people are enjoying good lives, which mostly comes about through a more fair distribution of the social production.
I'm not arguing that we should aim to be low-wage. I just think it's been happening, and it will continue to happen, and *that* is the challenge that is new. That is the crisis that has to be overcome. If we manage to do it without war this time, my faith in humanity will be restored.
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Saw Rise of the Planet of the Apes last night, and have to agree. Well done, the best of the Apes films since the first one.
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As Marx wrote, please accept my resignation. I don’t want to belong to any club that would accept me as one of its members.
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Hard News: London's Burning, in reply to giovanni tiso,
Glad to have you on board. I have some literature.
What? No personality test?
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