Dante and Plato and Marx, oh my! Financial mess makes old writings new
Monday, March 16, 2009 at 4:37 pm
- 1 Comment
Popping up in news pages with disturbing regularity since the economy started sinking are dead guys who wrote, centuries ago, about things like eternal agony, arbitrary tyrants and endemic economic crises. Dante, Plato, Marx — are we entering a worldwide financial collapse or a syllabus from hell?
The New York Times’ Ralph Blumenthal has no trouble finding a place for Ponzi schemer Bernard Madoff in Dante’s “Inferno”:
Mr. Madoff was 700 years too late to join Dante’s Who’s Who of sinners, but it is easy to imagine where the poet would consign this scam artist, who admitted to stealing as much as $65 billion: to the Pit, the Ninth (and deepest) Circle of Hell. It is where sins of betrayal are punished in a sea of ice fanned frigid by the six batlike wings of the immense, three-faced, fanged and weeping Lucifer.
The Financial Times’ Harry Eyres taps translated lines from Plato’s “Republic” to find an ancient Greek precedent for today’s conditions:
“The [oligarchic] Rulers, who are in power because they have amassed so much wealth, do not want to prohibit by law the extravagance of the young, and stop them from wasting their money and ruining themselves. Their intention is to make loans to such imprudent people or by buying up their property to hope to increase their own wealth and influence … The moneymakers continue to inject the toxic sting of their loans wherever they can, and to ask for high rates of interest, with the result that the city becomes full of lazy drones and paupers.” Has any better diagnosis of the origins of the credit crunch been written recently?
But it’s Karl Marx who had capitalism’s number and shows up most frequently in journalists’ financial diagnoses. Christopher Hitchens in The Atlantic first relates what a retired British Museum worker told interviewers about Marx–
“And then one day ’e just stopped coming. And you know what’s a funny fing, sir?” A pregnant pause. “Nobody’s ever ’eard of ’im since!”
– before announcing, “He’s back.”
As I write this, every newspaper informs me of frantic efforts by merchants to unload onto the consumer, at almost any price, the vast surplus of unsold commodities that have accumulated since the credit crisis began to take hold. The phrase crisis of over-production, which I learned so many long winters ago in “agitational” meetings, recurs to my mind. On other pages, I learn that the pride of American capitalism has seized up and begun to rust, and that automobiles may cease even to be made in Detroit as a consequence of insane speculation in worthless paper “derivatives.” Did I not once read somewhere about the bitter struggle between finance capital and industrial capital? The lines of jobless and hungry begin to lengthen, and what more potent image of those lines do we possess than that of the “reserve army” of the unemployed—capital’s finest weapon in beating down the minimum wage and increasing the hours of the working week? A disturbance in a remote corner of the world market leads to chaos and panic at the very center of the system (and these symptoms are given a multiplier effect when the pangs begin at the center itself), and John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge, doughty champions of capitalism at The Economist, admit straightforwardly in their book on the advantages of globalization that Marx, “as a prophet of the ‘universal interdependence of nations,’ as he called globalization … can still seem startlingly relevant … His description of globalization remains as sharp today as it was 150 years ago.” The falling rate of profit, the tendency to monopoly … how wrong could that old reading-room attendant have been?
1 Comment
Comment posted March 17, 2009 @ 7:08 am
Hi Chris and readers. Good piece, Chris, and accurate. Did you know there was a bunch of stuff about capitalism that you could figure out without reading anything? Take for example, the massive freemason symbols all over the USA dollar bill. Many of them come from the Colombia chapter of the freemasons, which has 13 degrees. Other freemasons use 33 degrees. The numbers 13 and 33 shows up all over the dollar, and don’t believe for a second that 13 shows-up because of thirteen original colonies. Actually, there was 13 original colonies BECAUSE there are 13 degrees in the Colombia freemasons. Ever ask yourself WHY the USA capital (-ism) is in a “district of colombia” and not part of the United States?
Let’s see what else is obvious and blatant. You DO see the pyramid scheme symbol on the back of the USA one dollar bill, right? You DO see the servitude infestation in capitalism, right? And do you see the “pay up or lose your wellbeing” Chicago mob-like felony extortion widespread within capitalism? Do you see the “join or starve” felony extortion done to the 18 year olds… by this ugly competer’s church called capitalism? See how forcing competer’s religions onto 18 year olds… kills membership in the cooperator’s church (Christianity/socialism)?? Do you understand that AmWay (American Way) (New World Order) got “the exclusive” (legal tender) on the TYPE of survival coupons (money) accepted in supply depots (stores) and leverages 18 years olds into the organization via that felony activity as well? (It puts AmWay-coupon slaving requirements called price tags… on all the survival goods). Do you understand how farmyard pyramids work… from your childhood?? Remember?? Upper 1/3 are “heads in the clouds” while the kids on the bottom ALWAYS GET HURT from the weight of the world’s knees in their backs? Still with me? Do you see anything illegal, immoral, or just plain sick… in any of this pyramid scheme’s activities?
Us American Christian socialists are still patiently awaiting the natural fall of the pyramid-o-servitude, or the busting of the free marketeers felony… by the USA Dept of Justice. Us Christians are VERY CLOSE to issuing a cease and desist order until the servitude and inequality goes away… which means it turns into a commune. Commune is a word we LOVE when used in the word “community”… but its one the caps HATE when used in the term “commune-ism”. Go fig. PROGRAMMED!!
Do a Google IMAGE SEARCH for ‘pyramid of capitalist’ to see a full color picture made way back in 1911, when capitalism was first discovered to be a con/sham instigated by the Free Masons/Illuminati. Folks sure bought into the thing… hook, line, and sinker just the same. The caps didn’t even check if a string was attached! Now THAT’S easy fishing, eh?
Time to level the felony pyramid scheme called capitalism. Abolish economies and ownershipism worldwide, and hurry. Economies just cause rat-racing, and rat-racing causes felony pyramiding. BUST IT, America! Look to the USA military supply/survival system… (and the USA public library system) for socialism and morals done right. Equal, owner-less, money-less, bill-less, timecard-less, and concerned with growth of value-criteria OTHER THAN money-value. Quit doing monetary discrimination immediately, and make it illegal. There are MANY measurement criteria of “value”… not just dollars. Try morals, efficiency, discrimination-levels, repairability, etc etc. Economies are cancerous tumors, and to cheer for their growth… is just insane. Profiting causes inflation, so if caps LIKE inflation, and if they LIKE a terrible time in afterlife when they meet the planet’s ORIGINAL OWNER before caps tried to squat it all with ownershipism, then keep it up with the felony pyramiding. I dare you. While us Christians are finally bulldozing that pyramid scheme back to level, lets make servitude and “join or starve” (get a job or die) illegal in the USA, and lets level the architecture seen in USA courtrooms, too. Right now, USA courtrooms are church simulators or “fear chambers”, by special design. Sick.
Yeah, anyone half-awake can see the rat-racing, enjoyment addictions, and pyramiding… caused by using economies and ownership. Not a single other living creature on the planet, does economies and ownership. Why do humans? Conned? You bet. Herd control systems 101.
Larry “Wingnut” Wendlandt
MaStars – Mothers Against Stuff That Ain’t Right
(anti-capitalism-ists)
Bessemer MI USA
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