• Tag Archives capitalism

  • Late-Stage or Last Stage Capitalism

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Winter                              Garden Planning Moon

     

    Back to late-stage industrial capitalism.  (see a couple of posts down)  In that article from the Atlantic Monthly that I referenced earlier it points out the collapse of middle class wage  manufacturing jobs in the US.  At the same time I heard yesterday that in spite of the fact that wages have increased slightly, consumers seem to be saving the money instead of spending it.

    Then, the radio reporter went on to say, 70% of our economy is driven by consumer spending.  Do you see the problem here?  We challenge old-age benefits like social security and medicare, demand people take responsibility for their own retirement (which, if successful, will increase savings–which makes sense).  We also have an economy, a pillar of which, manufacturing, that used to provided millions of middle-class wage level jobs–think auto workers, steel workers, rubber (tire) workers and their like–is now dominated by robotic machinery.  This is done to reduced the work force and hold down wages, both to compete with international manufacturers, such as the ones in China and other parts of Asia.

    So, if the economy is driven by consumers (70% is a big chunk!), and the trend in hiring is to use more machines and less workers, and a further trend is to bust unions (see all the right to work laws under consideration in state legislatures) and chip away at employee benefits, then who will be left with money to prop up the economy.

    Unemployed people or people employed at below living standard wages don’t line up at Target or Best Buy or head out to restaurants.  Not because they don’t want to.  Because they can’t.

    The big contradiction then is this:  our economic engine requires more and more economies on the part of industry and business to stay competitive in global and local trade.  Many of these economies come at the expense of income and benefits for American citizens (read:  consumers), the very ones who drive our economy.  So?

     


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  • Still Examining

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Imbolc                                                        Waxing Bridgit Moon

    Greg Membres, my Latin tutor, recommended a film, The Examined Life.  You may have seen it already since it was made in 2008, but it’s a powerful introduction to some fundamental philosophical questions like ethics, the meaning of life, political theory.

    One truth struck me more powerfully than any other while watching this movie.  I imagined, when I was in high school and then in college, that there was an upward and onward nature to learning, a steady progression in which high school and college pushed me, and a progression that would give me enough momentum to take my life up the mountain, all the way to the top, that somehow learning and life would be a regular unfolding of answers and conclusions.  After, maybe, my sophomore year I began to realize this was a mistaken view, not only mistaken but might have had reality actually inverted.

    That is, I was never more certain of the truth than when I was in college and then, later, in seminary.  Life since then has offered a sometime gradual, sometimes sudden degradation of both the things I know for sure and the things I know at all.  An abstract thinker by nature and inclination, I found it logical, desirable to hunt for truth in the abstract systems of philosophy, theology, theoretical approaches to various disciplines.  At one point, in fact, I wanted to study the theoretical foundations of anthropology in graduate school.  Turns out not many graduate schools had much interest.  In either the discipline or me studying it.

    As life experience and longer thought has lead me to reconsider many of my core positions, I have abandoned Christianity, the liberal politics of my father, the traditional roles of men and women, boys and girls, the positive assumptions about capitalism with which I was acculturated, the metaphysics of Rene Descartes which still informs our unexamined ontology, a soul, an afterlife, respect for the government, though not for democracy itself.  These are not trivial decisions, nor were any of them made lightly nor suddenly.

    On some of the big questions like the meaning of life, I have chosen to abandon my search.  Life is what we are, it is what we do and needs no abstract cover story for its purpose.  This may be too minimalistic for many and I get that, but for me, I find my purpose in life itself, the living of it that includes marriage, family, friends and  actions that press for greater justice, a sustainable future, a climate that will not kill us.

    Though I’m not a complete cultural relativist, I’m pretty damn close.  Murder, oppression, suppression, starvation, unchecked disease, poverty, racial and sexual discrimination of any kind are wrong, in my view, universally.  In almost all other matters, I’m more than open to different cultural perspectives and practices, I expect them, celebrate them and would find the world shallower and morally impoverished without them.

    Still working on this, noodling it.


    📂This entry was posted in Aging Cinema and Television Commentary on Religion Faith and Spirituality Humanities Politics 📎and tagged

  • Global Wealth in our Gilded Age: Conclusion

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Fall                                                        Waning Back to School Moon

    David Little has blown into town with contemporary photography and new media at his back.  His energy gives a new breadth and depth to the photography collection.

    Embarrassment of Riches demonstrates both.  He recalls seeing an Annie Leibovitz photograph, an advertisement.  Mikhail Gorbachev sits in the back of an expensive car, his hand somewhat anxiously on the door handle, looking at the Berlin Wall.  Sitting on the seat next to him is a Louis Vuitton bag.  The image exploded.  What would be the equivalent, if say the USSR had won the cold war, Ronald Reagan in a Soviet limo with a gold hammer and sickle sitting next to him, perhaps looking at the same wall from the other side?

    The global reach of capitalism and the vastly increased wealth around the world had wrought an unimaginable change in an icon of our former blood enemy.  Was this how global wealth looked?  In an investigation into how photographers portray wealth and its cultural influence, Little made an interesting discovery.  Documentary photography had focused on the poor, those without wealth, and also without the power and perhaps the understanding to control their own images.  Photographers could access the despairing mother of the depression era, the projects of Chicago’s southside, the barrios of Latin America but the wealthy knew had to handle the paparazzi.  Deny them access.

    Imaging wealth had a taboo feel, but wealth at unprecedented levels must have resulted in some images.  Where were they?  He knew some of them already, but had to search for others, especially others that dealt with wealth from an objective perspective, neither glorifying or chastising.  This show, which takes its name from a Simon Schama book of the same name, aims to show that other side of life, the life of those with power and money, but to show it in situ.

    A traditional problem of photography, of art in general, lies in how to show the invisible, then how to do it and not be obvious, heavy handed.  The photographs in the currency section of the show wrestle with that problem and have several different answers.  Gleaming oil pipelines, stacks of gold bullion, an uber power lunch, a stock exchange, an inventory of lamps all suggest rather than tell, reveal yet also conceal.  They are not didactic, at least not in any propagandistic way.  Value, critical to each image, is ephemeral and socially determined whether by Arab men selling stocks and oil futures or the market for gold or the power carried by top level business leaders gathered in one room.

    Art, too, is a currency of sorts.  It has a market, is sold in galleries and at auction and through private transactions.  Curiously, though, it has no intrinsic value, lumps of marble, paint on canvas, ink on paper, images on photo paper.  The value of art is purely transactional.  So, in this sense, each of the photographs in this exhibition participate in the thing they depict, especially since the world of art tends to be the world of the rich and powerful.

    This exhibit is as much about photography and photography as art as it about the contents of the images in it, more so because the images show only a minuscule slice of the lives of the rich and powerful.  So the title Embarrassment of Riches carries at least a double meaning, it describes what the images contain, but it also describes the images as art.  Worth seeing.


    📂This entry was posted in Art and Culture 📎and tagged

  • He Who Dies with the Most Toys Wins?

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    62  bar falls 29.85  3mph NNW dewpoint 29 Beltane

                 Waxing Crescent of the Hare Moon 

    “The capitalist bookkeepers’ theoretician was German sociologist Max Weber, whose 1910 book The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism argued that the key feature of capitalism was that making money becomes ‘a calling’, an end in itself. The bourgeois worked for the sake of work, denying himself the fruits of his labour. The pre-modern man would have been flummoxed by this, says Weber: what is the point of this, ‘to sink into the grave weighed down with a great material load of money and goods’? ”  from an article in Spiked

    I love this quote from Weber.  What is, after all, the point of sinking into the grave weighed down with a great material load of money and goods?  None, as far I can see.

    I disagree with Weber though about the state of pre-modern people.  Many, many cultures not only thought this was a good thing, but literally did it. Those wealthy or high born enough took servants, food, furniture, money, painting, all manner of things to the grave.

    Two tours today.  Winnipeg kids on a band tour.  They had been to the Mall of America and Bubblegum, a restaurant there and had lots of other places to visit.  They didn’t think the Days Inn where they were staying were showing them very good hospitality, though they did admit that having that many teenagers in one place created a lot of ruckus.  This was a bright, attentive and thoughtful group.  We saw the installation with the children’s photos, Frank, Magritte, Van Gogh and Goya.  They were talkative and had many ideas.

    The Weber tour had three people, a couple and Stacy Pydych.  Stacy had to leave early, but the couple stayed on for the whole tour.  He had been to Japan when he was 24 years old and a serviceman.  They, too, were attentive and talkative.  We saw most of the exhibit because I skipped part of my usual tour in teaware and Tale of Genji.  They thought I was a professor of Japanese history.  I assured them the museum taught us what we needed to know.

    Got a thank-you card today from Robbinsdale Japanese language students.  The teacher wrote a nice note and each kid signed it and some offered comments.  Amazing, when you consider these are high school students.


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