Philosophy.Com

capitalism crashes

Over at The Pinocchio Theory Steven Shavio observes about what has been called “irrational exuberance.”

Nobody should be all that surprised by the recent unraveling of the financial system. Crises are endemic to capitalism, as Marx argued long ago, and as generations of Marxist economists since have repeatedly demonstrated. Capitalism often has periods of dynamic growth; but these tend to turn into crises of underconsumption, or of overproduction and/or the overaccumulation of capital, because the very processes that boost productivity and profit end up increasing the imbalance between what is produced, and what workers and consumers are able to afford to buy. For a while this imbalance is alleviated by easy credit — consumers are able to buy beyond their means, and businesses are able to produce even more — but eventually the mismatch is replicated on a larger scale, and the whole house of cards tumbles down.

So we have the spectacle of financial meltdown and actual human misery--- homelessness, penury, and misery--- that the former caused.

Merry Xmas

Thanks for dropping by, commenting. and discussing.

Gary Sauer-Thompson, rose, Victor Harbor, 2008

I promise more effort next year.

Australia's compulsory "clean feed" on all internet subscribers

China's reimposition of censorship on websites run by the BBC and other news organisations and other politically unacceptable content is held to be a matter of international concern. Only repressive countries (China, Burma, Cuba, Egypt) restrict Web access and Internet freedom is the argument.

Authoritarian regimes censor web content, encourage self-censorship, demand real-name registration, actively surveil and block online communications, and even limit Internet access altogether. They also punish activists who attempt to use the Internet as a medium to dissent or challenge state authority.

Yet the Rudd Government in Australia is planning to do the same with child porn and illegal and inappropriate material. Inappropriate content, from what we can judge, includes gambling and euthanasia sites plus peer-to-peer file transfers. No other democracy has comparable mandatory internet censorship of this kind --presumably because secret, unaccountable, censorship is incompatible with democracy. It represents a denial of the marketplace of ideas.

As Irene Graham points out

Unlike Australia's offline censorship regime, the Internet censorship regime is secret and unaccountable. Offline material is classified by the Classification Board, an independent statutory body comprising publicly named members.Titles of banned and classified material are publicly available in the Board's online database. In stark contrast, decisions to add content hosted outside Australia to ACMA's blacklist are made by unnamed government agency (ACMA) staff and all information about material on ACMA's blacklist is secret. Freedom of Information legislation was changed in 2003 to exempt all such information from disclosure under FOI (changes voted against by Labor).

Minima Moralia: Toward the End

Adorno's Minima Moralia ends thus:

Toward the End.—The only kind of philosophy for which, in the face of despair, responsibility could be assumed, would be the attempt to contem­plate all things the way that they would present themselves from the stand­ point of redemption. Cognition has no light other than the one that shines onto the world from redemption: everything else exhausts itself in reconstruction and remains a piece of technique. Perspectives would have to be manufactured in which the world similarly displaces and estranges itself, revealing its tears and cracks, as it at some point will lie there, needy and disfigured, in the Messianic light. To gain such perspectives without arbitrariness and violence, wholly from one’s contact with the objects—this alone is what matters to thinking. This is the easiest of all because the condition irrefutably calls for such cognition, indeed, because completed negativity, once fully captured by the eye, shoots together to form the mirror writing of its opposite. But it also is the entirely impossible, because it presupposes a standpoint removed, even if only by the most minuscule degree, from the sphere of the spell of being, whereas every possible cognition, in order to become binding, not only must first be wrested from what is, but, for this very reason, is itself struck with the same disfiguration and neediness from which it intends to escape. The more passionately thought seals itself off from its conditionality for the sake of the unconditional, the more uncon­sciously and, therefore, the more disastrously, it falls toward the world. It must grasp even its own impossibility for the sake of the possible. But, faced with the demand that thereby is issued to it, the question concerning the reality or unreality of redemption is itself almost irrelevant.­