The National Forum   Donate   Your Account   On Line Opinion   Forum   Blogs   Polling   About   
The Forum - On Line Opinion's article discussion area



Syndicate
RSS/XML


RSS 2.0

Main Articles General

Sign In      Register

The Forum > Article Comments > It's the system, stupid > Comments

It's the system, stupid : Comments

By Marcus Strom, published 23/10/2008

While executive salaries are an obscenity, they are a symptom, not the cause, of the financial crisis.

  1. Pages:
  2. Page 1
  3. 2
  4. All
so any idea's of a reformed system? the few that have been tried around the world in the last 200 hundred or so years don't seem to have been too crash hot either.

i agree entirely with this article btw.
Posted by mr potato, Thursday, 23 October 2008 1:06:33 PM
Find out more about this user Visit this user's webpage Recommend this comment for deletion Return to top of page Return to Forum Main Page Copy comment URL to clipboard
And so...? Is there a page missing? The first page wasn't bad...
Posted by Grim, Thursday, 23 October 2008 8:04:15 PM
Find out more about this user Visit this user's webpage Recommend this comment for deletion Return to top of page Return to Forum Main Page Copy comment URL to clipboard
the marxists missed the boat, because they could not grasp the need for democracy as the political base for socialism. without democracy, socialism must be enforced at gunpoint as lenin did. this energized resistance and created a leadership corrupted by power, both power over the outsiders and internal struggle for supremacy, ensuring it's failure.

the political equality of democracy will create a more egalitarian society as votes transmute into working conditions. if switzerland is any guide, a mixed economy will result.

without democracy, human society is inevitably unjust, inevitably rapacious, and the only question is "can humanity get to democracy before we ruin the planet?"
Posted by DEMOS, Friday, 24 October 2008 6:41:11 AM
Find out more about this user Visit this user's webpage Recommend this comment for deletion Return to top of page Return to Forum Main Page Copy comment URL to clipboard
As capitalism appears to be failing it's interesting to see how folks in some parts of the world are looking again at Marx's writings (http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/7679758.stm).

As a critic of capitalism and its flaws, Marx did a pretty good job, although he perhaps made too much of 'the objective laws of history' which gave rise to the birth of 'scientific socialism' and the supposed inevitable disintegration of capitalism. Surely history has shown that capitalism has a remarkable phoenix-like ability to reinvent itself and rise from apparently moribund conditions, albeit at enormous social cost - there are many who consider that the recovery from the Great Depression of the 1930s came about not so much because of Roosevelt's New Deal, but because of the stimulus to production, and the re-ordering of the world system that the Second World War brought about.

Where Marx's & Engels' work fell down was in its prescriptions for the new utopia, communism, and the subsequent birth of Marxist-Leninism and then Stalinism. As DEMOS says, democracy was thoroughly lacking and it was replaced by repression. Further, the communists and state socialists simply substituted the managerial party apparatchik class for the bourgeois property owning class. So getting rid of private property doesn't necessarily get rid of hierarchies, and domination, and control, which arguably are as much at the root of human misery and planetary destruction as is the system of private control over the means of production and wealth-generation. Re-structuring the economy to get rid of the destructive growth drive and to internalise all currently externalised costs would also be big steps in the right direction

There are alternatives which do seek to tackle these issues in a highly democratic and participatory way, such as parecon (participatory economics - http://www.zmag.org/znet/topics/parecon), and ecological economics (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ecological_economics). Co-operativism already exists around the world, and co-op principles (http://www.ica.coop/coop/principles.html), if widely implemented, would help bring about a value and behavioural shift that would start to transform the highly dysfunctional aspects of actually existing capitalism. So if you’re interested in making some changes, join a co-op, or better still, start a new one!
Posted by Take off your blinkers, Friday, 24 October 2008 7:47:52 AM
Find out more about this user Recommend this comment for deletion Return to top of page Return to Forum Main Page Copy comment URL to clipboard
Marcus,

In almost every business cost cutting regimes the first thing to go is metaphorical victim, the tea lady as though she is the culprit. The one thing that never changes is the bosses’ excesses except to increase.

Now that focus has moved to the top (where the buck is supposed to stop) the bosses even those in charge of Union Super funds are claiming it’s all just commercial version of the ‘Stockholm Syndrome’ (see Ambit Gambit). While Marcus is arguing that the bosses’ excesses are irrelevant to the argument in that it’s ‘the system’ is the culprit.

But wait which system? Steiglitz on the “7.30 report” argued that it is the system that because businesses are too big to fail, the pressure to turn short term profits, lack of culpability (golden parachutes) and the reward system, lack of competence and self interest that encouraged the high risk taking strategies that cause periodic financial catastrophes. Some analysts blame derivatives, some blame the complexity of the system. Some blame the British 1864 Company’s Act that allowed companies to become legal entities and limited liability. Some even blame human nature (biological not the pop group). There you have it it’s everything is to blame… except people who could make a difference!
Clearly all of the above have had some part to play in the current malaise. Common sense and informed logic dictate that there isn’t some Grand Uniting Theory or Theory Of Everything that we can now implement. No system of Government is perfect but ALL systems have good bits so let’s stop with idiotic and unproductive ideological dogma wars and rationally take from all systems that which best suits our needs.
“New improved Democracy with added Eclecticism”.
It is time we addressed the needs of everyone rather than ‘Commercial Darwinism’ (sic) a system of one size fits no one or at best the only the elite.
If that means we direct capitalism and make it answerable for the greater good then so be it.
This isn’t left politics it’s the principles of Democracy and humanistic Capitalism
Posted by examinator, Friday, 24 October 2008 9:44:10 AM
Find out more about this user Recommend this comment for deletion Return to top of page Return to Forum Main Page Copy comment URL to clipboard
On my new blog http://chriswhiteonline.org I have posted "The Depression: A Long-Term View" by Immanuel Wallerstein.

The depression has started. We are already at the beginning of a full-blown worldwide depression with extensive unemployment almost everywhere.

The capitalist world-economy has had, for several hundred years at least, two major forms of cyclical swings. One is the so-called Kondratieff cycles that historically were 50-60 years in length. And the other is the hegemonic cycles which are much longer.

In terms of the hegemonic cycles, the United States was a rising contender for hegemony as of 1873, achieved full hegemonic dominance in 1945, and has been slowly declining since the 1970s. George W. Bush's follies have transformed a slow decline into a precipitate one.

The Kondratieff cycles have a different timing. The world came out of the last Kondratieff B-phase in 1945, and then had the strongest A-phase upturn in the history of the modern world-system. It reached its height circa 1967-73, and started on its downturn. This B-phase has gone on much longer than previous B-phases and we are still in it.

The characteristics of a Kondratieff B-phase match what the world-economy has been experiencing since the 1970s. Profit rates from productive activities go down, especially in those types of production that have been most profitable. Consequently, capitalists who wish to make really high levels of profit turn to the financial arena, engaging in what is basically speculation. Productive activities, in order not to become too unprofitable, tend to move from core zones to other parts of the world-system, trading
lower transactions costs for lower personnel costs....

...the present system cannot survive. What we cannot predict is which new order will be chosen to replace it...This will not be a capitalist system but it may be far worse (even more polarizing and hierarchical) or much better (relatively democratic and relatively egalitarian) than such a system. The choice of a new system is the major worldwide political struggle of our times.

Read the full article on http://chriswhiteonline.org
Posted by Chris White, Friday, 24 October 2008 10:03:49 AM
Find out more about this user Visit this user's webpage Recommend this comment for deletion Return to top of page Return to Forum Main Page Copy comment URL to clipboard
  1. Pages:
  2. Page 1
  3. 2
  4. All

About Us :: Search :: Discuss :: Feedback :: Legals :: Privacy