You misunderstood what i was saying.
Let me define some of the terms you are confused aboutCapitalism:A concept which has moved beyond the stage of sensible discussion.
Capitalism can be a useful social tool or a weapon of unabashed human expoiltation. Which it will be is entirely on the way that it is regulated. Capitalism itself contains no ethical values. Those who use it decide by their actions whether it is a force for good or evil.
Each economic system does tend to be more at home in certain circumstances than in others. Capitalism is happiest in a non-democratic society.
Not that any old dictatorship will do. Two types in particular can be disastrous. The first is the bureaucratic sort,when a nation is dominated by a state religion or ideology, as i the former Soviet Union. Second are the personalized dictatorships, where all financial dealings must run through the hands of the dictator, his family and friends.
capitalism thrives in the evolved authoritarian dictatorships. There the streets are calm, dissent is discouraged, disorder repressed. Little time is wasted over politics, debates, elections and tiresome, inefficient legislatures. For decades at a stretch the same ministers and poliicies remain in place.the firm hand all of this suggests must, however, be benevolent. Individuals must have the freedom to make money and spend it as they wish, believing that so long as they dont challenge the systtem, they will be permitted to live out their lives in peace, keep their wealth and pass it on to their children.
The glory days of the industrial revolution came in Englandd before a series of parlimentry reforms had created anything resembling a fairly elected assembly. With the rise of mass democracy during the late nineteenth century, the capitalist system began to stall, then declne, and hass never recovered. In France, capitalism's greatest moments came under two benign dictators:Louis-Philippe and Louis-Napoleon;in Germany it prospered happily under Kaiser Wilhelm.
In the United states the capitalist sysem was first establised under slavery. Its moment of glory came in the last quarter of the nineteenth century and the first quater of the twentieth, when the workforce was flooded by immigrants who either were not yet citizens or were still politically passive. Slavery still funtioned in its legal form of segregation. Capitalism complained a great deal from 1932 to 1968;the period during which public participation was most evenly spread and government paid the most attention to the needs of the whole populace. It regained a sense of optimism during the 1970s and 1980s when voter participation fell to 50% in presidential elections and far lower in thoose for congress. This period conincided with a rise in public disgust for the political process, a decline in labour union membership and intense deregulation.
Capiitalism was reasonably content under Hitler, happy under Mussolini, very happy under Franco and delirious under General Pinochet.
This is not what the early philosophers of cpitalism had expected. The tempering of man by commerce as imagined by Adam Smith and David Hume has not happened. The once-popular veiw that democracy blossomed thanks to the rise of capitalism can now been seen in perspective. Their parrallel rise is not one of cause and effect, as their ongoing difficult relationship continues to demonstrate.
These misunderstandings aren't surprising. Remarkable men writing in the eighteenth century were trying to guess what the new economic whirlwind would bring. We now have the advantage of experiance.
Even Max Weber in the early twentieth century was convinced that bureaucratic capiitalism, along with public bureaucracy, would be forces for efficiency, speed and precision. We now know that he was wrong. The large corporations use their structures and their wealth to protect themselves from their own failures, but they are ineffectual themselves when compared to smaller owner-managed companies.
These visible experiances have been clouded for us by the self-serving public relations of the business schools, which continue to feed the structures, and the kiddnapping of people like Edmund Burke an Adam Smith by the neo-conservitive ideologues. They present Smith as an apostle of unrestricted trade and unregulated markets. In fact his was a relatively moderate, balanced position which included public regulation to curb the excesses of capitalism.
We can now see how some of the miscalculations were made. For example, many of those who imagined the new American Rpublic had the Venetian Republic in miind as a model. They saw Venice's economic organization as a solution to their problems. They scarcely bothered with its under lying principals whichh excluded such elements as individualism, a responsible citizenary, free speech and democracy. It was an almost perfect corporatist dictatorship.
The great American philanthropist industrialists-such as Carnegie and Rockefeller-were in some ways naive descendants of the Venetian tradition. They seemed to promise a society led by economic daring. Alongside their eoonomic infrastructures, which became those of the nation, they left wonderful monuments to culture. But their sort of robber baron leadership, no matter how creative, undermined to posibility of a citizen-based state.
What these experiances indicate is that democracy and capitalism are not natural friends. That doesn't mean they must be enemies. But if allowed free run of the social system, capitalism will attempt to corrupt and undermine democracy, which after all is not its natural state. Democracy was a gradual and difficult creation against the stated desires of the natural sectors of power(authoritarian,military,class). It requires constant participation and can only be maintained by the toughness of its citizenary.
A functioning democracy nevertheless needs to create wealth. It therefore needs some balance of capitalism. by carefully defining the limits permitted to that phenomenon, responsible government can allow the process of wealth creation to succeed. This doesn't mean democracy can create ethical capitalism. That would be to impute values where none exist. Democracy can, however, lay out the rules of procedure which are based in ethics. Capitalism is then suprised to discover that it can produce wealth within the rules of the democratic game, providing they are perfectly clear and designed with the creation of wealth in mind.
Money: Societies get into trouble when they begin to beleive that money is real, which it isn't. Thoose foolish enough to forget that money is in the nature of a working illusion based on a tacit agreement about value also tend to mistreat their currency.
"money is neither the engine of capitalism or one of the wheels, it is the oil which renders the motion of the engine smoother." Adam Smith
: SDF explains: Randism exemplifies the primitivism of mere "reason" that Adorno illustrates so well in the above quote. What's at fault is not reason per se, but rather "reason's" refusal to criticize itself for its failure to understand modernity. "Reason," here in the scare-quotes, is thus reason hardened into ideologies, specifically the neurotic ideologies born of humanity's forced adaptation to capitalism. The Randists think they're pursuing reason, but what it really is that they're pursuing is a form of naivete having nothing to do with the technocratic reality of the present day. One can observe this in discussions that have been held within this Debating Room, where the Randists hold firm to their form of dogmatic weaseling despite all the trucks being driven day and night through the holes in their arguments.
I agree with you?
Why did you say the same thing as me just with that bit about randism in it? I better clear this up with another definition, this is what i was taling about.
Humanism:For the humanist, short-term problems are not a crisis. They simply represent reality with all its complications and contradictions. And the citizen's reaction to reality is not expected to be passive, for the simple reason that human nature is neither a problem nor something to be feared. "We're not intrested in a world," as Rene-Daniel Dubois puts it, "in which to be human is a weakness." Human nature is a positive force to the extent that it is in balance.
But a balance of what? What is this equilibrium the humanists seek?
A reasonable list of human qualities might include: ethics, common sense, creativity, memory or experiance, intuition and reason. The humanist tries to use all of these. But what does it mean to be in balance?
The Athenians didn't know about the structure of the atom, in which several poles are held in a self-maintaining equilibruim, not by what we would call either a physical or a logical structure but by tension. The tension of complementary oppoosites. Our qualities, seen as a whole, resemble an atom. The moment one quality is cut free from the others and givin precedence over them, this imbalence will bring out the winner's negitive aspects.
Thus ethics in power quickly turn into a religious dictatorship. Common sense couldn't help but subside into pessimistic confusion, as if wallowing in the mud. Creativity into anarchy. Memory into the worst sort of monarchical dictatorship. Intuition into base superstition. And reason, as we have seen over the last half-century, into a directionless, amoral dictatorship of structure.
This is was how i was reffering to reason.
None.
