Cultural Capitalism - A path towards decadence and despair

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... culture is rooted in spiritual and mental predicates ...

Oh really? Rooted in predicates. How would one sketch that metaphor?

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... the aspirations of man are merely for temporal goals ...

And women?

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For the very wealthy, living in [is?] an existential impasse of confusion between need and want.

Food for... something.

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This is the psychological corner stone of capitalism and consumerism driven by marketing and advertising: turning a desire for a product into an artificial need where enough is never enough - hence the need for ever more and more possessions and diversions.

How very profound.

Oh, I ventured into the full article, wherein this gem appears:

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... capitalism is merely the pseudo-antithesis of its much more deranged cousin of Marxism, since both ultimately reduce man to a mere “cog in the machine”.

I believe I've said enough.

Anti-feminist, anti-Marxist crap.  Troll alert.

M. Spector wrote:

Rebecca West wrote:

anti-Marxist crap.

When did babble start cracking down on anti-Marxist crap? [img]http://archive.rabble.ca/babble/eek.gif[/img]

Now that it's babble policy, I'm going to review all past posts and use "flag as offensive" as required.

I had trouble getting through that too...my favorite phrase was "the Freudo-Marxist welfare state". 

(as if fusing those two schools of thought wouldn't cause the head of every Marxist and every Freudian to explode).

Not going to read the article, but no reason why it can't spur some discussion regardless. I think there's something to that notion of the "cog in the machine". I find both Marxism and capitalism are reductive as philosophies, essentially materialist and lacking in any apprehension of humanity outside of economic activity. You could say that's not their purpose, but I find both have the unspoken assumption of being larger than mere industry, with cultural pretenses that are wholely unsatisfactory.

What there is to be said of them both might take the form of philosophy, but we're not dealing with any of that here.

M. Spector wrote:

Rebecca West wrote:

anti-Marxist crap.

When did babble start cracking down on anti-Marxist crap? [img]http://archive.rabble.ca/babble/eek.gif[/img]

Actually, there have been several mod "interventions" over anti-Marxist/ socialist screed over the years.  I know babble isn't your flavour of left wing progressiveness, and we can't moderate this board  24/7 (I'm pretty sure no one would want that anyway), but we do our best.  This isn't something new or unique around babble policy.

Ken Burch wrote:

And the poster who started all those threads with the "Riding The Tiger" links HAS been banned...and deservedly so...so how much more could the mods do on this particular situation?

Ken, I'm not absolutely sure about this but I think the ADL and SPLC have places where you can report hate sites if you think it's worthwile.  They will investigate and if necessary work with the internet companies to shut them down or prosecute the owners.

Let be heard and not be silenced.  Make a report if you'd like & stand strong against hate!

Patrick Mahoney wrote:

Ken Burch wrote:

And the poster who started all those threads with the "Riding The Tiger" links HAS been banned...and deservedly so...so how much more could the mods do on this particular situation?

Ken, I'm not absolutely sure about this but I think the ADL and SPLC have places where you can report hate sites if you think it's worthwile.  They will investigate and if necessary work with the internet companies to shut them down or prosecute the owners.

Let be heard and not be silenced.  Make a report if you'd like & stand strong against hate!

OK...I'll check that out and report it if possible.

"Either you repeat the same conventional doctrines everybody is saying, or else you say something true, and it will sound like it's from Neptune." - Chomsky

quote: "In this case it is a private website so we can't take that route. One way is to at least let those who monitor hate know about it, but as I said it's not the only way."

You are a calming, much-needed voice here, Patrick.

Would you mind moseying over to the thread on International Politics and perhaps explaining just what is happening in Georgia on a couple of fronts? The Obama front, to begin with?

I think in some ways we can thank Marx for his groundbreaking analysis of capitalism and his many theories in regards to economics, especially his criticism of capitalism. Actually, his analysis was not terribly different from other theoreticians of history. As early as the 13th century the Arabic philosopher wrote similar things about social conflict, aristocracies, the laboring classes and the moneyed classes.

With that said, the above poster 6079_Smith_W does have a point in saying that there are those who purport to sympathize with the proletariat while simultaneously working against their interests.

6079_Smith_W wrote:

@ Nathaniel Mossiblov

My personal feelings; I don't consider myself anti-Marxist. Someone is a Marxist? Not my concern.

I should add that my main reason for posting was in defense of moderators who may not be quite as zealous as some might want them to be.

I understand you. I think that people were a little too harsh on the OP. I skimmed over it as well as the site, and while some articles go too far even a stopped clock is right twice a day.  I won't go so far as to defend anything over on that site, or even defend this one article.  But I think the general topic, "cultural capitalism" does present one or two ideas at least worthy of discussion.

Number 1, with regard towhat the author called "cultural Marxism," it's indeed true that it was an attempt to apply Marxism to cultural Analysis. Classical Marxist thought is primarily economic, and concerns itself with developing the "dictatorship of the proletariat" to drive forth a revolution of the masses. What Horkheimer thought was different from the Soviet line in that he thought because the Western European countries were relatively prosperous, revolution couldn't come from the proletariat. Because of that they made cultural "superstructure", rather than economic "substructure" the focus of the Frankfurt school's work.

Number 2, In regards to "cultural Capitalism" I think what was really meant is the ideas like consumerism, consumption, commercialism and the like.  And it's also not really "wrong" to point out that third-world countries face a lot of problems because of capitalist-cultural-imperialism.  For instance you have entire indigenous peoples whose way of life have been threatened due to the encroaching of the industrial world into their traditional living spaces, then forcing them to come into cities where they don't have any real prospects.

In short I do think that cultural Capitalism is problematic, just not the same way that the author of that article thinks.

“The Myth of Normal”: Dr. Gabor Maté on Trauma, Illness and Healing in a Toxic Culture

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NERMEEN SHAIKH: Dr. Maté, could you elaborate on what you’ve been talking about now, namely the relationship between individual — the effects of an individual and social trauma? You said in a recent interview, quote, “Being left with an emptiness and insatiable craving creates addiction in the personal sense, and capitalism in the social sense.” And both these are taken to be coping mechanisms for the experience of trauma. If you could explain?

DR. GABOR MATÉ: Well, let me give you a more simple — I will answer to that question, but let me give you first a simpler example of social trauma and illness. So, it’s been well shown that the more experiences of racism a Black American woman has to endure, the greater her risk for asthma. In other words, the constriction of her airways and the inflammation of her airways are the physiological product of a social malaise. Now, who’s got the pathology here? Society or the individual? Can we even make a separation between the two? We know that if you look at the markers of aging, various biological markers of aging, they are much more advanced in Black people the same age as their Caucasian cohorts simply because of racism, because social stress and trauma translate into the physiology of the individual. You can’t separate the mind from the body. And you cannot separate the individual from the environment.

In Canada, where I live, an Indigenous woman — by the way, Indigenous people used to have no autoimmune disease whatsoever prior to colonization. Today, an Indigenous woman in Canada has six times the risk — six times the risk — of rheumatoid arthritis. And the same thing is true in the United States, by the way, that autoimmune disease strikes especially women, and especially women of color, in much higher rates. These reasons have nothing to do with genetics, and everything to do with social trauma.

Now, the emptiness that you refer to, in a society that tells you that you’re not enough, that you’re not good enough, that you don’t look good enough, that you don’t have enough, that you don’t own enough, that you haven’t attained enough, creating this sense of emptiness is the fuel that runs the consumer society, where never is there enough. You always have to have more and more. You have to attain more and more, obtain more and more. So, basically, it’s a highly addictive culture that feeds off people’s addiction to drive its profits.

And they do so quite deliberately. When it comes to the food industry, for example, you probably remember this book a few years ago, Salt Sugar and Fat, where the food companies very deliberately try to identify, using sophisticated neuroscience, the sweet spot, the bliss spot, that when you have the right combination of salt, sugar and fat in your junk food, that’s what gets people addicted. So that the digital companies employ what’s called neuromarketing. They try and find what’s the best way to excite the circuits in the brain of the customer that gets most addicted in order to get them hooked on their products.

What we’re looking at here is the mass engineering of addiction. And we’re not talking conspiracy theory. This is conspiracy reality. That’s how it works. But, of course, from the point of view of profit, it works, because people are going to buy junk foods, that are going to kill them or make them ill. But these companies don’t care. They just want — it’s not that they’re trying to kill you, as I say in one chapter of the book; they just don’t care if you die, because what really matters is profit. So, this society runs on people’s sense of deficient emptiness, where more and more is what they think is needed to fill that hole inside themselves....