consumerism

well, the main problem with any anti-consumerist position is that capitalisim is the strongest economic system we have. Bottom line is that it works. Does it exploit people? Yes, but so does every other system ever produced. Is there an insane gap in wealth? Yes, but so did every other system ever in place. It would be nice if we could get everyone on the planet to agree to a socialist dream where everyone is equal and there is no poverty, but it aint gonna happen. The best thing we can hope for is to raise minimum wage and have living wages.

 

Because the one that dies with the most toys wins. Assuming that most people on this board have been exposed to soccer at some point in their life they know it is more fun to win than lose.

 

Perceived quality of life issues, keeping up with the Jones'. I bet that "bang your mom/penis envy" guy might have a comment on this point.

Alpha make crap. Human nature? Just plain nature not really exclusive to humans. I bet if you beat the crap out of everyone in your caveman tribe, you had the best cave in the neighborhood...and plenty of bitches!

Because they are relative terms. If this ain't rich, there is no rich.

Nobody likes to hear how fat they are.

They don't call it the human race for nothing. More dealings with words, let's take socialism. Yea, we have a few guys in prison for being exhibiting anti-social behavior. In nature you also see this activity.

 

right, and you can't change human nature so socialism is a pipe-dream.

 

Smoke that "ism"

This is so much bullshit. Both greed AND compassion must be TAUGHT, must be LEARNED. It is one of the great successes of the 20th Century power-controlling bodies that "conservatives" got us to believe that greed was human nature, and that "liberals" got us to believe similarly regarding compassion (each group to further their own power-consolidating games). IMHO it is in the nature of humans only to BECOME. Thus, human nature, as it manifests in the "Deed" portion of thought, word and deed, is, and always was, what we decide it is, everyday. When we decide to ignore this ************************ about human "nature"; when we decide we want to make sure that noone is homelss, hungry, or indeed "left behind" by an education system that, in the "greatest country in the world" MUST be looked at as an abject failure; when we, for that matter, find it disgusting that we spend, officially, around $400 billion ANNUALLY on the military, but allow argument about the total $10 billion that NASA needs to implement the entire next generation of orbiters; when we come to understand that only the maximization of individual potential within a communal maxmization benefits each one and everyone; only then will human "nature" reveal its actual attribute; that unique thing about our "race" that allows us to enact our own evolution. No "ism," particularly not consumerism, can stand in the face of human evolution.

Of course, if, for religious, political, ideological or other reasons you prefer to decide that man today = man yesterday = man tomorrow = Man In End-State, then the institutions we have today are not reflective of one step in many we might take, but rather are the pinnacle of what mankind can be. Now, while Bush, Falwell, and the crowd that have something to gain by propagating that theory might tell you that, use your own common sense.

None of these "isms" will matter in the long run, ecept in the scenario where that long run is cut short by a nuclear-level commitment to the idea that humanity cannot be allowed to evolve. Indeed, I already can see the U.S., China, and many other nuclear nations in this age doing everything and anything they can to stay relevant in the face of obvious global change, and I do think that, push come to shove, they will not necessarily go quietly into that good night, but rather they will go out with a nuclear "bang," a kind of "It's my Party and I'll Blow it Up if want to" endgame mentality; for while they propagate the Internet to sell us DVD's and shitty investments - a tool of consumerism and capitalism, for sure - many use it for quite different reasons, none of which have to do with any "isms"...

 

Re: Smoke that "ism"

yeah it's called free porn. that's not an ism yet right???? just kidding

 

Consumerism leads to poverty? Where did you come up with that? I suppose if we all lived as ascetics, living as farmers and making our own clothes that we would be much better off?

I'm still unconvinced that it constitutes a problem.

Because being poor isn't any fun. Just ask the next immigrant from a third world country why they came here. Or ask people from Eastern Europe if they enjoyed life better when everyone was more or less equally miserable and deprived of consumer goods.

A better question should be, why isn't it? I think that being allowed to better one's condition is a fundamental human right.

Again, because it is much better than being poor. People enjoy living in comfort rather than squalor. I don't understand why this is puzzling.

Since when is it taboo? I think that most people choose not to participate in such a discussion because they find it absolutely asinine, with the benefits of consumption rather self-evident. I would wager that the type of people who sit around and ponder the evils of consumption are usually those who have never really lacked for anything.

If history is any guide, no. The more likely outcome would be a police state and widespread political oppression.

 

Capitalism and the pursuit of wealth spurs great inventions & innovations. Socialism breeds complacency & massive govt. control and invtervention. Guess which one is still going strong despite the greed and wealth disparities and which one has been tossed on history's scrap heap?

 

This is rather simplistic and exposes your ignorance of the past so-called "socialist" regimes. Agrarian economies with entrenched oligarchies do not a Socialist nation make.

By the way, the last time such a wealth gap existed in the United States was 1929. Great year for capitalism huh?

I don't believe in violent revolution. A pseudo-Fordist compromise will most likely alleviate the current "crisis" (to use a Marxist construct) in which our capitalist system now finds itself.

 

I can only speak for myself but one of my goals in gaining wealth is to provide the best life possible for my family.

I would MUCH rather be the person who decides what is right and best for my family than having some group decide it for me.

I don't know if it is a human right but the act of bettering the life for ones family has been around since the dawn of time and will never go away.

America continues to be a melting pot because so many people come here to seek what they could not attain in their own countries.

Apples and oranges.

Life is not a zero sum gain.

Life does not have parity like the NFL.

If it did, god (or whom ever you believe creates us), would never have given such vast differences in brain and physical powers.

No, because at the very heart of socialism lies people who believe they know what it best for the masses and that can never ever be true.

Andy

 

It can just as easily be argued that "socialism," or a civilization-outlook that must for the purposes of this discussion be reduced to "socialism," allows for the establishment by the people of systems that reflect "the better angels" of our so-called nature, securing them institutionally, and not allowing for the oscillation in the value of human life that other systems manifest (e.g., our current extreme "capitalist" one: equating, or allowing for the equivalence of, corporate entities and human beings)...

 

The "Man-in-EndState" argument (that I introduced as such above) in action, btw.

 

I believe man continues to evolve and improve so I have no idea where you came up with this half cocked theory based on one statement about individuals having different physical and mental strengths.

Once again, you make the point that socialism is doomed from the get go because your "theory" of evolution and improvement is most likely different from mine or my neighbors. And there is nothing that can ever conclude which theory is correct.

Andy

 

The biggest problem with historical socialism is the attitude that you don't need a better system, you need better people. In the absence of better people, you need mechanisms to force people to become better.

This invariably leads to a dictatorship indistinguishable from fascism except in government rhetoric.

Is rampant consumerism a problem? You bet. But until you can persuade people to act against their own interests in the name of a greater good, you're stuck with it.

Colin, here's why consumerism/capitalism is a problem--we now have a President who seems intent on spending our great-grandchildren into the poorhouse. That's what institutionalized deficits do. They spend future money. Reagan spent our money. Bush I spent our children's money. Clinton, despite presiding over years of surpluses, spent our grandchildren's money by failing to substantively address reducing the debt or fixing social security. Bush II has now endeavored to put America irredeemably in the red, before taking us into war in Iraq.

What drove and drives all of this? The urge to consume. Spending keeps going up exponentially. The only way to regain control of our grandchildren's destiny is to raise taxes, reduce spending dramatically, and forego our foreign ambitions. That'll never happen, because self-sacrifice is not a virtue ingrained in our culture. Consumption is.

 

Provide examples of socialism working. China is not a socialist country. Cuba's economy is a basket case although they're well educated. Socialism is unnatural. Market economies have existed for centuries while forced socialism is a wrong-headed concept and an utter failure in practice.

 

Does that include your great-great-great-grandkids who will inherit a polluted and overcrowded world, national insolvency and a whole host of other problems because of your (and everyone else's) drive for maximum short-term monetary gain?

The trouble is that at some point you have to start thinking beyond your own selfish interests. I'm sure Ted Bundy would have loved to have been left free to continue making his own decisions but as his decisions had negative consequences for the rest of society, "the group" decided to take action against him.

At the same time, decisions must be made not only taking into consideration the needs of others alive at the same time as yourself but also must be made while balancing the interests of the generations that come after us. And this is exactly what the vast majority of people do not do. Since we Americans "consume" so much more than most other people and as the global imperial center we generally set the world agenda, it will have to start with us.

The same was true of Britain, Rome and probably Sumer and every other imperial center. Life is always best in the imperial center than in the occupied territories and colonies.

They come here partly because we've done a lot to make things so unbearably shitty in their own countries.

Ah, amoral Social "Darwinism" virtually undiluted. We're all just apes so who cares. Why do we bother with laws and morals and crap that make artificial "parity" when we should all revert to savagery and the law of the jungle? Let the strong rule and the weak starve!

You don't know too much about socialism. Hint: The USSR, China and Cuba were Stalinist and not socialist.

The idea of socialism is to push as much decision making as far down to the individual as possible and place it in the economic as well as political realm. Hence the socialist fondness for workers councils and the extremely "strong" forms of political democracy. Stalin destroyed socialism in Russia and put a top-down totalitarian state capitalist system in its place. That system learned to twist the words of Marx and other socialist theorists to its service and usurp the label of "socialist" and this was imitated by Mao, Castro, et. al. If you read the history of the Russian Revolution and the radical democracy and workers' councils of early Soviet Union, however, you realize that things could easily have been much different.

That said, I agree we will never have a "utopia". We will always have to be vigilant against those who would try to deny us our freedom. This does not excuse us, however, from trying to do better than we are doing now and making wiser decisions about how we use the world's finite resources now.

 

I'm mystified as to how you could in any way describe the Soviet economy as "capitalist." Top-down, yes. Totalitarian, yes. But capitalist?

There's no way the Soviet Union could have gone down any other path. The masses were terribly uneducated and incapable of self-rule. Sure, you had some isolated cells of people from the educated middle and upper classes that had short-term success with a Marxist model, but Russia's destiny lay in tyranny.

 

Please take a moment to comprehend my reply. There never was a socialist system. See Joe's last paragraph above.

Further, I'd suggest reading Johann Arnason's The Future That Failed. Some observers go so far as to claim these totalitarian states as "state-capitalist"!

Nice try with the broadstroke though.

 

Provide me an example of a genuine attempt at socialism that didn't immediately come under military and economic attack by the rest of the world, mostly led by the USA.

The Communards in Paris were quickly and savagely crushed by the French Army in a slaughter of men, women and children so atrocity-filled that it horrified even Europe's ruling classes.

The USA, Britain and France all sent troops and supplies the White Army to attack the Soviet Union almost immediately after it was created and tried to isolate the revolutionaries economically. Stalin merely completed their work by becoming, for all practical purposes, a fascist who learned to quote Marx instead of Mussolini and Wagner.

American and European business elites funded fascism in Germany and financed the rise of Hitler to stave off socialist revolution there, thinking that Hitler could be controlled. Oops.

Mao was a Stalinist and a nutcase. Except for the brief and disasterous "Great Leap Forward" which had no precedent in socialist theory, China was always the ancient Chinese Empire first no matter who ran it or what they claimed was their guiding principal. Mao and his successors have simply been "Red Emperors", quoting Marx while imitating the imperial houses of old. Their little buddy North Korea is the same.

Cuba endured an illegal 50 year blockade, not to mention military invasion (however inept), at the hands of the USA. Who knows what they could have done if it hadn't been for that. Castro didn't even like the Soviet Union. It was the USA's blockade that forced him to develop economic ties with them in order to survive.

We all know the environmental and material damage wreaked by the USA on VietNam and surrounding areas during the VietNam War.

President Reagan committed treason by secretly selling weapons to a known enemy of the USA so he could fund terrorists against the Sandanistas in Nicaragua after they kicked out our mass-murdering thug Samoza. Then Reagan lied to Congress and the American people about it. To their credit, the Sandinistas transferred power peacefully after the people of Nicaragua got tired of the USA's terrorists and the USA's economic warfare against them making their lives hell.

 

Because they were entities that competed against each other employing the use of capital, the top-down bureacratic business model and market mechanisms. For example, if the Soviet Union was truly a monolith, why did they need not one, not two but THREE different, self-contained aviation design bureaus that competed with each other for military contracts and made profits from these contracts? The only difference was that instead of being owned by individuals directly, they were owned by the State which kept the profits made by these enterprises. The same is true for most of the rest of the soviet economy. Which is why the Soviet Union developed a privileged class of wealthy apparatchiks. Their wealth came from control of the profits made by the State off the backs of the State's workers.

For a withering socialist critique of the Stalinist state capitalist system, please read Raya Dunayevskaya's "Marxism and Freedom".

I disagree and so do many historians. In fact, Russia's peasants had more experience with self-rule than most western Europeans and Americans.
I mean, most Americans in the late 1700s and most of the 1800s weren't any more educated than Russia's peasants.

The Soviet Union's "destiny" was much more a function of the effects of the Civil War (theirs, not ours) and the political struggle between Stalin and Trotsky than of the supposed unsuitability of its population for self-rule.

 

I've been reading this thread since it was started in the hopes of finding exactly what it's about. Is it here to point out the horrors of Capitolism? Is it to guilt us into turning our money over to those less fortunate? Is it to convince us that being higher on the social and economic ladder is the worst thing one can strive for in life?

I really don't understand what it's exactly supposed to do.

 

1-3. Men are into wealth because wealth is power, and power attracts women, and women have sex with men they're attracted to, and men like that because biology has made the act of passing on our genetic material very very pleasurable. (I'm about 90% serious about this. Don't underestimate the natural desire to procreate when trying to explain a multitude of human behaviors.)

4. You don't see stories of anti-consumerism on TV because it's not in the networks' best interests to show it, and because TV viewers generally like being consumers.

5. Socialism is probably not the answer. As Colin said, socialism in the pure sense generally fails because regardless of how well-meaning people are at the start, all it takes is one dickhead to say "I'm leader" and ruin everything.

What's wrong with representative democracy, anyway? If you want to get people to consume less and be less concerned about wealth creation, create a platform and convince them that your ideas are the best. But since elections require lots of wealthy people with lots of money to fund it, most of whom you'd likely despise, the best you can likely do is live your life in the way that best reflects your values and provide an example for others.

 

Cry me a frickin river, please.

You are going on the theory that everything goes to hell and that is not a theory I subscribe to.

The LAST thing I would want a decendant to have to deal with is some ego-maniac who dares to believe he has god like power and knows what is best for everyone.

The trouble is, sometimes you have to see past your own arrogance and ego mania. No one person or small group of people will EVER be able to decide what is best for the masses.

I understand that you think you are god like and that anyone who dares to think differently than you is selfish, but I would have to say you have gone off the deep end here.

Hint: It is the height of STUPIDITY to compare people who feel they know what is best for their families to Ted Bundy.

But then again if you want to play that foolish game, that makes you Hitler. Do even comprehend how stupid you sound?

I agree with this.

Balance is good.

Comparing people to Ted bundy is bad.

I won't even touch the arrogance of this one.

Hint: Before making yourself look more arrogant (yes, I understand that may be mathematically impossible), you should actually post a quote where I listed those countries as Socialist.

Andy