andie nachgeborenen wrote:
>>>I don't know hoe much productivity growth is due to
>>>R&D and investment in new plant and equipment, as well
>>>as building up necessary cash reserves and acquiring
>>>long term assets liquid and other, but isn't that the
>>>modern equivalent of "abstinence," where dividents and
>>>executive jets are indulgence?
>>>
Abstinence, my ass. It's just the way the fucking model works.
Capitalism requires capital; capital may be accumulated by "abstinence"
or by theft. Point being, if you never get any more money than that
required to feed yourself (the position of most workers in the world),
how the fuck are you going to abstain without dying?
Defoe's "Robinson Crusoe" is the founding myth of capitalism: self-made autonomous individual marooned on a desert island reinvents himself with the aid of the friend-slave Friday. Since he saves Friday's life from cannibals...that's OK. More moral merit. After he cobbles together a subsistence existence on the island, he is rescued and returns to the world to find that his slave plantations somehwere or other have made him a rich man. But that's OK cause he suffered so much on the island and PROVED he could have done it all by himself....so he can now enjoy his riches since they were morally earned.
No one should talk about capitalism/imperalism without having read Crusoe. It's the dream in the machine all right. And Defoe is the bees knees in the 18th century.
Also, for a good laugh, check out Monty Python's skit on capitalists on a talk show having a pissing contest about who suffered the most. It's a treat.
Joanna
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