I've been a bit curious to know what people here think of the whole fractional reserve banking critique? I've nearly finished Michael Rowbotham's Grip of Death. To me, not a trained economist, it seems like a credible critique. Why is the economy, national and global, groaning under a weight of ever increasing debt, which we're forced to work ever harder to pay off, despite our technological advances - with political effects of forced pacification, discipline by example of e.g. evictions from mortgaged homes, if you let up for one moment on that work? It pushes Rowbotham for one to some quite radical stances (absolute rejection of IMF-led globalisation etc), despite standard bourgeois liberal critique of a straw man ("it's not the rich's fault"), and the required denunciation of Marx. So I'm tempted see it as a useful aspect of critique of the way one part of the world economic system functions, which could easily sit within a Marxist or other systemic anti-capitalist critique - in the same way as say an ecological critique from a liberal perspective could also sit within that framework and have an instrumental value within it. However one rarely if ever hears any critique of such within Marxist or other radical left circles. Is it a non-issue, a misunderstanding?
I watched the first ten minutes of Zeitgeist, I should give it a longer go, but I found it pretty dire - ominous sounding discussion of some sort of religious conspiracy or something mixed with seemingly gratuitous footage of 9-11. Obviously I need to watch the whole thing before really saying but I thought it was dubious in the extreme.
Thanks a lot, from a nearly first-time poster, lurker for some months, I've enjoyed and learned from immensely the discussions here.
Thu, Dec 11, 2008 at 5:24 PM, Voyou <voyou1 at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Thu, 2008-12-11 at 08:07 -0800, Wojtek Sokolowski wrote:
> > http://www.zeitgeistmovie.com/
> >
> > I wonder what others think of this. I found much of it very appealing
> > albeit it does have some weird conspiracist strain.
>
> I've only seen the "addendum" film, which is largely idiotic (and
> borderline anti-semitic) anti-fractional-reserve-banking conspiracism. I
> see that the sources list for the main film
> ( http://www.zeitgeistmovie.com/sources.htm ) involves a number of
> crypto-fascist usual suspects like Alex Jones, Lyndon LaRouche, and
> David Icke, which isn't exactly promising.
>
> I would be interested, though, if anyone knows anything about the Venus
> Project, which is endorsed in the film, and appears, from its web site
> ( http://www.thevenusproject.com/ ), to be some kind of bizarre
> techno-utopian Proudhonism.
>
> --
> "The slightly richer ... eat in semi-darkness, preferring
> candles to electricity. These candles make me laugh. All the
> electricity belongs to the bourgeoisie, yet they eat by
> candle-end. They have an unconscious fear of their own
> electricity. They are embarrassed, like the sorcerer who has
> called up spirits he is unable to control."
> -- Vladimir Mayakovsky
> http://blog.voyou.org/ voyou at voyou.org
>
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