Thursday, April 24, 2014

We Got Solutions!

"While the capitalist mode of production has done a great deal to accelerate the development of technology and increase the availability of consumer goods in the last few centuries, it has outlived its usefulness and has in fact become destructive. Inequality, unemployment, financial crises, and environmental devestation [sic] all point toward one inevitable conclusion: we must get rid of capitalism, once and for all. Hence we ask that the President work with Congressional leaders to develop a more just and sustainable economic system not based on the profit motive or the exploitation of waged labor."--petition, WhiteHouse.gov, April 22, 2014

Solution: slavery!

The problem of waged labor is instantly solved, and no one will be working to make a personal profit. Next.

In other news...

"IKEA to Roll Out Vegetarian Meatballs"--headline, Puffington Host, April 23

TOF is not sure exactly what IKEA rolled out, but he is pretty sure it is not a MEATball.



4 comments:

  1. The petitioners think politicians are better equipped to create a post-capitalist society than economists and anthropologists. I doubt they noticed that slavery is the simplest option that meets the terms they've set.
    Then again, politicians are in a better position to implement whatever changes they decide on (cf. ACA) than a bunch of, y'know, experts. Maybe the petitioners want an expedient change more than they want a positive one.

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  2. Not meatballs, but really! Who wants to eat "Vegetarian Balls"?

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  3. You could just call them 'vegeteballs'.

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  4. As you say, the only alternative to "exploitation of waged labor" is "exploitation of forced labor". At least if you're not all just going to forswear all technology later than the Neolithic.

    In any system whose economy does more than hunting-and-gathering or pure subsistence agriculture, you are never not going to have an elite. (And incidentally, "economy does more than brute subsistence" describes not only "advanced civilizations", but also most "tribal" cultures, e.g. in Polynesia, as well as many pastoralists. Think how old the caste system is, in India—well that wasn't the social stratification of a primarily urban culture for its first several thousand years. And we find the same stratification—warrior, priest, herdsman—throughout Europe, from Roman to Viking and Irishman to Kossack.) Since the "egalitarian" (because all equally hand-to-mouth) hunter-gatherer lifestyle is off the table, the only choices are whether the commoners that work for the elite are freely contracted into their labor, or coerced into it.

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