Tangent on another discussion by poledancer announcing return to stripping and JackSlash and others talking about minimum wages.
(systemic dysfunction leading to exploitative commercialization and desensitization Vs Moral and institutional dysfunction and eventual desensitization )
What is better for society? (Probably neither)
Simple one : Russian Institute or Brazzers ?
Hmmm... Nietzsche or St. Paul?
Well you need a mix and my belief is that the US is close to the ideal mix as it stands.
Pure capitalism would degenerate into Feudalism in a generation or two. Marx was right about that. Pure communism, and, unfortunately, I seem to be the only on the board who even knows the definition of it: dictatorship of the proletariat, would probably mean we were worse off than a mixed system, but at least it would be tolerable by most.
One of the problem is people want things they don't need and capitalism has done a good job making them desirable, then make the credit desirable and creating a lot of bullshit jobs in the process- most bullshit jobs pay minimum wage until they are lost to automation. The vicious cycle that feeds itself off the people slowly and a creates lot of economic activity to make people worse off.
We are still dealing with Don Draper's mistakes.
Me cago mis pantalones
I agree with cflock
"Nietzsche or St. Paul?"
Well, I definitely go along with Nietzsche. Of Paul of Tarsus, understood in context, there are limited amounts of worth in his writings. But our OP has opened a thread and a topic which has no end insight.
I do not consider it always wrong to stimulate desire, even desire for things which have no utilitarian value.
While not everyone is going to be able to have a Rolls Royce or a huge diamond ring, like Dougster uses to take money off of marks, there are lots of things in this world which really don't need to cost money, and they don't need to be in short supply.
Knowledge, Spirituality, and Sex, do not really need to cost money, or not much money. But rather, it is because of external things that we have set up, that they appear to need to cost money. And so people spend their entire lives, trying to accumulate money, believing that this will give them Knowledge, Spirituality, and Sex, and not understanding that for the most part, their pursuit of money is a hindrance, not a help.
Before going further, I am going introduce a couple of thinkers. First, Georges Bataille, and his "Accursed Share". Writing in the carnage and wreckage of two world wars, and seeing how these were caused by capitalism and its production excesses, he dubbed this excess the accursed share. Instead he envisions a gift economy, where everything is in surplus. And this was to include sex. It is everywhere, something like a free prostitution. He writes about this in detail. And also know that in his later years he was a very heavy user of Parisian brothels, so he is drawing on his own experiences.
And then two drawing upon Bataille, Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari. Coming out of the wake of May 1968, they rejected the Communist Party, as Foucault also did. Because students and workers had been acting together, they could have completely taken down the French State. But at the critical moment, the Communist Party switched sides and acted to prop up the state. As such, they saw that Marxism needed to be completely rethought. So the work of theirs I would first recommend is Anti-Oedipus.
They are using Nietzsche to critique Freud, and then also to create a dialectic far more radical than Marx and Engels, and way beyond anything the Bolsheviks could ever stomach. They show that psychoanalysis and psychotherapy are the products of capitalism, which these reinforce, as they back up the middle-class family.
Most of the intellectual radicalism of our times, along with most of the radical sex, are the products of capitalism. And so they want to take it all the way, promoting lines of flight and molecularity, and what has been called bachelor machines.
What it comes down to is simply sex for the sake of sex, sex for the purpose of emotional intensity.
With capitalism, sex has to be for some utilitarian purpose, like procreation, or maybe making money. D and G want to go all the way and make it sex simply to produce emotional intensity, sex as a deliberate expenditure of energy, time, and resources. It is not waste, it is deliberate expenditure. And so in line with Bataille, sex becomes religious sacrifice.
I would also recommend the works of Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, like Multitude and Common Wealth.
Now Dougster says that capitalism unchecked would produce Feudalism. Well, under feudalism there were still reciprocal obligations. Noblemen were required to look after the welfare of peasants and craftsmen. For capitalism to develop, feudalism had to be broken down. This usually is seen as happening with the enclosure movement, the fencing off of common lands, and with the development of Protestantism, accumulating money just to look good and to show divine favor.
Peasants were driven off of the land, usually requiring both starvation and gun point. They were forced into the cities where they would work for starvation wages, just in order to stay alive. Craftsmen were put of out business by factories. And this was also when welfare began, because they needed it to enforce laws against the kinds of disruptive behavior which panhandlers can engage in.
What we have today is not just capitalism, it is neo-liberal, or totalizing, capitalism. This goes beyond anything Mussolini or Hitler could have imagined. It has taken decades of changes in living patterns and thinking to bring us to this point. We are at a place where social darwinism and eugenics are re-emerging, often in the form of psychotherapy, psychiatric policing, and the recovery movement, and where the human race is poised to formally divide into two tiers. If only the problem were only going back to feudalism, as Dougster sees it. We are in the beginnings of a Science-Fiction dystopia.
Great Topic!
SJG
Aaron Copland - Fanfare For The Common Man, introduced by Leonard Bernstein youtube.com
Stones, Hand of Fate youtube.com
No system is perfect and can never be perfect since imperfect humans are involved.
All I can say is history shows that people throughout the world have historically wanted to come to America even if it can cost them their lives - history shows that communist regimes have to build walls not to keep outsiders out but to keep their people in and from leaving - people in communist regimes will risk their lives to leave and w.r.t. America people will risk their lives to get here.
Everybody has to believe in something. I believe I'll have another beer.
Just go ahead and trace the Chinese economy from when they decided to mostly free-up the economic system - they went from the bottom to the top in less than one generation
I'll join you, jack, it's been a hot day.
Así que ve a cambiarte los pantalones
Unfortunately in places like China you see capitalism at its worst, really a kleptocracy.
Deleuze and Guattari, what it comes down to is more like Social Democracy, as you see to one degree or another in much of Western Europe.
SJG
TLDR I don't think free-love was ever free, though the utopian stories about what it COULD be are certainly enticing. I just think it's "normal" for a human heterosexual female to want to lock a a "provider" male who is her beta-chump into some form of permanent mandatory relationship, although meanwhile she may also want to fuck (if she can get away with it) the alpha hunter who runs off to fuck other girls. Now, whether that "normal" is an acculturated, trained, learned behavior, or is just a biological imperative, is open for debate. Either way, however, nearly all the women I will ever interact with in my entire lifetime will have it as an assumption, so it presently doesn't do me much good to hope for it to change.
Consequently, given my "preference" for a type of female(s) and a type of service from said female(s), and given the females' "preference" for a different type of male(s) and a different type of relationship(s) with said male(s), it all adds up to, we don't actually have a "true" free market. Instead, we really can't believe that all commodities in this situation are truly liquid and truly fungible, and we can't really believe that all actors in this situation are truly rational (even if the "need" that is being fulfilled is somehow "irrational" in the colloquial sense -- need for sex, need for affirmation, f.e. -- nevertheless, it would be a better market analysis if we could call the actors "rational" in the economist's sense of the rational actor, the person who gets what he/she wants on the basis of balancing out loss versus gain in a sensible comparison), so we can't really analyze the market. Different participants want different things and have different capacities of giving up different things. It's only as much like Adam Smith's descriptions if we give the women Scotch Pebbles, the men Roubles, the Pebbles are paid for by means of Roubles exchanged to cowry shells, and the men disdain cowry shells and crush them to make pebbles, but not Scotch Pebbles, and subsequently the women raise the prices on the Pebbles until some men start buying them with British Pounds Sterling. See, it just doesn't make sense ...
So, given (see above) 1. sexual services (including lap-dance, and including performance of on-stage-stripper dance as loss-leader and/or advertising for lap-dance services) is not an analyze-able classical market, consequently ...
Only maybe. By reverse reasoning. I'm not really convinced by the argument, but it was a fun thought-experiment.
