A Commonplace Book

Music should be the realm of pure play, but capitalism has corrupted it into another fucking chore, and made us all a bunch of whores.

The reason capitalism is theft has to do with "surplus value" -- the difference between the selling price and the cost of equipment, materials, marketing and labor. All down the line, "profit" is really the result of unpaid labor that creates additional goods without commensurate additional cost. The capitalist claims the profit by virtue of his capital alone, which in most cases is the result of economic, racial and social inheritance, not hard work.

Capitalism is the astounding belief that the most wickedest of men will do the most wickedest of things for the greatest good of everyone

Anarchists are opposed to violence... The main plank of anarchism is the removal of violence from human relations. It is life based on the freedom of the individual, without the intervention of the police. For this reason we are enemies of capitalism, which depends on the protection of the police to force workers to allow themsleves to be exploited...We are therefore enemies of the State, which is the coercive, violent organization of society.

More noted as an economist, John Kenneth Galbraith is also a prophet. In 1996, Galbraith told my college class that once leadership passed to those who had not lived through the Depression, the safeguards installed in its wake would be dismantled. Scandal, crisis, and economic collapses were sure to follow. "Democratic capitalism," Galbraith said, "has institutional flaws but only personal memories."

Keep in mind, democracy and capitalism are two different things. Democracy is not an economic system. It's a political system. The conservatives actively promote the idea that democracy and capitalism are the same thing, or that capitalism is a political system. Whenever capitalism is used as a political system, it is a tyranny. It's rule by the rich. And that's why it's important to balance capitalism with democracy, which is what Roosevelt did.

"The question to me is not do you foreclose or do you not foreclose. The question is when and with what philosophy you foreclose," the man on the bank restructuring team said. "If you want to reduce the amount of leveraged homeowners you have, you need to ultimately kick them out of their homes." A colleague walked up: His recommendation was to burn houses. "It would lower the supply."

That's from a new article about Wall Street in the New York Observer, the newspaper for Manhattan's richest people....

Millions of people are getting kicked out of their homes who need a place to live, millions of homes are sitting empty and their value decaying along with their neighborhoods, and all this banker can say -- with a straight face, I presume -- is to burn down the houses? Isn't that insane?

It is -- because capitalism is insane. It doesn't matter that we have a giant oversupply of something, and a giant number of people who desperately need that specific thing. The only thing that matters is: can this something be sold at a profit? If not, the obvious solution is to reduce supply by setting it on fire.

Most of the students I encountered had already embraced the perspectives of the rich, the powerful and the unalienated, and they seemed to have done so with appalling ease. In keeping with the tradition of the American rich they worked exceptionally long hours, they were aggressive in exercising their talents, and on the ideological features of market capitalism they were unanimous. Their written work disclosed the core components of the consensus upheld by their liberal parents: the meaning of liberty lies in the personal choice of consumers; free competition in goods and morals regulates value; technological progress is an unmixed good; war is unfortunate.

Just as climate change is the natural byproduct of fossil capitalism, so is fake news the byproduct of digital capitalism.

Google is the mothership and ideal type of a new economic logic based on fortune telling and selling, an ancient and eternally lucrative craft that has exploited the human confrontation with uncertainty from the beginning of the human story.

Paradoxically, the certainty of uncertainty is both an enduring source of anxiety and one of our most fruitful facts. It produced the universal need for social trust and cohesion, systems of social organization, familial bonding, and legitimate authority, the contract as formal recognition of reciprocal rights and obligations, and the theory and practice of what we call "free will." When we eliminate uncertainty, we forfeit the human replenishment that attaches to the challenge of asserting predictability in the face of an always-unknown future in favor of the blankness of perpetual compliance with someone else's plan.

Consistent in its denial of human reality, growth capitalism thinks only in the present tense, ignores the past, and limits its future to the current quarter.

By boldly identifying themselves with the cause of working-class self-emancipation, the surrealists demonstrated their utter scorn for capitalism's cultural elitism.

They also avoided the trap of "mysticism," another means by which poets are converted into innocuous comforters of the existing order. Surrealism's atheistic and materialist conception of poetry vigorously rejects the consolations of organized religion--that "impoverished magic," as Joyce Mansour called it--whose ideologies it regards as inherently authoritarian and imagination-stifling.

[University of Maryland researchers examining Facebook use discovered that] a person's disclosure of specific personal information such as religion or political affiliation contributes less to a robust personality analysis than the fact that the individual is willing to share such information in the first place.

[Wormold:] I wouldn't kill for my country. I wouldn't kill for capitalism or Communism or social democracy or the welfare state -- whose welfare?... If I love or if I hate, let me love or hate as an individual. I will not be 59200/5 in anyone's global war....

[Beatrice:] "I don't care a damn about men who are loyal to the people who pay them, to organizations.... I don't think even my country means all that much. There are many countries in our blood, aren't there, but only one person. Would the world be in the mess it is if we were loyal to love and not to countries?"

While the Internet was meant to allow you to reach out to any- and everyone without a hint of the cruel discriminations that blight our world, it turned into the opposite, a forum where individuals are less speaking to other people than preening and listening to themselves -- turning themselves into desirable objects to be coveted by all. It became, that is, the perfect embodiment of consumer capitalism, where everything can be touted in the marketplace.

Surveillance capitalists are fast because they seek neither genuine consent nor consensus. They rely on psychic numbing and messages of inevitability to conjure the helplessness, resignation and confusion that paralyze their prey.