On Sun, Apr 20, 2014 at 12:03 PM, Eubulides <[email protected]> wrote:
> On Apr 19, 2014, at 1:45 PM, raghu <[email protected]> wrote: > > When you are very wealthy, you are making claims on resources that you > cannot possibly use > yourself, which means you are making claims for the > sole purpose of denying other people the > use of valuable resources. That > seems to me the very essence of sociopathy. > > ======== > Well when one is very wealthy under capitalist rules of the game, one has > immense claims on the labor time of other human beings and the control of > that labor time is the result of a long history of the development and > transformations of the capacities of exercising coercion. When one is wealthy under ANY rules, one has immense claims on the lives of other people, and not just on their "labor time". If I am a wealthy guy, who buys up land in Africa, and push the native people off their land, I *may* choose to control the labor times of the displaced people. Or, even worse for the displaced people, I may choose not to control their labor time and simply push them into refugee camps and hope they will disappear. You have a singular focus on capitalist modes of wealth accumulation, and capitalist forms of exploitation, and that's fine. I'd go further and argue that wherever great inequalities of wealth exist, it must necessarily be accompanied by coercion, exploitation and control of the non-wealthy. This I believe is also the big claim of Piketty and his fans like Krugman. You may think that "exploitation", "coercion" etc are legitimate analytical concepts only within the framework of capitalism, but I disagree. I think these concepts can be usefully generalized. > Coercion and authority are *the big* problems in contemporary societies; > [...]. One need only think of the enslavement of the masses of labor in > Saudi Arabia in order to build the world’s tallest building to get a sense > of how useless a concept ‘sociopath’ is when trying to put a stop to such > suffering and the immense waste of time that such a project entails. > You really can't see how patronizing, arrogant and obnoxious this kind of attitude is? Our ideological frameworks lead us to some things that we may consider "the big problems". If other people arrive basically the same politics as us, but from different analytical frameworks, shouldn't we be looking for common ground? -raghu.
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