> Yes, the "Life is Beautiful" argument. (That Italian movie where a > clownish man acts out in order to convince his son that a concentration > camp is not a concentration camp. I couldn't force myself to see it, but > apparently that was the plot)...or perhaps "Schindler's List," where the > essential argument is "you can have benign capitalism (Schindler) or > psychotic capitalism...there is no alternative. Still, can this lead to > a vital society? History argues otherwise.
Yeah, I know the one, La Vita e Bella. I saw it once with this blonde I met, and I didn't even have a mustache, but I was very polite and friendly. I sent the video to my sister in Paris, along with another video, The Red Violin. Later I asked her, did you watch La Vita, and what did you think ? She said, well, I watched the first part, and I appreciated that, but I haven't really got time to watch more, gotta look after my son." I told her the end of the story, how the little boy gets rescued by the US Army and met his mother again, and that therefore, somehow, there was some sort of benign ending to this sad story. I have seen Schindler's List, in Wellington, New Zealand, but at a certain point I walked out, I had a gutsful of it, I felt sick. Schindler was basically talking about a reduction of casualties as far as I remember, and to do that, you had to make profits from forced labour and be a civilised capitalist in an impossible situation. Well, the bourgeois argument is that the Allied victory in world war 2 did produce a vital society, in the sense that the average real economic growth rate returned to around 4 percent annually, employment opportunities expanded, a new technological revolution was unleashed, and more people than ever prospered. Towards the end of the 1960s, economists were projecting that in the Affluent Society based on the Technostructure, economic growth based on the Mixed Economy was permanent, and French sociologists were saying that society had never been so stable (until May 1968 that is). Whereas towards the end of world war 2 and immediately afterwards, all the important economists were predicting gloom and doom for capitalism, possibly a catastrophic depression, and some (like Schumpeter) foresaw the supersession of capitalism by socialism. > > The "message" being disseminated in the U.S. is that all the > manufacturing jobs can go abroad because then Americans will simply be > the managers of world wealth and world labor, what it takes to enforce > that is a different story--whether it is through military means or > religious brainwashing. I mean it might work, but not for very long. > Perhaps, for once, I'm being an optimist. Yeah, we've had that argument in Holland as well, in the 1990s everybody wanted to be a manager (sort of like, "I don't want to be your monkey wrench"), and a lot of people started to call themselves managers of this or that. "Services" were renamed ""products" and if you had an organisation that didn't make a profit then you established "cost centres". Often, you could get more pay and status that way, because of course you could be responsible for a cost centre. But it didn't really work all that well, because then there still had to be somebody to manage, even if it was only housework management, and apart from that, people no longer actually took the manager label very seriously anymore, rather, they looked more at what somebody functionally actually did, i.e. what their real capacities and performance actually was. You could fool some people all of the time, fool all people some of the time, but you could not fool all people all of the time. We started to get into the problem of "how do we know that somebody actually knows something, or has a certain competency", and how do we know that an investment in particular employees would pay off, and from this epistemology you could make great profits as well. Well, anyway, after a while, the new "everybody is an individual, responsible manager" idea broke down to a large extent, and people became a bit more careful with their language again (although some enterprises still get quite arty about the labels). If the USA manages the world, then the assumption is that the USA can also pay the wages and salaries of the employees everywhere else, and hire and fire people everywhere else. A weighty responsibility I would say. Actually, I think quite possibly the growth industry in the USA in the future will be debt management, which involves important questions such as "how do you get people to pay debts" and "how do I shift the debt burden to someone else." Eric Toussaint has suggested some ways in which this might be accomplished; but there could be some other variations on the theme, I suppose. Toussaint suggests that in reality what happens is that in "hiring and firing", the firing means "either you pay up, or I shoot you", i.e. either your money, or your life. The objection made against that argument is, that if you pose the problem in terms of "your money or your life", then you are referring to a victim mentality. But it you abandon that victim mentality, then there might be more options, than "either your money or your life". And in that sense, there is a glimmer of hope for the world. As regards a certain politician in Washington, who shall remain nameless here, I was reminded of that person, thinking of an old song by the Boomtown Rats from the Fine Art of Surfacing Album (final track), which features a bit of Spanish guitar: When The Night Comes The offices are emptying their pale-faced wards into the street, Flickering their strip-light eyes, shivering they readjust their lives >From the air-conditioned heat. The humdrum and mundane Is nearly driving them insane. But you get hooked so quick to anything Even your chains, You're crouching in your corner 'til they open up your cage. Chorus: And when the night comes It'll help you disappear And when the night comes Forget about the day that brought you here. Frankie takes the train and makes it home in time to catch the evening news, Opening a can of beans he learns the world has turned without much help from him. Hey Frank, why not get drunk tonight? Hey Frank, I think it'll be alright, You'll be too far gone to notice when the neighbors start complaining, But they're used to it by now, every day's the same. And when the night comes, He might get on the phone, She's a stuck-up bitch, But she lives on her own, And he heard her talking dirty to the girls the other day, And she knew that he had heard her and she looked "as if to say" And then later up in marketing while going through the files, She bent a little too far down, then turned around and smiled. He got her number, He got the phone, He dialed the number, He heard the tone. He said "Tonight's the night that I've been waiting for, Oh I know you've seen me worship you from afar, And I might tell you that I love you and I will but just for Tonight, one night, alright tonight." In his three piece cunning camouflage nobody can guess what Frankie's thinking, Last night she said "I don't know if I'm drowning Maybey it's because I'm sinking." He said "It'll be okay I'll get outta here one day" And she said "Frankie, you're no different from any of the rest, They've nailed you to that table and chained you to your desk." But when the night comes.... Jurriaan
