Overview: Capitalism has been a totalizing---I am tempted to write “totalitarian”—system, in a way in which no previous mode of production had been, compelling the whole world to dance to its frenzied rhythms of competition and accumulation. As it has done so, the system as a whole has continually reacted back upon the individual processes on which

it depends. It forces each capital to force down the price of labour power to the minimum that will keep its workers able and willing to work. The clash for capitals compels each to accumulate in a way that will

produce downward pressure on profit rates for all of them. It stops any of them standing still, even if they occasionally become aware of the devastation they are causing . It is a system that creates periodic havoc for all those who live within it, a horrific hybrid of Frankenstein’s monster and of Dracula, a human creation that has escaped control and lives by devouring the lifeblood of its creators.

Link: Economic growth and reformThe status quo of economics bases itself in a state of equilibrium, presumingthat the capitalist world is perfect and dandy and that crisis will never occur. Modern neoclassical economics seek to mask its imperfections by attempting to reform the system, only serving as a “veneer” over the horrors that lie underneath.

1 Chris Harman 2009 Zombie Capitalism, pg. 9

“The mainstream economics that is taught in schools and universities has proved completely unable to come to terms with [economic crises]. The bank of International Settlements recognizes that “Virtually no one foresaw the Great Depression…each downturn was preceded by a period of non-inflationary growth exuberant enough to lead many commentators to suggest that a “new era” had arrived” Nothing sums up the incomprehension of those who defend capitalism as much as their inability to explain the most significant episode in the 20th century—the slump of the 1930s. Ben Bernanke, the present head of the Federal Reserve and supposedly one of mainstream economics’ most respected experts on economic crises, admits that “understanding the Great Depression is the Holy Grail of macroeconomics” inother words he can find no explanation for it…These are not accidental failings. They are built into the very assumptions of the “neoclassical” or “marginalist” school thathas dominated mainstream economics for a century and a quarter. Its founders set themselves the task of showing how markets “clear”—that is, how all the goods in them will find buyers. But that assumes in advance that crises are not possible. The implausibility of the neoclassical model in the face of some of the most obvious featuresof capitalism has led to recurrent attempts within the mainstream to bolt extra elements onto it in an ad hoc way. None of these additions, however, alter the basic belief that the system will return to equilibrium---providing prices, and especially wages, adjust to market pressures without hindrance. Even Keynes, who went further than anyone else in the mainstream in questioning the equilibrium model, still assumed it could be made to work with a degree of government intervention. …Yet what is involved is not just abstract academic scholasticism. The orthodoxy is an ideological product in the sense that it operates from the standpoint of those who profit from the market system. It presents their profiteering as the supreme way of contributing to the common good, while absolving them of anything that goes wrong. And it rulesout any fundamental critique of the present system, in a way that suits those with

commanding positions in educational structures, connected as they are to all other structures of capitalism.Status quo: Minors were not considered legally capable of making medical decisions and were viewed as incompetent because of their age. The authority to consent or refuse treatment for a minor remained with a parent or guardian. This parental authority was derived from the constitutional right to privacy regarding family matters, common law rule, and a general presumption that parents or guardians will act in the best interest of their incompetent child. ­ See more at: http://www.nursingcenter.com/lnc/cearticle?tid=739795#sthash.XTftLSyG.dpuf

Link: Medicine

Capitalism has turned patients themselves into commodities for sale by their physicians – offering a source of profit not just through drugs but through expensive hi­tech testing and ‘treatment’ technologies.  All this at massive expense to national health services and/or to the profit of private health providers milking health insurance companies.

The truth is that illness is essentially big business, that Big Pharma is Big Bucks and Bad Medicine, and that today’s ‘evidence­based’ medicine is essentially Money­Driven Medicine.  Indeed any drug ornew medical technology that actually ‘cured’ a disease would be fatal for the profits of the entire Medical­Industrial Comple   x. Nevertheless the promise of cure is constantly promoted by this multi­trillion dollar medical industry – one with vast lobbying power and almost complete monetary control of regulatory organisations such as the Food and Drug Administration in the U.S.A.

Link:

Any discussion of teenagers and capitalism needs to begin with these two major themes – individualism and personal rights. Today’s teenagers express this by their very existence. They are self­focused. This is a normal developmental stage. It is also a normal stage in the lifecycle where personal consumption now trumps investment and deferred consumption.4 In addition to the normal development, we now teach children from birth that they are important, so important in fact that each one has been nurtured and celebrated, not as they connect with their families, their community or larger society but for who they are individually. There are of course exceptions to every rule, but withemerging adulthood now commonly accepted as a developmental stage, the communal scene has shifted.5

Individual rights are a precursor to private ownership. Initially, property was owned by individuals or individual families. This established wealth, status and power.6 Today wealth, status and power are still being displayed. Teenagers may not own a house but they certainly spend money to establish their image through ownership of goods. What you own establishes your status regardless of how much debt you accumulate to create your image. Status carries with it an implication of wealth, whether it is true or not.

The legacy of capitalism passed to adolescents today is a sense of entitlement and a preoccupation with image. I would say for anyone, but for teenagers in particular, capitalism is more about a lifestyle than economics. This plays out every day in millions of choices made by a group of people wielding over $155 billion in disposable discretionary spending each year since 2000 with no slowing in sight.7 In fact regardless of overall economic trends, teen spending (ages 12­19) has continued to grow by 5% for the past 7 years. By 2006 the estimation is for adolescent spending to top $190 billion.8

Victim or savvy participant? Manipulated or setting the trends? Teenagers are anything but ignored in this capitalistic society. They are the focus of attention with billions of dollars and thousands of adults attempting to capture their next move. They are literally telling the marketing industry what they want, what they demand. James Twitchell, a professor of English and advertising says it this way, “We were not suddenly transformed from customers to consumers by wily manufacturers eager to unload a surplus of crapular products. We may be many things but what we are not are victims of capitalism.”18 He sees capitalism and consumption as a liberating role. He refuses to see consumers as passive and helpless actually wanting to give credit back to people for demanding not only better products but better informationsurrounding those products.19 Teenagers are fickle. Many products and businesses burn bright and are gone in six months. Songs that every teenager seems to know are forgotten and never considered again as soon as the next big hit comes along. Private industry and marketers look to teenagers and if a teenager says jump, they ask how high? Buzz marketing may help but it will never equal that of the teenage preference.

Giving teenagers autonomous medical decision making power effectively opens up an entirely new industry to perpetuate capitalism with; A new audience to help corrupt under the capitalist regime.

Impact: Commodity fetishism andexploitation

Harman 4Social labour….Value…only comes to light as a result of the continual blind, blind, interaction of commodities on the market. The system as a whole forces its individual components to worry about how the individual labour they employ relates to labour elsewhere. [This is] the process known as the operation of “the law of value”. Once commodity production is generalized across a society, one particular good comes to be used to resent the value of all others---money…The development of commodity production had one important effect. It systematically distort[s] people’s understanding of reality through what Marx called the “fetishism of commodities”

Harman 5The…relation of the producers to the sum total of their own labour is presented to them as social relations, existing not between themselves, but between the products of their labour…A definite social relation between men assumes, in their eyes, the fantastic form of a relation between things. In order to find an analogy, we must have recourse to the mist enveloped regions of the religious world. In that world the productions of the human brain appear as independent beings endowed with life, and entering into relation both with one another and the human race. So it is in the world of commodities with the products of men’s hands. People speak of “the power of money, as if its power didn’t come from human labour for which it is a token; or of the “needs of the market” as if the market was anything more than an arrangement for linking together the concrete acts of labour of different human beings. Such mystical attitudes lead people to ascribe social ills to things beyond human control—the process which the young Marx had called “alienation” and which some Marxists since Marx have called “reification”. But withoutseeing through the fetishism, the conscious action to transform society cannot take place.

The worker can leave the individual capitalist to whom he hires himself whenever helies…But the worker, whose sole source of livelihood is the sale of his labour, cannot leave the whole class of purchasers, that is the capitalist class, without renouncing his existence. He belongs not to this or that bourgeois, but to the bourgeois class….

The [commodity fetishism] now takes the form of making it seem that creativity doesn’t lie with living human beings, but the products of their labour, so that people talk of capital creating wealth and employer “providing people with work”, whereas in

reality it is labour that adds to the value of capital and the worker who provides labour to the employer.

Compulsive accumulation

7 Chris Harman 2009 Zombie Capitalism pg. 36However successful a firm may have been in the past, it lives in fear of a rival firm investing profits in newer and more modern plant and machinery. No capitalist darestand still for any length of time, for that would mean falling behind the competitors. And to fall behind is to eventually to go bust. It is this which explains the dynamism of capitalism. The pressure on each capitalist to keep ahead of every other leads to the continual upgrading of plant and machinery.So it is that capitalism becomes not merely a system of exploiting “free” wage workers, but also a system of compulsive accumulation. Capital is not then defined just by exploitation, but by its necessary drive to self-expansion. The motivation for production and exchange is increasing the amount of value in the hands of the capitalist firm—a process for which some Marxist writers use the neologism “valorization”. So the system is not just a system of commodity productive, it is also a system of competitive accumulation. This creates limits to the action possible not only for worker, but also for capitalists. For if they do not continually seek to exploit their workers as much as is practically possible, they will not dispose of the surplus value necessary to accumulate as quickly as their rivals. They can choose to exploit their workers in one way rather than another. But they cannot choose not to exploit their workers at all, or even to exploit them less than other capitalists do--- unless they want to bust. They themselves are subject to a system which pursues its relentless course whatever the feelings of individual humanbeings.

Impact: Crisis

The possibility of general crises of overproduction was built into the very nature of capitalism. He destroyed the arguments based upon Say’s law in a couple of paragraphs in the first volume of Capital. Of course, he acknowledged, every time someone sells an article someone else buys it. But, argued Marx, once money is used to exchange goodsthrough the market, it does not follow that the seller has then immediately to buy

something else. Money acts not only as a measure of value in directly exchanging goods, but also as a means of storing value. If someone chooses to save they money the from selling a good rather than spending it immediately, then there will not be enough money being spent in the system as a whole to buy all the goods that have been produced:

“Nothing can be more childish than the dogma that because every sale is a purchase and every purchase a sale, therefore the circulation of commodities necessary implies equilibirum of sales and purchases. If this means that the number of actual sales is equal to the number of purchases, it is mere tautology. But its real purport is to prove that every seller brings his buyer to market with him. Nothing ofthe kind. The sale and the purchase constitute…an exchange between a commodity-owner and an owner of money, between two persons as opposed to each other as the two poles of a magnet…

No one can sell unless some one else purchases. But no one is forthwith bound to purchase, because he has just sold. Circulation bursts through all restrictions as to time place, and individuals, imposed by direct barter, and this it effects by splitting up, into the antithesis of a sale and a purchase, the direct identity that in barter doesexist between the alienation of one’s own and the acquisition of some other man’s product. If the interval in time between the two complementary phases of the complete metamorphosis beof a commodity become too great, if the split between the sale and the purchase become too pronounced, the intimate connexion between them, their oneness, asserts itself by producing—a crisis.

Impact: Imperialism and War

Chris Harman Zombie Capitalsm 2009 pg. 90

“Hilferding did not see competition as disappearing completely. He emphasized the importance of international competition, pointing to the way the

merger of finance and industry inside a country led to pressure on its state to use protectionist tax duties to aid its capitalists in their struggle against rivals in the world market. “It is not free trade England, but the protectionist countries, Germany andthe United States, which become the models of capitalist development”, wrote Hilferding.Far from continuing with the traditional liberal notion of a minimal “night-watchman state” the great trusts wanted it to have the power to widen its boundaries so as to enlarge the market in which they could gain monopoly profits: “While free trade was indifferent to colonies, protectionism leads directly to a more active colonial policy, and to conflicts of interests between different states”, Hilferding argued. “The policy of finance capital is bound to lead towards war”.

Open up the space of a revolutionary subjectivity. Embrace the revolution in favor of socialism.Zizek Professor of Philosophy 2004 [Slavoj, Revolution at the Gates, Zizek onLenin – The 1917 Writings, p.259-260]

As Deleuze saw very clearly, we cannot provide in advance an unambiguous criterion which will allow us to distinguish "false"violent outburst from the "miracle" of the authentic revolutionary breakthrough. The ambiguity is irreducible here, since the "miracle" can occur only through the repetition of previous failures. And this is also why violence is a necessary ingredient of a revolutionary political act. That is to say: what is the criterion of a political act proper? Success as such clearly does not count, even if we define it in the dialectical terms of Merleau-Ponty: as the wager that the future will retroactively redeem our present horrible acts (this is how Merleau-Ponty, in Humanism and Terror, provided one of the more intelligent justifications of the Stalinist terror: retroactively, it will become justifiedif its final outcome is true freedom);129 neither does reference to some abstract-universal ethical norm. The only criterion is the absolutely inherent one: that of the enacted utopia. In a genuine revolutionary breakthrough, the utopian future is neither simply fully realized, present, nor simply evoked as a distant rpromise which justifies present violence – it is rather as if in a unique suspension of temporality, in the short circuit between the present and the future, we are – as if by Grace – briefly allowed to act as if the utopian future is (not yet fully here, but) already at hand, there to be seized. Revolution is experienced not as a present hardship we have to endure for the sake of the happiness and freedom of future generations, but as the present hardship over which this future happiness and freedom already cast their shadow – in it, we are already free

even as we fight for freedom; we are already happy even as we fight for happiness, no matter how difficult the circumstances. Revolution is not a Merleau-Pontyan wager, an act suspended in the futur anterieur, to be legitimized or de-legitimized by the long-term outcome of present acts; it is, as it were, its own ontological proof, an immediate index of its own truth.

Traditional discourse gives capitalism a free pass. This is an independent reason to vote for the negative – we start necessary conversations that wouldn’t happen without us.Wolff, an Americaneconomist, well known for his work on Marxian economics, economic methodology, and class analysis,

’11 (Richard, 10/4, “Occupy Wall Street ends capitalism's alibi”, http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cifamerica/2011/oct/04/occupy-‐wall-‐street-‐new-‐york ) CW We all know that moving in this direction will elicit the screams of "socialism" from the usual predictable corners. The tired rhetoric lives on long after the cold war that orchestrated it fades out of memory. The

audience for that rhetoric is fast fading, too.It is long overdue in the US for us to have a genuine conversation and struggle over our current economic system. Capitalism has gotten a free pass for far too long. We take pride in questioning, challenging, criticizing and debating our health, education, military, transportation and other basic social institutions. We argue whether their current structures and functioning serve our needs. We work our way to changing them so they perform better. And so it should be. Yet, for decades now, we have failed to similarly question, challenge, criticize and debate our economic system: capitalism. Because a taboo protected capitalism, cheerleading and celebrating it became obligatory. Criticism and questions got banished as heresy, disloyalty or worse. Behind the protective taboo, capitalism degenerated into the ineffective, unequal, crisis ridden social disaster we all now bear. Capitalism is the problem– and the joblessness, homelessness, insecurity, and austerity it now imposeseverywhere are the costs we bear. We have the people, the skills and the tools to produce the goods and services needed for a just society to prosper. We just need to reorganize our producing units differently, to go beyond a capitalist economic system that no longer serves our needs. Humanity learned to do without kings and emperors and slave masters. We found our way to a democratic alternative, however partial and unfinished the democratic project remains. We can now take the next step

to realize that democratic project. We can bring democracy to our enterprises–by transforming them into cooperatives owned, operated and governed by democratic assemblies composed of all who work in them and

all the residents of the communities who are interdependent with them. Let me conclude by offering a slogan:"The US can do better than corporate capitalism." Let that be an idea and a debate that this renewed movement can engage. Doing so would give an immense gift to the US

and the world. It would break through the taboo, finally subjecting capitalism to the critiques and debates it as evaded for far too long and at far too great a cost to all.

Bruce R. Scott – The Political Economy of CapitalismAll organized sports can be understood as three­level systems, as suggested in Figure 2.2. The first level is the game itself, in which athletes compete with one another, whether as individuals or as teams. This competition is usually the focus of audience attention; we are concerned to see who wins or loses as well as how the game is played. However, organized sports typically are not played in back alleys or out in the tall weeds, nor at random times among random assortments of athletes. Rather, the actual competition usually unfolds in carefully marked­out areas, at specific times, under the supervision of a set of referees. The use of an explicit setting and set of rules for sports parallel capitalism‘s nascent beginnings in the late middle ages, when it was confined to specifically designated market locations and 

market days and was often carried out according to a prescribed set of rules, often under the direct supervision of duly chartered guilds of registered tradesmen. 

The infrastructure that guides the first level game, then, is created and maintained by the administrative and regulatory officials who comprise the second level. More specifically, these agents demarcate the field, specify rules of play and the scoring system, and monitor the play. These agents organize and legitimate the competition and ensure that it is carried out on a level playing field, with no unfair advantages permitted. Capitalism involves a very complex set of relationships, where many actors have power, and each has the capacity to influence how the system works. At the same time it is fundamentally different from any mechanical system in that its components have regenerative powers and their relationships continue to evolve through time. Thus, it is more usefully seen as a system that is organic or social than one governed by rigid laws like physics. Organized sports provide a useful analogy to a capitalist economy. The comparison can be helpful because organized sports are smaller, simpler systems and therefore more easily understood as totalities. Organized sports also evolve, but typically at a much more measured pace than the dynamic sectors of a capitalist economy. Most people have observed one or more organized sports and are familiar with competition in a regulated context. Thus they can distinguish between a contest with rules and referees and an un­refereed contest, which can deteriorate into a free­for­all. While there are important similarities between organized sports and capitalism, we need to be aware of some differences as well; these differences between capitalism and organized sports will allow us to highlight distinct characteristics of the former. 

But how do these institutional foundations arise and achieve legitimacy In organized sports—as in capitalism—a third level is required to complete the system. It is comprised of a political authority with the power to decide on the rules, i.e., who is eligible to compete, the time and location of the games, and technologies that may be used. Advantages, such as a playing field tilited in one’s favor, become possible sources of additional – and potentially cumulative ­­  advantages. Since capitalism is designed to promote productivity, it can be expected to promote inequalities of income and wealth, and first movers in a technology may keep their advantages for decades. Capitalist competition is for keeps.

John Bellamy Foster 2011, The Great Financial CrisisFor Bowles and Gintis, schooling under capitalism—if not countered by powerful democratic resistance movements—tends to evolve in the direction of capitalist­class imperatives, which subordinate it to the needs of production and accumulation. This is evident in what the authors called the correspondence principle, or the notion that the “social relations of education” normally correspond to the social relations of production in capitalist society.6 Schooling, therefore, is meant to service production, and replicates the hierarchical division of labor of the productive system.7 Hence, both the dominant purpose of elementary and secondary schooling in capitalist society—the formation of 

workers or labor power for production—and the labor process internal to schooling itself, as carried out by education workers, are fundamentally conditioned by the relations of production in the larger economy.

In this view, the forms of consciousness and behavior fostered by capitalist schooling are designed to reproduce existing classes and groupings, and thus are meant to reinforce and legitimize the social relations of production of capitalist society as a whole. Working­class students and those destined for working­class occupations are taught rule­following behavior, while those arising from the upper middle class and/or destined for the professional­managerial stratum are taught to internalize the values of the society. (Those between these two groups are mainly trained to be reliable, in addition to following rules.)8

The role of the ballot is to vote for the better debater, but fair adjudication cannot occur because Capitalism modifies our understanding of what it means to be fair as capitalist orthodoxy demarcates what is considered acceptable and right in gaming. For us to have a true conception of what fairness is requires us to break down and achieve an understanding of capitalism. The K is pre­fiat.

Thus the role of the ballot is to vote for the team that best challenges capitalist orthodoxy.