pai mei

"To compel a man to furnish funds for the propagation of ideas he disbelieves and abhors is sinful and tyrannical." -Thomas Jefferson.


Can one man in America do that ? Can somebody say : "I will not pay my taxes, I don't want you to use my money for war". This is democracy - the will of the people, not the will of a few at the top.

No, nobody can do that , as a free man who decides what is going on with his contry, he will soon be unde siege , like Ed Brow - he did not pay his taxes for another reason, but it's the same ideea.
Who will attack him ? His own government , whoms existence he pays for.

You think you can vote ? They are all the same, corporations pay all the politicians before elections, to make sure their goals are achieved after.
You think you can protest ? They do not care, they will surround themselvs with police and that's all there is about it. Look at G8, people protest every year, nobody comes and talks with them, but we are told - "you live in a democracy, the country is run by your will"
I see no democracy, it's just the capitalist dictatorship.

Sun Tzu

It's a now distorted republic. We were suppose to say we elect to voluntarily have our employers withhold for programs we think are going to be there, and each do our share. What a scam. There is truly nothing that can be done about the banking cartel and its henchmen the IRS. I hope in my lifetime this house of cards comes down and some people are held accountable for what they have done. Until then they will continue to smile above us.

__________________
To confine our attention to terrestrial matters would be to limit the human spirit.- Stephen Hawking

Telluride

I see a nation that is on its way to becoming a dictatorship (and this was happening long before GWB took office). But America is NOT capitalist.

__________________
"I am certain that nothing has done so much to destroy the safeguards of individual freedom as the striving after this mirage of social justice." - Friedrich Hayek

roachboy

um.....there are two ways you could mean this. one would be to hold, arbitrarily, that the states are "socialist" and from a kind a zany position far enough to the right you would probably point to the new deal and other such as "evidence"....or you could be serious, in which case you could imagine that the word capitalism refers only to one type of organization, probably some hayek fantasia of "perfect competition" in the context of "free markets" which are problematic as a historical phase because they have never existed. but at least the claim you make would be reasonable.
so you'd probably have to argue that "capitalism" (which i put in quotes to indicate that i am using the word in your sense here) would have existed, if at all, for a few weeks in the nineteenth century somewhere...

before stock was created (expansion of the role of the evil state through the formation of stock markets) and the monopoly capitalismit enabled: so before 1870.
so by extension, capitalism would maybe not inclde heavy industry because that form of production required more capital than the imaginary individual entrepreneur could muster and so were a driver behind the creation of stock markets--so heavy industry would constitute a sector-level distortion of capitalism, so that couldn't count either.
so before railroad-relation production came to be dominant, and before its military-related forms took shape: so before the american civil war...
i assume that agrarian forms of production could not be dominant for "capitalism" to have been in place, so that excludes the pre-civil war south...
and most of the us north before the civil war as well.
so in northern cities before the civil war, but not too much before because you'd have mixed economies in which some sectors would be capitalist and others not organized on those lines (standardized production--which is capitalist organization of production--is not the same as craft-based production organization---capitalism is a bureaucratically organized form of production...)---so "capitalism" may have existed during the 1830s-1840s, in a couple economic sectors within a couple of east coast urban spaces....maybe textiles in new england.
the only other place you find this "capitalism" is in books about political economy. it flourished in books as the ideal-typical model for a much more complex, messier and shifting mode of production...

but in the actual world where the term capitalism is used to designate a series of discrete types of organization of a mode of production based on particular patterns of ownership and organization internally, particular types of markets and relations to markets, etc., the claim that the united states is not capitalist would be understood as simply goofy.
and no-one--at all--anywhere--who understood ANYTHING about democratic socialism would see in it in the united states.

so in the world that other people know about who are not also entrenched in some extreme right libertarian worldview, the word capitalism is abstract enough to designate a series of dominant forms of organization.

so when you say:

you dont say anything.

__________________
a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear

it make you sick.

-kamau brathwaite

seretogis

In the "real world" the term "capitalist"/"capitalism" is misused and misinterpreted to blame the ills of the nation/world on the economical system. The fact that corrupt politicians take money from corrupt corporations, essentially selling their political power to the highest bidder, is not a result of capitalism -- it is a result of corrupt politicians and business leaders. If an "extreme right libertarian worldview" were to be the dominant way of thinking for a majority of Americans, those corrupt politicians would not have the power to grant favors to corrupt business leaders who yearn to funnel them money. If a politician cannot seize property at a whim for a businessman who pays him enough money to "revitalize the area" and put bundles of cash in his own pocket, that businessman would have to actually make use of the capitalist ideal of (gasp) paying market value or higher if the existing tenants don't want to move.

So, to call what we have here in America "capitalism" is to hold up a half-eaten apple and try to sell it as new. It is no longer an accurate term for what has happened in this country, and does not deserve to be the scapegoat for the corruption of some of our citizens.

As for the tax issue, it is true that taxes are extorted from us at the point of a gun. If we don't pay, we are jailed. That is not what our founders had in mind, and certainly isn't "freedom."

__________________
seretogis - sieg heil
perfect little dream the kind that hurts the most, forgot how it feels well almost
no one to blame always the same, open my eyes wake up in flames

roachboy

maybe in your "real world" that's the case, seretogis--but ususally when the term gets used, it refers to particular characteristics of the ownership of the instruments of production, a particular range of ways of organizing production itself, a particular type of market and a particular logic of market relations. it refers to features of a social system. actually, it refers to a series of such systems (in one series: monopoly capitalism, fordism, flex accumulation, globalizing capitalism--each phase emerges from within what precedes it--each phase is distinguished from the other by its patterns of organization, patterns of integration with state functions, etc....)


from your post, what seems to be the case is that capitalism is capitalism if it operates in a way that you vaguely approve of but is not capitalism if it doesnt.
so for you, the term doesnt refer to social system characteristics, but is more like the word "tasty" when applied to peanut butter.

if you want to use capitalism as a adjective to modify the implicit referent "economic activity that i like" then of course you are free to do so: but there is no agreement at all---at all--that this usage makes sense to anyone who is not you.

besides, meanings are matters of convention: if you want to demonstrate your point, maybe indicate where there is a community that uses capitalism as an adjective in the way that you do, and then i can point to a huge mountain of material-analytic----from the analytic to the political to the polemical, cutting across academic, political and popular writing done over the past 150 years or so---that uses the term in the way that i outline as well.

you cant win this one.
maybe we should move on to such discussion as there might be about the claims in the op.

__________________
a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear

it make you sick.

-kamau brathwaite

seretogis

The OP's use of "capitalist dictatorship" implies that capitalism as an economic system plays some role in the resulting dictatorship when it does not. If we agree on a definition of capitalism in the most basic terms as "a free exchange of goods between private entities" it is mind-boggling to try to see how this could result in any way a dictatorship or repressive political system.

Our ills are due to a flawed political system, not any inherent flaw in lessaiz-faire capitalism (lessaiz-faire capitalism being the purist ideal which is being twisted and otherwise distorted into other "forms" of capitalism.)

__________________
seretogis - sieg heil
perfect little dream the kind that hurts the most, forgot how it feels well almost
no one to blame always the same, open my eyes wake up in flames

roachboy

seretogis: there is no agreement on this. the "free exchange of goods and services" can take place in any number of contexts, particularly given that "free" is a relational term, not an absolute one. you could say that such "free exchange" took place in context dominated by the guild system and official pricing structures because they functioned as a natural horizon against which economic activity was understood---and the notion of "free" in the end means nothing more than coincendence in the perception of the actors between normative ideas and what happens in 3-d: if these perceptions line up, then the activity is "free" if they dont, then it isnt.

capitalism is predicated on specific structural features. it is not a clause-long characterization of relations. it is particular types of firms owned in particular ways, organized along a particular logic (bureaucratic) characterized primarily by the compartmentalization of tasks...capitalist forms operate with particular structures that underpin market relations, particular types of markets (which are legal creations and so are by their nature always at the curious intersection between the state and what is outside the state)....so no, there's no agreement on this.


aside: rather than go round and round, maybe a step to the side would help (here and elsewhere) me (at least, for what it's worth) to understand where you are coming from better:

it seems to me that the problem here is political--you operate in a space that seems geared around being and not being an anarchist.
i am personally far more sympathetic to anarchism than i am to your style of conservative libertarian politics, if only because the anarchists do not have to go through the gymnastics that you seem to require in order to imagine themselves to be opposing the existing order in the name of a radically socialist alternative. since radical socialism is often understood as direct democracy, i think that you are closer to "les anar" than you like to think. so to differentiate your position from its left correlate, you have to figure out ways to rework the notion of capitalism.

when you do that, you end up repeating all kinds of naive ideological propositions, not least of which is that markets are some kind natural formation (and by extensions are not legal constructs) and so can be opposed somehow to the operations of a modern state.
i dont buy that: i think was markets are varies as the context that enframes them vary.

but if you strip this out of your positions, as you have outlined them here, then it seems to me that you are really quite close of libertarian socialism or council anarchism, except that you dont like the terminology.

is that accurate?

__________________
a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear

it make you sick.

-kamau brathwaite

trickyy

i would say Russia and China are much closer to "capitalist dictatorships" than the US

they have been able to integrate the market system into their largely authoritarian, post-communist govts. the market has not brought about the democracy that some expected.