One response to “Life Under Capitalism according to Occupy Wall Street”

1. 

   Jarod

   March 11, 2012

   Jesus was basically socialist. As Marx, Engels, Stiglitz, Zizek and Jameson have shown, it’s not “work work work” that makes capitalism wholly unethical, but the CONTRADICTIONS of capitalism. One of which, of course, is the fact that as all money that enters the system does so at interest, one can only stay out of debt by pushing someone into debt. Capitalism is a system of bondage. And of course capitalism must expodentially expand – markets opened up via wars – to survive. Then there’s the issue of waste. Most of what is produced under capitalism goes unused, as there is always less money in the system than there is debt. As debt always increases, bondage always increases. And so forth. Capitalism is simply wholly illogical, a form of blind, wholly irrational faith which philosophers have been decrying for years, but of course no one listens. We Christians too are guilty of not listening. We’re so focused on Christ that we refuse to accept that we partake in a system that is simply unethical. Blinded by our tiny, subjective day to day lives, we do not see the far reaching ramifications of what we do. “You step out the door every morning,” Sartre said, “and you commit a crime by default.” A further sad irony of capitalism is that every “strata” of the system has “less money” than the “goods they produce”. What this results in is a sort of “infinite regression”, in which there are always those below you working harder and reaping less to support you. As the system progresses through time, wealth flows upwards such that it can only be sustained by two things: the middle class shrinking, and a continuous supply of new entrants (ie newly born human beings, quite literally, all in third world countries or all below the poverty line) who enter the system at its base and work for nothing, or little, to support it. The perfect Ponzi scheme, which Westerners typically don’t notice because, well, life’s good around them so it must be so for everyone else. The ostriche’s logic.

   Reply