The Root: Africans in China Say Police Have Told Them to Stop Sharing Stories About Racial Discrimination
- Thread starter Cicada 5
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Bold claim considering that every remotely socialist system in Africa has been met with colonial terrorism and after that intra-nationalist, ethinicist and capitalist terrorism.
I'm sorry, you must not have read a history book in your life. Corruption existed long before capitalism.
The concept of a shared humanity is an enlightenment-era project. Please tell me how the concept of a 'humanity' as a shared notion existed before it, and consequently before capitalism retroactively mapped it onto the entire world and history as a whole.
Corruption long predated capitalism, and has thrived under innumerable economic and political systems.
Corruption is about law, social attitudes, and power. Dictators tend to strip their countries of wealth and funnel it into their own pockets... because they can. Mugabe destroyed the economy of his country for nothing - to strip valuable agricultural assets off colonial farmers and put them in the hands of himself and his cronies. He made himself a billionaire whilst his country starved, and it wasn't "capitalism" or "colonialism" that did it.
Educated, free and politically involved populations tend to hold their governments to account. They install bureaucracies that are better at management, laws that squash fraud, remove governments that misrule.
Western capitalists, African dictators, the Chinese... they will exploit African countries because they have weak governance. But I think better governance will grow out of better human development, development needs economic growth, and investment can make that growth happen. In the meantime, corruption is just going to happen.
I'd argue the people who are best equipped to advance humanity through medical and technological advancement and reduce overall suffering should do the exploiting because that will offer more benefit. If we are agreeing that these people will definitely be exploited by corrupt leadership, well, might as well get the most out of it to honor their sacrifice, right?
Immoral though it has been, we can't say humanity didn't move forward leaps and bounds during the time it was exploiting africa when compared to the thousands of years that it couldn't (and this advancement has trickled down to Africa too, to a degree, it's definitely better than it would have been had it just been completely isolated from everywhere else for 500 years anyhow).
Now, maybe acknowledging that thing is evil is better for our souls and the way forward is to just halt progress to minimize exploitation, but the way I think of it is we're just sacrificing all those future people who will live in a world without whatever miraculous cures and food sources and technologies we could have invented but didn't. Who knows, maybe we could invent anti-aging in 50 years and not 150. We could save billions of people's lives with that stuff.
Not sure everyone would agree but to me such a sacrifice is even more immortal.
I lumped these two because while on many ways, they are different sentiments, the way I view them is basically the same answer.
Essentially, I chose my words carefully. Humanity breeds humanity. Humans and their creeds run the gambit of compassion, warmth, fear, violence, anger, humility, virtue and corruption. Very often, all in the same person at varying times of the day, let alone their entire life.
Humans are capable of switching through these things on an infinite scale. A corrupt person will have a line they won't cross. "Screw the elderly and give me all their cash... but don't you dare touch that money that's supposed to go to animals. That's vile."
Likewise will a compassionate person might not want to be bothered one day and will lie to a homeless man that there is no money to give as charity.
The definition of Capitalism is "An economic and political system in which a country's trade and industry are controlled by private owners for profit, rather than by the state." It's drive is not compassion. Nor the safety of others solely due to the concern of their fellow humans. Capitalism is only concerned about the economy and profit.
Compassion in and by itself runs counterproductive to the goals of Capitalism. Giving things for free to the common masses without anything to gain in return cuts into profits.
If the Capitalist system was Virtuous, it would not lobby against telling the truth about knowing we are killing the planet faster than a rate where a repair can be plausible. Or telling us they realize that the chemicals they place in our food to make it taste and/or look better has uncontrolled affects on the body that they realize there will be a percentage of people who will react poorly to it, but they consider those numbers to be within thresholds not to hurt their bottom-line. Or would ban the prison industrial complex and forgo the allure for cheap, nearly slave labor which drives the need to get more people to work for them dirt cheap.
Capitalism and Capitalists breeds corruption means just that. There is no end game for Capitalism where they will hit a wall of common courtesy and decide this is as far as they can grow. They will buy votes. They will buy Political Figures. They Will Buy Presidents. They will buy Countries. And then they will erase safeguards and deny that they are doing it while even saying it wasn't necessary in the first place. We've all seen in happen in our lifetimes.
While Humanity can have infinite number of facets, including corruption, the only direction Capitalism can go is inevitable corruption. And that's why I said Capitalism breeds corruption. Because unlike humans, the only outcome from Capitalism is the eroding of Mores, Laws, and Safeguards for ever-increasing Profit.
*NOTE* I'm sorry to split my response into two post, but I guess there's a word limit.
And to your next point, there are two things wrong with that. If everyone on this page here is pinned down by gun fire, I tell you guys that I am going to run off to distract them and they shoot me down while I did that, I sacrificed myself. I chose to do this.
These people aren't sacrificing themselves. They are being exploited.
If you take the poor who trust the medical institutions that were supposedly set up to take care of them, and find out they are exploiting the most vulnerable, what do you do as a nation? Well, you largely forget about it. Such is the case of New York University Dr. Saul Krugman , who fed mentally disabled patients under his care the feces of patients who had hepatitis, in order to understand it better. And yes, his results yielded evidence for the effectiveness of a gamma globulin as a treatment. When's the last time you or anyone thought of those 20 patients who had to suffer through that for actual decades while Krugman stumbled along before finally finding something that could be noteworthy?
You know what the common answer would be? "Never. I never had Hepatitis".
Because that's the point. Even if we DID live in a society that would actually revere people for being subjected to these things... we would only revere those who yielded beneficial results related to us and our lives. Because they would be the only ones known. Hundreds of Thousands (and I feel I'm severely undershooting this) will have suffered and be subjected to horrors and it will be for nothing because it did not yield a handy-dandy drug that makes our direct lives better.
And your African comment is too subjective to even try to converse over. Having a land to yourself without having foreign agents who don't care a lick about your ways or your culture really appeals to a lot of people. That's why America can be a land of great innovation, but you still see great numbers of people going to the midwest, getting their land, and living the way they want. You might see the benefit of it now in your life currently. But have it be your people, your land, and your global outlook.
You talk about advancements like they are universally given the second they are discovered. We know that humans need clean water to drink and that anything else will be only harmful to human life. But Flint, Michigan and other places like it still have disgusting water. We won't even talk about what Fracking does to water. We grow more food than we can eat in this country. But we would rather have it rot and thrown away instead of given to every child that would benefit from it. Because what profit is to be made from that?! We prevented people from crossing the border to Canada, Central America, and international means because we didn't want the drug companies to lose their profit. Go die, that's legal... but if you want to get your meds, get ready to sell all you own.
The 'sacrifice' you talk about will only be used to cause more damn suffering. Because we will discover a cure. And then it will be held out of reach, with a promise of pain free days if they just give up all their worldly possessions to obtain such a thing.
And this is not hyperbole. This is fact.
I hear what you're saying. But for me personally, the only way I would ever even consider this point is if humanity has shown that it will share said gifts equally. We know from a casual glance around that it will not. Therefore humanity doesn't benefit from these 'advancements'. The rich will.
And to your next point, there are two things wrong with that. If everyone on this page here is pinned down by gun fire, I tell you guys that I am going to run off to distract them and they shoot me down while I did that, I sacrificed myself. I chose to do this.
These people aren't sacrificing themselves. They are being exploited.
If you take the poor who trust the medical institutions that were supposedly set up to take care of them, and find out they are exploiting the most vulnerable, what do you do as a nation? Well, you largely forget about it. Such is the case of New York University Dr. Saul Krugman , who fed mentally disabled patients under his care the feces of patients who had hepatitis, in order to understand it better. And yes, his results yielded evidence for the effectiveness of a gamma globulin as a treatment. When's the last time you or anyone thought of those 20 patients who had to suffer through that for actual decades while Krugman stumbled along before finally finding something that could be noteworthy?
You know what the common answer would be? "Never. I never had Hepatitis".
Because that's the point. Even if we DID live in a society that would actually revere people for being subjected to these things... we would only revere those who yielded beneficial results related to us and our lives. Because they would be the only ones known. Hundreds of Thousands (and I feel I'm severely undershooting this) will have suffered and be subjected to horrors and it will be for nothing because it did not yield a handy-dandy drug that makes our direct lives better.
And your African comment is too subjective to even try to converse over. Having a land to yourself without having foreign agents who don't care a lick about your ways or your culture really appeals to a lot of people. That's why America can be a land of great innovation, but you still see great numbers of people going to the midwest, getting their land, and living the way they want. You might see the benefit of it now in your life currently. But have it be your people, your land, and your global outlook.
You talk about advancements like they are universally given the second they are discovered. We know that humans need clean water to drink and that anything else will be only harmful to human life. But Flint, Michigan and other places like it still have disgusting water. We won't even talk about what Fracking does to water. We grow more food than we can eat in this country. But we would rather have it rot and thrown away instead of given to every child that would benefit from it. Because what profit is to be made from that?! We prevented people from crossing the border to Canada, Central America, and international means because we didn't want the drug companies to lose their profit. Go die, that's legal... but if you want to get your meds, get ready to sell all you own.
The 'sacrifice' you talk about will only be used to cause more damn suffering. Because we will discover a cure. And then it will be held out of reach, with a promise of pain free days if they just give up all their worldly possessions to obtain such a thing.
And this is not hyperbole. This is fact.
So, I qualified that this advancement trickled down to africa "to a degree" for a reason. You see all those guns they wield and modern clothes they wear instead of tribal skins? Those antibiotics they use? Those cars they drive and so on? They didn't create none of that stuff. They wouldn't know what to do with the diamonds they dig out or the oil they procure or the computer parts they mine if left to their own devices. Now, sure, they're the third world, so the advancement wasn't shared equally, but it was shared. See, this is just how advancement works, even if the rich try to hoard it, it will eventually find its way to those who need it.
Just because the rich will benefit the most doesn't mean that those other people won't also be better off too.
To put it simply, anyone can eat shit, but only few people can make that into a cure for hepatitis. And that is actually valuable. The hundreds of thousands of sacrificed and exploited people pale in comparison to the trillions of people who died from curable diseases, tooth infections, the flu and plain old hunger. The fact that if our advanced world existed thousands of years ago, trillions of lives would be saved, is undeniable.
So what I'm doing here is expanding this. We think we reached the pinnacle but stuff we use nowadays would be seen as magic a mere 150 years ago. Just imagine how the world will be in the future. Stuff we think of as magic and completely impossible now would be common then. The sooner we get there the better.
Sorry, but the intial point is just not true given historical context. There are plenty of developed countries in Africa and were pre-colonialism like Ethiopia and the entirety of Northern Africa. The relative wealth of countries was not just due to different and uneven development, as these countries were also systematically exploited by colonial practices for what by this point is a matter of centuries. One could add that what is now Sudan, the Nubians, were significantly ahead of most European and Asian cultures in terms of engineering since they built pyramids at a given point in time. The transmission of knowledge is not piggy-backed on imperialism historically but through the sharing and distribution of resources. What you are describing is the inevitability of the transmission of knowledge not a feature of a capitalist system. It's not a direct product of the system, its a general product of all human productivity, since this also held true in the middle ages (Islamic scholars preserving Greek texts that later on were transmitted into Europe across ethnic, feudal and religious lines for example).
What your argument amounts to is saying that because something happens in a system, it is a factor of the system, and that somehow there's a utilitarian argument to be made that if millions suffer now under abject conditions, that it will be worth it for whatever hypothetical number you will save further down the line. Let's apply this to a particularly unpopular anti-capitalist example - how many did Mao save from poverty through the revolutions and the Great Leap Forward? Would we be as comfortable looking at China's current rate of poverty knowing that it came at the cost of all those purges? Would we be as comfortable in looking at the technological advances that the Soviets made after The Moscow Trials and the Stalinist purges, the invasion of Hungary, Holodomor, etc.? Cause under that logic, we should have a violent revoltuion and not care about the cost at all, since the benefits of it (literacy, economic prosperity, scientific advances) are also tangible and visible.
I'm not for imperialism in particular, just for using whatever thing we can to advance. Back during the times of the pyramids you didn't have the ability to advance as a planet, it was a lot more isolated. Nowadays it's way more universal.
I am not married to capitalsim (I'm a socialist so that'd make it obvious) but I will give it its dues for what it has done.
The future is there to decide if those things the communists in China and Russia did were worth it or not, ultimately. Right now we haven't yet reaped most of the benefits that supposedly are there but the tragedies are fresh so that makes us biased against them. At the same time, China is a world power now, not sure how much that goes to make 60 million folks starving worth it but again the future is gonna reveal the answer.
I mean, to Dengists, Soviet nostalgists that answer is already clear - it was worth it, including the atrocities committed along the way. I do personally think that raising the general level of prosperity in those countries was a miracle, and the infighting in the party, plus the shapes and structures of the revolution were in many ways inevitable, even if they were experiments at the time. I'm just against this idea that generally things are worth it ahead of the suffering they will cause, since proposing an optimal system of organisation in itself already entails an indirect ethics about what the optimal state of being is for humans as productive entities. Not that that's necessarily what you say - just along the lines of how the future will decide it - we can already see the costs unfolding before us if we have the capacity to view them non-ideologically and objectively.
As for what counts as global development, there is still a lot of gatekeeping, that can be argued to have similar impediments as the Sudanese example - patents, copyright, national competition, individual pettyness, suppression (which to the sciences happens often, I'm not talking about quack theories but about ideologically or institutionally motivated suppression that is a lot softer than just banning) all still happen and impede general progress because of the way society is modelled around competition. One can say that hiding breakthroughs is a lot harder than usual, and on that I'd agree. But the material requirements - machinery, the space in which to conduct research without being worried about finances, and testing all possible hypotheses (something that's also pretty common - no one wants to publish a paper that has no breakthroughs, cause that doesn't get you money or exposure) are all big hindrances on advancement. I subscribe generally to the fact that we have a much more efficient mode of production that developed on the back of social, logicistical and scientific advances. Whether that means its an achievement of it or rather the human productive capacity depends on the person. I lean on the latter, if you forgive the soppy humanism.
I get your general point, and forgive me, but it sounds like a truism in many ways. In a broad sense historically, exploitation has been fruitful - slave labour did help in achieving some of the greatest achievements in the world - the study of science and philosophy in Greece being a prime example. It's generally true, but the problem is that the progressive forces are not simply a feature of history - history is a broad set of clashes and uneven developments that lead to chaotic results. Consequently, I don't think we can say that x or y system is retroactively better anymore than we can say that in any reality where we're not actively building alternative systems, since they are historically contingent.
It's something I notice some marxists say indirectly when they talk about history as a teleology yet they forget that the point of The Poverty of Philosophy was to not just rest on Hegelianism but to apply it as a mode of analysis onto materialism, and to politically agitate. We may be able to tell that capitalism is becoming insufficient in dealing with a variety of social and economic situations since it can no longer be justified under the scarcity of resources. It may even be heading towards a foreseeable collapse, but that prognosis in itself isn't sufficient to actually enact a more optimal mode of social production. The case needs to be made, the structures need to be built and the productive forces need to be set free from the shells that contain them, and this demands direct activism.
Consequently that means that even if progress can be generally seen to be made, the question of how many people have to suffer in any given moment if we have the means to end the suffering through say, a modest change in our socio-economic circumstances is rather moot. If we have the agency and the knowledge, then it should be enacted. At that point it makes me wonder why we should just wait or expect this to be handed to us, when every scientific breakthrough that allows us to reap the benefits of modernity is itself a revolution: hard, extensive labour where sometimes scientists are even willing to die for it (in the case of Marie Curie and the early radiologists/nuclear scientists). I think at that point we owe it to ourselves to fight for freedom, equity and for a better future wherever it may be, and not fear social revolutions just because past experiments have ended poorly - rather the impetus is to validate the revolutionary struggles by building an optimal system and to make sure that it is executed principally, without resorting to murder and without insecurities.
This is something I'd like to interrogate if you allow me - corruption is a broad concept so it'd be interesting to see what shape it would take under different systems. The definition I'll deploy will be one of hoarding material resources for private gain outside of the jurisdiction of the social system at hand. If you object to this, that's fine, please do point this out since I'm enjoying this thread. I'll also assume relatively normative definitions for the systems in question, and I'll assume that each one is larger and more complex in its overall organisation than the previous one, and that this can loosely be understood as an development of organisational systems.
Under tribalism, what would count as corruption? I'd assume hoarding of resources that could otherwise be deployed for the betterment of the ethnic group. It's relatively transparent, even in a small exchange economy, and is beholden to small-scale law/whatever punitive system is in place. Yet at the same time its material impact could be drastic - tribal leaders who sold their people to Europeans as slaves in exchange for guns to secure supremacy over other tribes led to ethnic strife and supremacy in many west and east African countries. Someone hoarding water, food, or any other valuable resource would too have a certain impact.
Under feudalism, corruption could easily take place under similar lines - hoarding of personal resources without paying dues to the feudal liege. Yet now we start to see a difference. In tribal structures, any member doing so in situations of scarcity can be seen as being corrupt, it hoarding in order to boost their own social station. A peasant would be too, in a small village/hamlet situation. Yet at the same time, a noble withholding personal wealth from the regent primarily affects the regent and their ability to use resources to expand their lands, to mobilise their vassals and to develop those lands. A lord serving under a king could also use corruption to their own benefit to expand their fiefdom, to develop it, or to use it as a political strategy in currying favour with other groups, to invest in trade, buy mercenaries etc. etc. None of this directly impacts the peasant as it would a tribal member in tribalism. Corruption over time begins to affect the kingdom over time in tandem, but a certain amount of corruption is relatively tolerable - after all, even an absolute ruler cannot always trust to know and to control to wealth or the ambition of those subject to him, just the ones who produce raw materials in the first place (i.e. peasants, craftsmen, miners and slaves). I'll leave aside monarchs for now, since arguably the wealth, power and politic are concentrated in their actions as such outside of some exceptions which would require their own analyses (constitutional monarchies, electoral monarchies, etc.).
So now we already have a manifestation of two different types. Obviously if you object to this, I'm fine to you pointing it out. Within the confines of the fairly modest analysis I've built up here, I think it's clear that corruption both has different effects in terms of scale (tribal unit vs. fiefdom/kingdom) the agents of corruption relative to that scale (tribal member vs. lord on a fiefdom/peasant in a hamlet) and the actual effects (survival of the tribe vs. economic instability/competition between lords and war vs. peasants becoming richer but largely being unable to use that wealth due to a system of strict inheritance). I don't think we can call this corruption necessarily, but let's run with this for now.
Now under capitalism. Much like before, someone hoards wealth for private purposes outside of the jurisdiction of the system at hand. The effects are multidinous - a single agent doing so can cost quite a lot depending on the scale of the wealth they have hoarded, much like tribalism and to an extent feudalism (though I don't think there's been major cases of fraud anywhere near the scale we've seen in capitalism in feudalism due to the punitive systems in place and the mode of law) in terms of how it impacts taxation and the flow of honest capital in a market. I'm not an economist, it should be stipulated. A bunch of agents doing this at once can have disastrous effects, with some of the most extreme being in cases like Zimbabwe, like the Soviet Union, Italy, etc. etc. A person's station and the relative extent of their corruption are important factors in determining this. A head of state hoarding wealth has significantly greater capacity for corruption, both in terms of material scale and with the manipulation of the state apparatus to get away with. Similarly to a lord, since they are in many ways the embodiment of the law and also have the material capabilities to suppress dissent to those below their station to enact their will. However, under capitalism, corruption chains are different. Say a peasant hoards grains and a lord hoards taxes. Under what circumstances could it be possible that they work together? Maybe they cut a deal, but a peasant has no legal authority over the lord so that a mutually beneficial situation may be enacted. In capitalism however, a corrupt foreman can work with a corrupt factory owner in tandem with a corrupt shareholder to embezzle significant amounts of money that leave catastrophic effects for the entire enterprise and the social context it's attached to. We already see this in China, in the Soviet Union. Chernobyl was one such case - individual technicians were complicit in the corruption on display, which manifested itself in corruption at the supervisors and all the way up to the party where the direct human costs were starting to become visible, all for the sake of personal gain so as to curry favour within the party to be awarded through premiums and privileges. Similar situations still occur in Russia where corruption can start from the level of an individual worker and continue as a chain to the greatest CEO.
So where am I going with this? Well, to stipulate that corruption, as a hoarding of private resources is something that has existed in all human systems hitherto enacted. It may even exist under communism (in the sense of a classless, stateless society - though this is a question in itself). But the fundamental shape corruption takes, who is complicit in it, and who benefits from a structural perspective, and how it can be resolved are significantly different I'd wager. From the smallest production unit up to the state itself, the shape is fundamentally different, as is the extent of benefits and their structural impacts. Punitive measures under tribalism were ensured in their totality by the proximity of its members, and corruption in terms of slavery was something that was relatively an aberration, but something that nonetheless led to the supremacy of a tribe over others. Corruption under feudalism can equally lead to the supremacy of specific lords, but the risks are much greater due to the concentration of power, and individual productive units in feudalism cannot sufficiently be corrupt individuals so as to massively impact the system overall. Similarly, one person stealing money from a workplace does not destroy a chain of production in capitalism, but a chain of corruption is something that is magnitudes worse in its effects than either of the previous systems. Albania losing its pension fund to a pyramid scheme is one such example.
I'd say that one can sustain this analysis to point out how different countries in different socio-historical contexts also fit under these descriptions and models. Mugabe being an example - he ushered in a new government with the ZANU-PF by revolting against apartheid minority rule. As the head of this movement, that assembled a new state on the ruins of the old, he was given total power under an ethno-nationalist pretext to take whatever resources he wanted with no legal repercussions. He and his army had the total monopoly on power, and if they didn't , they could rig elections and assassinate those they didn't like. At the same time, Zimbabwe was under massive international pressure, so the state at hand gave Mugabe the reigns to exploit the situation for wealthier countries and personally reap the rewards. The instruments were already in place, and there was little that the Zimbabwean people could do considering that they just cast off a previous regime that also exploited them ruthlessly. The impoverishment of education, wealth parity, etc. all then repertuate themselves in a neo-colonial spiral with nominal freedoms from oppressors. In that sense, corruption is both something that is a historically consistent aspect, but one that, much like the social systems it exists in, takes on completely different shapes particular to the system in place.
I think as a start point corruption needs to be seen in a wider frame than wealth, of more general personal gain. If we take away the prospect of wealth for personal ambition, ambition will merely shift to other forms of personal power and status.
I would take the assumption that proportion of people who are top of the heap motivated by personal gain more than collective good is relatively high. People who thirst for power, status and wealth are going to work for it. People (like me) who just want a job they can quietly and unflashily get on with that pays enough for a comfortable life end up middle and bottom. But a lot of it is competition. There's nearly always going to be fewer positions or things than people who want them: and as they compete (for page view, money, high office, etc.), competition not only drives excellence, it's also an incredibly potent driver of cheating. Corruption is, essentially, cheating. So as a society you either get lucky that the guys at the top have a strong motivation of public good rather than personal interest, or you need two systems: one a "carrot" than lionises and promotes ideals of public good, and the other a "stick" to rigorously investigate and thus deter venality. If your society chose luck over systems, you're boned.
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Corruption existed in slightly unusual forms in the Eastern bloc because personal enrichment was difficult.
The leaders tended to have very modest personal incomes and ownership. However, they could acquire a great deal of luxury via goods and services associated with office, which acted to the benefit of the individual. Furthermore, the higher ranks got privileged, first picks of accommodation, scarce goods, etc. Corruption existed increasingly in a black market towards the end, too. Much of the corruption was therefore quasi-political, about rising up the ranks.
There was another interesting form of corruption in terms of production. With a planned economy, bureaucrats would set targets and expect industry to meet them. So what factories did was was under-report production capability and over-report resources needed to achieve it - this meaning they would not fail to hit their targets (which could have unpleasant consequences for managers) even if something went wrong and if they exceeded targets, earn an extra reward. But the result was persistent waste and underproduction that dragged on the economy and thus the livelihoods of the people. I would call that corruption.
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As for Mugabe, he seems to be a man who started off with the right intentions and carried out many policies to benefit the masses, but ended up... well. I can get that he had strict and autocratic notions of a one-party state and ruthlessly crushed dissent. Perhaps pride, that he needed to be the person to build the state of his dreams and persisted even as things went wrong. But that vast personal enrichment - how can we get past that? My sad conjecture is that he was never truly signed up to his ideology. At core he always wanted power, and he adopted ideology of convenience that advanced him which merely for a time aligned with national benefit.
Zimbabwe had never been left the means for firm governance - the whites were unfit for governance after apartheid, and the old British authorities had never deemed the development of a well-educated populace and middle class important in its colonies. And as you say, Mugabe was excessively powerful within his party and country. No system was there to restrain him.
I'd generally agree that the routes by which corruption occurs vary in all times and places according to the systems and circumstances they operate in, but I think the base rules of why they do it and how to stop them are pretty consistent.
Ah but here's where we run into a problem - what would be corruption when excluding wealth? (Though in fairness I was talking about material gain - wealth being a part of it, so are things like small things, lands, etc. tangible physical things) I don't see for example how corruption would manifest in terms of social status, unless you mean blackmail, gaslighting, etc. for the sake of becoming famous (though the question there is also - does the notion of fame too change over time? I'd argue that this is still within my framework of corruption since the component of power and fame that is a big aspect in it is material access - within a post-scarcicity system that might change, but we also don't know how such a society would look like in practice, we can merely speculate at this point in time).
The thing is though as well, is that ideologically, it is largely justifiable under capitalism that personal gain in the abstract is beneficial for society as a whole. A billionaire, regardless of their mode of income, will still spend money and stimulate the economy, consequently create a need for jobs and capital circulation that can result in growth and prosperity for all those involved in this chain of expenditure. Never mind the fact that most billionaires either hoard money, or are too financially tied up to their assets to be able to give it away even if they wanted to, so they exist like points of confidence on a graph that keep the system going. I'd argue that the largely artificial material scarcity that most of the world is met with (for example, crises of homelessness in rich countries) drives personal gain regardless of mode, with there being no regulating body for it other than the state and its punitive measures - call it a cultural by-product if you will. That works up to a point, but it means that despite requiring the state to prop up the capitalist system, the state is always at odds with the ambition of the would-be capitalist, so cheating effectively becomes expected, not simply a driver. Regardless of how robust a society is in its punitive and regulative measures, it's never going to prevent the drive for cheating latent in the structure it operates in. It consequently becomes non-beneficial to the operation of the system as a whole, and it makes the system a constant struggle where private gain is both good but needs to be mediated by public good, in spite of itself. Combine that with bureaucracy, where people can be arbitrarily targeted or where there are heavy tax brackets depending on income level, it makes the system and its avenues of personal gain seem rather silly.
But here's the thing - personal gain is also mediated heavily by social factors. The family unit, the largest 'private' social unit, is also a focal point determining the likelihood of corruption. The figure of a lone renegade criminal is nothing compared to the mafioso who establishes a family through which his wealth is dispersed. In many ways, we are all beholden to our families and are instilled with a particular social duty to help those in our family who might not be able to help themselves. That paired with largely arbitary material scarcity (again, I stress that there are enough materials to satisfy most human needs based on the current state of the productive model - there are enough houses to accomodate most people, there's enough food to feed the world) means that one has to weigh familial moral duties, which predate capitalism and are generally stronger, against both the difficulty of accumulating wealth honestly through climbing the career ladder (productive demands, taxation, scarcity of jobs, uneven distribution and allocation of qualifications, undervaluing of qualifications, the generally greater demand for manual labour vs intellectual labour, the asymmetry of types of labour) means that in many ways cheating is the optimal option. Consequently, I believe that it's not simply up to the state or society to tolerate this model, to expect people not to cheat (since capitalism is global - it's an inescapable system that at most can be mediated with borders and the violence that entails) or simply just to waste constant resources in curbing these cheaters just to expect the system to become more meritocratic over time. I think that impatience, especially in places across Africa, is a potent driver that makes all sorts of corruption justifiable. And that's even before the neocolonial incentives for corruption (keeping countries corrupt and inefficient in their bureaucracy is profitable for companies who want to keep labour expenditures low).
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- Whatever, just wash your hands.
That's like saying having cars encourages speeding. As with all things, it needs to have rules that will be enforced. You want to remove corruption, make it illegal and actually enforce those rules.
Something can encourage and reward something without entailing it in the same way that cars entail the motion of them. Capitalism, as does every system up to this point, has had rules, yet one can make the case that it's structurally inherent to systems of resource scarcity overall. I think it's pretty naive to think that just with rules you can 'remove' corruption anymore than you can remove the desperation, ambition, morality, etc. that are also big factors in the prevalence of corruption, that are more likely to be motivated by general scarcicity, artificial or not.
- Apr 1, 2009
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- Gender
- Whatever, just wash your hands.
You can view things like that but ultimately it is vacuous since everything can work like that, people who are against sex education or contraception are, at least partially, because they think it will lead to more sex and more degenerate sex.
The presence of rules does almost nothing to dissuade a behavior, you need enforcement of those rules and for people breaking those rules to actually be caught and held accountable.
Well, obviously.
Ok, I'm not fond of hasty judgements, but the way you've presented and worded yourself gives a distinct impression that the lottery of life has given you a fairly comfortable space of existence and perception within this particular system, to feel obligated to defend it the way you do. Whether that's the case or not, I garuntee you my life has been created and raised in the dirtiest most poverty ridden way it could be. This system forces desperate people into cunts. Sometimes it's people just wanting to survive, sometimes just cunts wanting to be cunts. I've broken laws many times just to fucking survive and I ain't proud of it, it was either that or starve. Also the car analogy may not serve you the way you'd hope when the majority of modern research is pointing towards automation as the safest method of transportation because as always the human element cannot be fucking trusted.
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