Aggression: The Essence of Capitalism

[sophia-sadek.livejournal.com]

When reading various accounts of anti-Communist policy by American political insiders, an idea recurs again and again. The problem is invariably described as one of Soviet aggression. War on the Korean peninsula: Soviet aggression. Mosaddegh deposes the Shah: Soviet aggression. Batista falls to Castro: Soviet aggression. South Vietnam spirals into civil war: Soviet aggression. Brutal dictatorships in Latin America are threatened: Soviet aggression. India shuts down East Pakistan: Soviet aggression. Tribal conflict and religious fanaticism tear Afghanistan apart: Soviet aggression.

With all of this aggression, you would think that the Soviet Union was a capitalist empire. After all, capitalism depends on aggression for its continued existence. The termination of aggression spells doom to capital expansion. Instead of eating the young of other lands a collapsing capitalist economy is force to eat its own young.

Scholars of the Austrian stripe tend to look the other way when confronted with the historic aggressions of the capitalist system. As Marxists blame all of their mistakes on counter-revolutionaries, Libertarians blame the bad aspects of capitalism on socialist impurities such as human weakness. The system is strong and good, but the staffing is weak and vicious. The message seems to be that "pure" capitalism is as impossible as travel at the speed of light. The only reason to continue promoting the idea is so that weak capitalists will continue funding the Austrian school in order to make themselves feel better. The words "running dog lackey" come to mind for some strange reason.

When Managua and Havana supported rebel guerrillas attempting to overthrow the corrupt death squad dictatorship of El Salvador, which side did American capital take? I'll give you a hint: it was not the side opposed to death squads. Capital loves an investment climate that is conducive to a substantial return on investment. This makes any regime that promotes wage slavery a pro-capital regime. The horrors of organized labor, public education, and accessible health care are obstacles to a hefty return on investment. As such, they are considered "aggressions" against property, whereas death squads are considered friendly to property.

A more recent example of death squad activity emerged under the heavy boot of American occupation in Iraq. Bodies cropped up like mushrooms with drill holes in their knee caps. It is a good thing US forces were there to prevent a bloodbath. They kept it down to a bloodshower instead. Good show, troops! Capital is proud of you.

As a child my mother recounted what it was like to have the Klan visit the neighborhood and burn a cross. As a young adult, a Klan member asked me why I was so down on the Klan. Do you have any experience with a death squad in your neighborhood?

Comments

[paedraggaidin.livejournal.com]

.. Do you have any experience with a death squad in your neighborhood?

Yes, I do! They're called the Arkansas State Board of Law Examiners and their mission is the death of the law student's very soul.

The Devil...

[sophia-sadek.livejournal.com]

... demands his due. If you think the Board is bad, wait until you work with a parasitic partner.

Re: The Devil...

[paedraggaidin.livejournal.com]

Heaven forfend....

[notmrgarrison.livejournal.com]

A local pizza parlor begins to franchise, 30 years later they have hundreds of outlets.

Did they shoot people to accomplish this.
Burn crosses in people's yards?
Depend on the Gulf War to fuel their expansion?

Chances are...

[sophia-sadek.livejournal.com]

... they made peace with the local death squad protecting the mozzarella supply chain.

Aw shit, you had to bring that up:

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

The only one of these to be clearly dickery on the part of the USA was the decision to reimpose and strengthen the Pahlavi dynasty reason be damned by offing Mossadeqh (and while he's better than either the Shah or Khomeini that's not really an endorsement of Mossadeqh). The Kim regime in North Korea was a Soviet ally, it had been since 1945. Kim was incapable of invading South Korea with Soviet armor and Soviet airplanes without Stalin's consent, as we're speaking of the guy that had his political rival from 1926 killed with an ice pick in the head in Mexico in 1940. Stalin was far too control-obsessed for Kim to up and invade without his consent.

Castro was always a Leftie, the USA's problem was the same as Israel's in facing Middle Eastern democracies. Too long a legacy of supporting dictatorships means either not-democratic and pro-USA or democratic and anti-USA, and national security overrides democracy at least where the USA's concerned. Then along comes Little Nicky and his proposals for helping Castro and Castro thought that was jolly good, then the idiot damn foolery of the Bay of Pigs, and well.....

The Vietnam War was another example of a Soviet proxy fighting a US one, and by the time North Vietnam won the war it was turning into a Sino-Soviet proxy war. Which incidentally the pro-Soviet faction won in both cases. To be certain the French regime was pretty much the remnants of the Vichy era against nationalism but by the 1960s Uncle Ho was far more a Communist than he had been a nationalist. At the same time it was not really clear why the USA went in or what it intended victory to look like, and this contributed to the US defeat there. At the same time yet again without Little Nicky and Brezhnev the NVA would have lost the war circa 1968 at the longest.

The Bangladeshi Independence War is the one occasion in the Cold War where the Soviet Union's ally was actually in the moral right and the USA's one was the simple, brutish face of genocide. If someone wants to defend the Pakistani army in Bangladesh they're welcome to do so but it's akin to defending Babi Yar or Sand Creek.

Defending the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan's like defending the Mexican War from the US side: the only people who do that have an instinctive fanboyism of force and forgo any thought of the consequences.

I see the point you raise, but none of these examples are actually meaningful examples bar the one with Mossadeqh. The United Fruit Company, the Suez Crisis, the US support of Mobutu's kleptocracy, those are real examples of what you're speaking of. This particular list subverts the actual points you attempt to raise by using in almost all cases examples of Communist action and Western reaction, not even the Cold War versions of Western action and Communist reaction.

Re: Aw shit, you had to bring that up:

[sophia-sadek.livejournal.com]

Trotsky threatened Stalin with a Bolshevik revolution.

I would never defend the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, nor would I defend support for the Mujaheddin.

Your closing comment misses the point. The observation of Soviet aggression makes a greater case that the Communists were simply a different breed of capitalists.

Um, no.

[squidb0i.livejournal.com]

" After all, capitalism depends on aggression for its continued existence."

You're confusing Imperialism with Capitalism.

Much in the same way that most anti-OWS dupes confuse anti-corporatism with anti-capitalism.

And you manage to bash the troops in the process. Classy.

Re: Um, no.

[404.livejournal.com]

Aye.

This is one of sophia's weaker attempts at whatever she tries to do.

Although I am a big fan of Caesar and everything that is rendered to him, especially a good salad to go along with it.

Re: Um, no.

[devil-ad-vocate.livejournal.com]

Bingo.

Re: Um, no.

[sophia-sadek.livejournal.com]

How do you distinguish imperialism from capitalism? They are two sides of the same coin.

If I wanted to bash troops, there are more poignant examples I could use. I was bashing those who contended that a troop presence was needed to prevent bloodshed.

Do you have any experience with a death squad in your neighborhood?

[fizzyland.livejournal.com]

No, unless Jehovah's Witnesses & Amway reps count.

Re: Do you have any experience with a death squad in your neighborhood?

[sophia-sadek.livejournal.com]

Those are the walking dead victims of brain-death squads.

neighborhood death squad.

[sandwichwarrior.livejournal.com]

Several of my classmates would consider this guy to be a "fellow traveler"



...and that makes me very nervous.

Groups motivated by greed or hate are easy to spot and in turn advoid/counter. The ones who think they can build a utopia are far more dangerous because sooner or later they'll start erecting guillotines in the public square.

Re: neighborhood death squad.

[sophia-sadek.livejournal.com]

One of the problems with Marxism-Leninism is that it boils down to a cult of revolution. The original goal of human progress is lost in a haystack of slogans and kvostism.

Re: neighborhood death squad.

[squidb0i.livejournal.com]

Likelihood 1: This guy is some kind of Breitbart style plant being used to discredit OWS.

Likelihood 2: This guys is serious, and he might even have a tiny following of similarly extreme wingnuts.

Regardless, his opinion does not reflect that of the majority.

"Capitalism" is a Marxoid strawman.

[montecristo.livejournal.com]

Actually, it wasn't a strawman when Marx coined the term, he had an actual argument to make against the system as he saw it and a set of proposed criteria that theoretically supported that assessment, unlike the Marxoid-parrots who have no idea of the pedigree of their own ideas. Marx was honest but wrong. The Labor Theory of Value is fundamentally flawed, but at least he was able to ennunciate his argument intelligently. His intellectual children are brain-damaged believers in the economic analogy to creationism and do not care if their facts or theories support their emotion-based faith or not. Most of them could probably be told that Marx argued against LTV and be none the wiser. Most of them probably couldn't consistently score "socialist" themselves on something like the Are You An Austrian?" Quiz at LvMI (http://mises.org/quiz.aspx)

As for this:
The words "running dog lackey" come to mind for some strange reason.
I'll let George Orwell take you to the woodshed for that. His arm has a much more eloquent swing and he had your number in 1946, when he wrote Politics and the English Language (http://www.mtholyoke.edu/acad/intrel/orwell46.htm)

In our time it is broadly true that political writing is bad writing. Where it is not true, it will generally be found that the writer is some kind of rebel, expressing his private opinions and not a "party line." Orthodoxy, of whatever color, seems to demand a lifeless, imitative style. The political dialects to be found in pamphlets, leading articles, manifestoes, White papers and the speeches of undersecretaries do, of course, vary from party to party, but they are all alike in that one almost never finds in them a fresh, vivid, homemade turn of speech. When one watches some tired hack on the platform mechanically repeating the familiar phrases -- bestial atrocities, iron heel, bloodstained tyranny, free peoples of the world, stand shoulder to shoulder -- one often has a curious feeling that one is not watching a live human being but some kind of dummy: a feeling which suddenly becomes stronger at moments when the light catches the speaker's spectacles and turns them into blank discs which seem to have no eyes behind them. And this is not altogether fanciful. A speaker who uses that kind of phraseology has gone some distance toward turning himself into a machine. The appropriate noises are coming out of his larynx, but his brain is not involved as it would be if he were choosing his words for himself. If the speech he is making is one that he is accustomed to make over and over again, he may be almost unconscious of what he is saying, as one is when one utters the responses in church. And this reduced state of consciousness, if not indispensable, is at any rate favorable to political conformity.

Scholars of the Austrian stripe tend to look the other way when confronted with the historic aggressions of the capitalist system.
Honestly, every single time you litter the ether with your ASCII, I lose more respect for your intellectual honesty. I'm begining to wonder whether you have any at all.

First off, if you're going to make a charge against the Austrian School of Economics then distinguish them from "libertarians" instead of smearing them together with a broad brush and hoping that nobody notices. There are plenty of schools of political, ethical and economic thought within "libertarianism," and to introduce a category error like that is to make the kind of mistake one expects of junior highschool students.

Second, you should distinguish your criticism according to field of study. The Austrian School is a economic discipline; it is not a political or ethical system. Its economic prescriptions have implications in politics and philosophy, for a given set of values but the discipline itself makes no political value claims per se; it merely analyzes economic cause and effect in the context of a society's economic organization.

Re: "Capitalism" is a Marxoid strawman.

[sophia-sadek.livejournal.com]

Well, that was civil.

Good luck with your endeavor to divorce economics from politics, especially in the case of school with a very obvious political agenda.

"Capitalism" is a Marxoid strawman... (continued)

[montecristo.livejournal.com]

Continued due to the damned LJ comment length limit:
That being so, the people embracing the Austrian School DO espouse certain value systems which are supported by the economic thought put forward by the Austrian School. Furthermore, if you are going to make an indictment, you could at least present some evidence for your charge. Did the dog eat that part of your homework? I figure you haven't read anything any of the Austrians have written at all, but since you do know that they oppose the socialistic faith you feel inclined to pick on them and smear them, counting upon others not to fact check you. The truth is, you just don't have any evidence to back that charge and are counting on people not to notice that you haven't presented any. Anyone who spends even a modest amount of time browsing the archives at Mises.org will be hard-pressed not to draw the conclusion that you have absolutely no idea of what you're talking about and probably don't care. The following writers have written volumes of essays and even entire books on the subject of imperialism and its effects and causes in the U.S. government:

• Justin Raimondo (of Antiwar.com)


• Lew Rockwell (founder of the LvMI (http://www.mises.org) and operator of LewRockwell.com (http://www.lewrockwell.com) the anti-state, anti-war, pro-market web site)
  
• Ralph Raico


• Eric V. Denison


• Murray Rothbard


• Hans Hermann Hoppe

Others, while not Austrian Economists themselves, have had their writings featured on sites like Anti-war.com, Mises.org, and LewRockwell.com. To make the charge you have is completely intellectually dishonest. (http://www.antiwar.com) ()

Re: "Capitalism" is a Marxoid strawman... (continued)

[luvdovz.livejournal.com]

Continued due to the damned LJ comment length limit

No surprise there. :p

Re: "Capitalism" is a Marxoid strawman... (continued)

[sophia-sadek.livejournal.com]

Perhaps you should take the hint from the comment limit.

[kardashev.livejournal.com]

Do you have any experience with a death squad in your neighborhood?

Well, in the old neighborhood we had the Ninth Street Dawgs(white trash), then the Bloods(black people), and the East Side Latin Counts(hispanics). I used to hear TEC-9 fire off in the distance as a regular basis on Summer nights.

DId this...

[sophia-sadek.livejournal.com]

... experience contribute to your misanthropy?

[allhatnocattle.livejournal.com]

When the nice government man from Indian Affairs came in his big white van and offered to take the children to town for ice cream, it seemed like a really nice gesture. Then when the nice man didn't return, the parents worried. The parents had no idea where their kids were. They asked the IA men where their kids were. They had taken the children to Residential Schools to be educated.

Years later the some of the children would return, bruised and hollowed eyed. The parents asked where their siblings were. Some were riddled with guilt or hate and vowed never to return. Some had died from the beatings. Others were simply murdered.

Yes, I know of the death squads.

Charles Dickens...

[sophia-sadek.livejournal.com]

... would be proud. This reminds me of Champlain's description of his travels in Mexico. He observed how Spanish priests beat natives who missed church service on Sunday without a valid excuse. There is also the story of the Native girl who said that she dreamed about the Jesuit heaven: Jesuits were beating Natives. For the Jesuits it was heaven, but for the Natives it was hell.