New Anti-Capitalist Documentary: Ethos

[The Vegan Marxist]

Anti-capitalism is definitely becoming a mainstream outlook against our crumbling system. Whether it be through "Capitalism: A Love Story" by Michael Moore, or "Zeitgeist: Moving Forward" by Peter Joseph, and now "Ethos" by Woody Harrelson, capitalism is no longer being backed by the people. They're looking for alternatives, for solutions, for a better system. This is our greatest chance to start organizing the people under our banner!

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[Widerstand]

Well it's obvious and inevitable that capitalism will fall, the question is how: socialism or barbarity?

[A Revolutionary Tool]

Woody Harrelson? Seriously? That's awesome!

[The Vegan Marxist]

Woody Harrelson? Seriously? That's awesome!

"It's a foreign policy gone way wrong. But that's how it always is. American foreign policy has always been not about spreading democracy, but about spreading capitalism."

~Woody Harrelson (comment on US foreign policy over Afghanistan)

[Broletariat]

Well it's obvious and inevitable that capitalism will fall, the question is how: socialism or barbarity?


What sort of mode of production would "barbarity" imply? In what class's interests would it be for this mode of production to take place? Or did you just mean a more general shittier capitalism.

[Iraultzaile Ezkerreko]

Just finished watching the new Zeitgeist, and while it says all the right things and seems to borrow VERY heavily from Marxism, they explicitly call for people to reject "socialism and communism" and occassionally flirt with what seems like determinism and impossiblism.

[The Vegan Marxist]

Just finished watching the new Zeitgeist, and while it says all the right things and seems to borrow VERY heavily from Marxism, they explicitly call for people to reject "socialism and communism" and occassionally flirt with what seems like determinism and impossiblism.

Actually, near the end (roughly, last 20 or so minutes), it states that all the ism's are simply economic buildups from now to where they want to be. In a way, this is essentially saying that each system will be better than the other, but they want more. So, to me, the only way we can get to where they want, we have to go through socialism. They don't quite understand Marxism very well, but we do. Which is why we should be leading that movement, the working class.

[Iraultzaile Ezkerreko]

I agree, I just thing their statement about any "-ism" being useless and meaningless in counter-productive. I have a friend on Facebook who told me I should watch it because a lot of the things I post about are talked about, I responded by telling him to go check out any socialist meetings around him because some youtube movie from a lineage with conspiratorial and mysticist films isn't going to change the world, but a mobilized working class will. He responded with "No, they talk about in the movie how socialism isn't a solution, we have to do something different! That has been tried and failed!" It devolved into stupidity from there. I swear, false consciousness and combating entrenched bourgeoisie ideals is the least attractive part of being a socialist and activist.

[Rusty Shackleford]

watch it here
http://www.ethosthemovie.com/filmdownload.html


our ethos is all that we currently hold to be true. it is what we act upon. it governs our manners, our business and politics.
In memory of Howard Zinn
1922-2010

[Savage]

Long live comrade Harrelson.

[bcbm]

I agree, I just thing their statement about any "-ism" being useless and meaningless in counter-productive. I have a friend on Facebook who told me I should watch it because a lot of the things I post about are talked about, I responded by telling him to go check out any socialist meetings around him because some youtube movie from a lineage with conspiratorial and mysticist films isn't going to change the world, but a mobilized working class will. He responded with "No, they talk about in the movie how socialism isn't a solution, we have to do something different! That has been tried and failed!" It devolved into stupidity from there. I swear, false consciousness and combating entrenched bourgeoisie ideals is the least attractive part of being a socialist and activist.

i think your friend's response proves the point of the documentary rather well. people are skeptical of -isms, especially ones with a long history and pretty negative connotations. instead of fighting "false consciousness," why not agree that we need something new and fight for something new? i don't think its a stretch to say that the kind of society we would want to create has not existed or even been come close to by any ideological regime.

just as a random aside, i came across this in an article earlier today about syrians reaction to egypt:


"It may not be tomorrow or a few months but I'm sure it is like dominoes. Before there was always an ideology - pan-Arabism or being an enemy of Israel. But now people are simply looking for their personal freedom, for food, education, a good life. The days of ideology are over."

[Widerstand]

What sort of mode of production would "barbarity" imply? In what class's interests would it be for this mode of production to take place? Or did you just mean a more general shittier capitalism.

Rosa Luxemburg, the Junius Pamphlet, Chapter 1 (http://www.marxists.org/archive/luxemburg/1915/junius/ch01.htm):


Friedrich Engels once said: “Bourgeois society stands at the crossroads, either transition to socialism or regression into barbarism.” What does “regression into barbarism” mean to our lofty European civilization? Until now, we have all probably read and repeated these words thoughtlessly, without suspecting their fearsome seriousness. A look around us at this moment shows what the regression of bourgeois society into barbarism means. This world war is a regression into barbarism. The triumph of imperialism leads to the annihilation of civilization. At first, this happens sporadically for the duration of a modern war, but then when the period of unlimited wars begins it progresses toward its inevitable consequences. Today, we face the choice exactly as Friedrich Engels foresaw it a generation ago: either the triumph of imperialism and the collapse of all civilization as in ancient Rome, depopulation, desolation, degeneration – a great cemetery. Or the victory of socialism, that means the conscious active struggle of the international proletariat against imperialism and its method of war. This is a dilemma of world history, an either/or; the scales are wavering before the decision of the class-conscious proletariat. The future of civilization and humanity depends on whether or not the proletariat resolves manfully to throw its revolutionary broadsword into the scales. In this war imperialism has won. Its bloody sword of genocide has brutally tilted the scale toward the abyss of misery. The only compensation for all the misery and all the shame would be if we learn from the war how the proletariat can seize mastery of its own destiny and escape the role of the lackey to the ruling classes.

[Dimentio]

I don't believe in consumer power. It is firstly something which requires a large and wealthy middle class. Moreover, it is focusing on a moralistic approach which is hardly changing society, rather serving to legitimise the capitalist system itself.

[Rusty Shackleford]

ended up not watching it all the way through.

went into Federal Reserve crap and Ron Paul quoting.

why did you do this woody?


WHY?

[Dimentio]

ended up not watching it all the way through.

went into Federal Reserve crap and Ron Paul quoting.

why did you do this woody?


WHY?

I just read the description. It implied that the solution was conscious consumption, which is an incredibly lazy and inefficient solution.

[GPDP]

I just read the description. It implied that the solution was conscious consumption, which is an incredibly lazy and inefficient solution.

Not surprised in the slightest. This is likely aimed at middle-class petit-bourgeois liberals who are morally repulsed by the negatives of capitalism but due to their privilege and class interests would never consider any action beyond individual changes in consumption. Revolution is unthinkable; it is not even criticized. It is an option that by virtue of class interest does not even cross their minds.

[Dimentio]

Not surprised in the slightest. This is likely aimed at middle-class petit-bourgeois liberals who are morally repulsed by the negatives of capitalism but due to their privilege and class interests would never consider any action beyond individual changes in consumption. Revolution is unthinkable; it is not even criticized. It is an option that by virtue of class interest does not even cross their minds.

Sadly, that sort of behaviour have a spread effect. I have talked with cleaning ladies and industrial workers who are thinking in the same manner. I have even talked with communists(!) who believe that we could change capitalism by consumption.

[GPDP]

Sadly, that sort of behaviour have a spread effect. I have talked with cleaning ladies and industrial workers who are thinking in the same manner. I have even talked with communists(!) who believe that we could change capitalism by consumption.

Indeed, this is true, but I prefer to think workers are merely duped into internalizing such views, while the more privileged do so as a natural extension of their class standing. Workers have nothing to lose but their chains. Those above them actually run the risk of losing their privilege.

[Broletariat]

Rosa Luxemburg, the Junius Pamphlet, Chapter 1 (http://www.marxists.org/archive/luxemburg/1915/junius/ch01.htm):
I recently spoke to Zanthorus about it and here's what he had to say about that.

"When Luxemburg put forward the slogan in the Junius pamphlet, it was as an extension of her 'saturated markets' theses. That is, that capitalism could only grow by trading with non-capitalist areas of the world, and that with the creation of the world market capitalist society would henceforth be in a state of incurable stagnation, war and chaos (And that WWI marked the start of all this). The problems with Luxemburg's theory have been gone over plenty of times in debates over Marxist economics. Luxemburg ignores Marx's idea that consumption is a 'moment' of the totality of economic relations which constitutes production (Along with distribution and exchange) expressed in the original introduction to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (Now chapter 1 of the Grundrisse). Put quite simply, production is also consumption, the consumption of raw materials and means of production in order to create new goods, and it requires that the capitalist who wants to produce has to realise the surplus-value of another capitalist whose enterprise created those goods. Within capitalist society there will be a sector of production which produces goods which will be bought by capitalists to produce further goods, and the ability of this sector of production to realise surplus-value is not dependent on the ability of the workers to buy their goods, but of capitalists to buy them. The stats show that 90% of transactions in OECD economies are transactions from enterprise to enterprise rather than enterprise to consumer. Capitalism is increasingly a system of production for the sake of production which is only limited by the desire for capitalists to invest (Which in turn is limited by our old friend the rate of profit).

Of course, for empirical proof that Luxemburg was wrong, we can always look at the economic boom between the 40's and 60's. Many groups which had taken some kind of 'Luxemburgist' analyses tried to weasel around in various ways but in the end it all came down to the idea that crises could be averted by state spending, an explanation which showed the disturbing parallels between the Luxemburgist and Keynesians paradigms. It was also an explanation that in turn had no way of explaining the fact that the economy nose-dived again in the 70's.

Luxemburg did quote Engels for justification in The Junius Pamphlet, and Engels did (Along with August Bebel) predict that capitalism would collapse by 1898. However, the period from the 1870's to the 1890's saw what was known as the 'long depression' which led even stalwart defenders of capitalism to believe that the system was in crisis (The emergence of the economy from the crisis was also the context for the emergence of revisionism within the Second International). So Engels has something of an excuse that all the facts at the time would have led him to believe that the system was in decline (This is also the context in which some of Marx's more optimistic statements about proletarian revolution should be viewed).

To see the folly of predicting the immanent collapse of capitalism we can take a moment to bash those folks in the ICC (In a friendly manner of course). Their theory, based on Luxemburg's, is that capitalism has been in crisis since the end of the First World War, and that it has been leading us to barbarism since then, even though it's taken a fair bit longer than Luxemburg would've expected. Eventually in the late 80's, after about fifteen years of this doom-mongering, they came up with the idea that capitalism was in the phase of 'decomposition', the phase which would lead to the final destruction of either capitalism or humanity. So far we've been in the phase of 'decomposition' for a good twenty years and nothing much of interest has happened in that direction besides the collapse of the Eastern Bloc. This idea that capitalism is constantly on the edge of collapse has led the ICC to take a lot of strange positions, for example, they are absolutely against revolutionaries even becoming members of trade-unions. They also think that the era of counter-revolution induced by the triumph of Stalinism in Russia ended in the 60's, and have been saying since the 70's that the working-class' moment of triumph was just around the corner (I should probably note here for clarity that these criticisms are also the criticisms of the ICC made by the Internationalist Communist Tendency, and should probably initially be taken with a pinch of salt by anyone standing outside this particular sectarian debacle)."