what is capitalism really?

[peaccenicked]

What is CAPITALI$M, Really?
"Capitalism is an economic system in which the means of production are privately owned." Everyone knows this. But just because most businesses are privately owned in this country does not mean what we have is really capitalism. And while more and more people push for privatization of more and more industries-- essentially trying to attain one hundred percent privately owned businesses-- we are moving more toward that definition. However, when one examines the principles that capitalism was founded on, one starts to wonder just what kind of economic system we're really immersed in.
If you're familiar with Adam Smith's The Wealth of Nations (1776), you know he thought the system of capitalism would have the business "man" being "led by an invisible hand to promote an end which was no part of his intention." Is that what really happens in America? Sure businesses fail, but never a corporation as big as Chrysler. If they mess up and get into trouble, instead of being weeded out of the system by market forces, the Government comes to their aid subverting the darwinian process of competition. Even my Grolier's multimedia encyclopedia knows "The crux of Smith's argument was that the economic order should be as independent as possible from the political order." This is not the capitalism we live under, we're not even close to that.

We are told that the market dictates what will be made, who will make it and how it will be distributed. But the idea that capitalism can work depends on educated and rational consumers, and that is extremely contestable in this day and age. Today, it seems a corporation can but whatever it wants into a box, and as long as it spends enough money on slick advertising campaigns, people will buy it. They could sell cow manure in a bag, and as long as they market it right, they can command premium prices for it (call it Organatech Natural Fertilizer, and you've turned something that someone paid you to remove from their land into a hot commodity).

People buy all sorts of things all the time that aren't worth anything, and I can't figure out why they don't realize they're being scammed. My Father bought a "New Dodge" Stratus. The car's warranty just ended, it had less than 30,000 miles on it, and the air conditioning compressor went out. It cost him $950, plus he had to rent a car while they worked on it, which cost him close to another thousand. It wasn't the first time he had to rent a car because of the Dodge, either. Once, it was recalled under warranty, and they didn't even give him a car to use. The "New Dodge" cars might look better than the old ones, but if this is any indication of how they're made, they still suck. I went over some railroad tracks in it the other day, and I thought the front end was going to fall off.

In capitalism, the system is supposed to be ordered so that no person or combination of persons can control the market place. Well, let's see, have you ever taken a look at who owns the media? There's a handful of people making the decisions for almost everything you see. It's not exactly a monopoly, but it may as well be.


More often than not, capitalism in reality is based more on collusion rather than competition. As is the case with ADM and the price fixing scandal, it is obvious that many companies commit similar acts of conspiracy or other trust violations. And in a society that values freedom and accepts it as given, rarely is the question of choice ever scrutinized. Do we really have a choice if we get to choose between Coke or Pepsi? In that case perhaps, but it's not much of a choice. We can drink RC or IBC, or water, but with Pepsi's recent acquisition of Seagram's, perhaps it's only a matter of time between the first choice is the only choice.
Freedom is not given, it must be taken. If you think you have a choice, try boycotting a company like Procter & Gamble, Beatrice foods, or perhaps, Microsoft and see how far you get. If you know all their subsidiaries, you'll find its hard, even for seasoned anti-consumers. For instance, if you're keen you'll notice my e-mail address is a hotmail account. Hotmail = Microsoft. I'm typing on a computer with Windows 95, but using Netscape's Communicator (at least to write this page). But the choice between Netscape and Microsoft's Internet Explorer is a lot like the choice between Coke and Pepsi.

The market is supposed to reward companies that profit, and punish inefficiency, since inefficient businesses should theoretically be put out of business. This again, does not necessarily hold true, depending on what perspective you consider efficiency from. For instance, it is rather inefficient to feed grains to cows which are ruminants, in order to fatten them so that they can be killed and eaten. Because of the laws of thermodynamics, something like 94% of the protein is lost, either excreted, used for energy, i.e., muscle movement, or to grow hair etc.,. Without the government subsidizing water for the beef industry, it's said that a one pound hamburger could cost as much as $32 dollars. Yet the government makes such inefficiency possible, and the USDA does everything it can to promote the consumption of meat.

We live in a society we call a democracy, which in reality is more like an oligarchy or a plutocracy. And we live under an economic system we call capitalism, but in reality it's more like socialism for the rich. There are more mergers and acquisitions than I can keep up with, and corporate power is finding itself strangled by fewer and fewer hands. All of this might make you wonder what's stopping them now that a few large corporation control virtually ever aspect of most people's lives.

[Fuck A Capitalist]

In this country there is no competition which is an essential part of capitilism because competition is supposed to cause the producers to lower the price of a good or service to its lowest amount. All the large corporations conspire together and are backed politically by the politicians they have in their pockets so that no other company can be set up. for example if you wanted to make your own car and begin producing and distributing it all the large company's like ford and gmc which make alot of other cars will not let you operate and have the influence in government to stop your production.

[Supermodel]

I think the big corporations are going to continue to push for being let off the hook, bailed out, tax advantaged and crooked so long as our politicians are bought and sold by them.

I really pine for the type of government made up of people who really wanted to do the right thing for the country, not secure a fat salary once they quit elected office.

It's not just elected officials either, most cabinet and sub-cabinet appointments are what I would term "the fox in charge of the henhouse" like putting oil guys in at interior and energy, and insurers in at HHS and HUD.

How do we get the word to them that we simply demand better from our public officials?

(Edited by Supermodel at 12:30 am on Mar. 12, 2002)

[Nateddi]

Peacenick, did you write that?

When? I heard that your father died recently, is this true?

Anyway, I was bored at school today so I decided to actually read it, good job!

[peaccenicked]

No.
I got it from the Web. Somebody letting off steam.
Not bad. My dad Fredy obit on my site.died Dec. His besat friend. Last week.
Here is the abituary for our friend Hamish. He used to send me his translations of Gramsci into English.
Hamish Henderson

Poet, translator, Highland folklorist, campaigner for Scottish parliament and guiding light behind the Edinburgh fringe festival

Timothy Neat
Monday March 11, 2002
The Guardian

The tryst of Hamish Henderson, who has died aged 82, was with Scotland. It was a meeting of high consequence - across the 20th century, in darkness and in sun, Scotland informed all that Henderson was as a man and a poet. In his great sequence of second world war poems, Elegies For The Dead In Cyrenaica, he asks "that we should not disfigure ourselves/With villainy of hatred". It is the MacDonalds of Glencoe that he presents as exemplars. And in his Nelson Mandela freedom song, Rivonia, when Henderson sings, "Spear of the nation unbroken", it is to Scotland as much as South Africa that he refers.
Like Burns, Henderson was, first and last, a poet, and poetry was for them both language rising into song, responsible to moment, people, place and joy. Not for Henderson Auden's conceit that poetry never made anything happen; he believed that "poetry becomes people" and changes nations, that poetry elevates and gives expression to the deepest and best being of mankind, that poetry is a measure that extends far beyond the written word, that poetry is pleasure and a call to arms. As he states in his prologue to the Elegies:

Let my words knit what now we lack

The demon and the heritage

And fancy strapped to logic's rock.

A chastened wantonness, a bit

That sets on song a discipline,

A sensuous austerity.

It is the kind of vision that Charles Rennie Mackintosh expressed in stone and wood and glass: even as a young man, this was a poet who spoke with Druidic authority.

Henderson was born in Blairgowrie, Perthshire, on Armistice Day. His mother, Janet, had spent the first world war as a nurse on the western front. His father was an officer, but who exactly remains a mystery. His early years were spent in a small cottage at the Spittal of Glenshee. His grandmother was a staunch Episcopalian Jacobite, while his mother was a beautiful singer of Gaelic songs; the French national anthem was her party piece. Tradition, song, story, passing tinkers and highland chiefs, a travelling highland dance teacher, Latin and Greek - these were the normal and marvellous facts of Henderson's boyhood and, with an inherited genius for language, he soon became conscious that he should be "a remembrancer", a poet of his highland people and of Scotland.

Spring quickens.

In the Shee Water I'm fishing.

High on Whaup's mountain time heaps stone on stone.

The speech and silence of Christ's world is Gaelic,

And youth on age, the tree climbs from the bone.

The sense of responsibility Henderson felt for Scotland was enhanced by the urban misery he witnessed during the years of the great depression. He remembered being "cleared" from a house in Blairgowrie and "going away" - first to Ireland and then south-west England, where his mother found work in various big houses. When she became ill, he was sent to Lendrick school, near Bishops Teignton, in south Devon. When she died, he won scholarships - first to Dulwich College in London, then a state scholarship to Downing College, Cambridge, where he studied German and French. These institutions provided Henderson with a superb education and during holidays propelled him out "on to the road", where he experienced a strange, inspiring, orphaned freedom. He walked the streets of Glasgow, he wandered the Highlands and islands; he busked the streets of Paris; he was a silent presence as great crowds in Berlin cheered Hitler to the echo.

During the summer of 1939, after speaking in the Cambridge Union, Henderson was hired by the Quakers to work as a courier, bringing Jews out of Germany. In September that year he tried to enlist in the Cameron Highlanders but, on account of poor eyesight, was told to await call-up. In 1940 he joined the Pioneer Corps and was quickly promoted to sergeant. He spent the Battle of Britain building defences along the south coast, and began to write serious poetry, make ballads, and collect the songs being created, almost daily, by his fellow pioneers.

After the war a selection appeared in his first book, Ballads Of World War II - A Collection Of Songs In Five Languages. A number were reconditioned and finalised by Henderson himself - notably The D-Day Dodgers, about British soldiers in Italy. Former captain Denis Healey recently sang it on television and it brought him to tears.

Commissioned in 1941, he then worked as an intelligence officer in the Western desert, in Sicily and throughout mainland Italy. Promoted to captain in 1943, he fought with the partisans, captured and interrogated numerous prisoners, was mentioned in dispatches, and personally accepted the surrender of Italy from Marshal Graziani. He kept the signed document in his pocket till his death.

Henderson fell in love with the people, landscape and culture of Italy. He embraced Dante and living folk tradition, Montale and Botticelli, Leopardi and Antonio Gramsci all at once as living realities in the mountains above Florence. The companionship, courage and humanity of the partisans confirmed his commitment as a political thinker and an artist. He saw Gramsci's Sardinian vision as deeply relevant to the situation in Scotland, and he became what he remained - a libertarian, international socialist activist: a poet located by a place and a people.

After the war Henderson returned to Cambridge, then to Edinburgh, to South Uist and to Carradale, where, amid Atlantic tranquillity, he completed his Desert War poems - 10 elegies and one "heroic song". Only their ambition, their complexity and their essentially Scottish viewpoint prevented them from being recognised as pre-eminent 20th-century war poetry - on a par with that produced by Wilfred Owen a generation earlier. Elegies For The Dead In Cyrenaica won the Somerset Maugham award for poetry in 1949. EP Thompson responded: "I greet you with humility, you are that rare man, a poet . . . I hope you have had bad reviews from the culture boys, because their approval today is cause only for shame. Remember always who you are writing for: the people of Glasgow, Halifax, Dublin . . . And you must not forget that your songs and ballads are not trivialities - they are quite as important as your elegies."

The Maugham prize brought Henderson £660. For the first time in his life he had money, £10 of which he put on the Grand National - and won. At odds of 66-1, he doubled his fortune. He gave up his job as a district secretary for the Workers Educational Association in Northern Ireland, spent a wild weekend with the Behans in Dublin, then set off for Italy to translate the prison letters of Gramsci.

These translations were a remarkable achievement. He was lionised by the Italian left but became involved in controversy which ended with his deportation as an unwanted alien. Before this happened, he had spent some time as a guest of the Olivetti family - of typewriter fame - who introduced him to the portable tape recorder. Henderson immediately saw its potential and returned to Scotland with a mission. He would record for posterity the folk music of Scotland.

He suspected the tradition was still strong, but what he found was better than he or anyone imagined. The great songs and singers were there in their hundreds - in tinker tents, bothies and stables, in miners' clubs, on fishing boats and in farmers' kitchens. The second phase of Henderson's life had begun; he became a folklorist and, in 1951, with Calum MacLean, the Gaelic scholar, he established the school of Scottish studies at the University of Edinburgh.

Over the next 40 years, Henderson made distinguished contributions to folk scholarship and, when he retired from teaching in 1987, the school allowed him to retain his room in George Square, where he continued his work almost until his death.

Henderson, however, was never a conventional academic; he was unable to divide his life or his art into compartments and, while employed as a lecturer, ceaselessly involved himself in cultural and political activities that have, over the years, had a profound effect on his nation. It may well be that the new Scotland - with its parliament, its renewed cultural confidence, its renewed dominance of British politics - owes more to Henderson than anyone else. Although not invited to the opening of the Scottish parliament, he was delighted that one of his followers, Sheena Wellington, stole the show with her rendition of A Man's A Man For A' That. The folk revival was, in effect, the revival of the Scots people.

In 1951, Henderson was instrumental in creating the first Edinburgh people's festival - as "the Scottish underbelly" to the "official" international festival. After its demise in 1954, this people's festival transformed itself into what is now the festival fringe. It was Henderson who discovered Jeannie Robertson, the Stewarts of Blair, and the "neolithic" Travelling Stewarts of Remarstaig, Sutherland. These discoveries set in train an explosive development of Scottish and Celtic music that had worldwide repercussions. At the same time, Henderson emerged as one of the few intellectuals in Scotland able and willing to take on Hugh MacDiarmid: their public confrontations, particularly about the literary value of the folk tradition, were seminal and, in retrospect, these two very different poets can be seen to stand as the twin piers of "revolutionary thought" in modern Scotland, archetypal representatives of Apollonian and Dionysian energy. They were Robespierre and Danton: MacDiarmid the small, ascetic, atheistic Presbyterian, Henderson the Falstaffian, Episcopal libertarian.

Always wary of pretension, Henderson was never at ease in Edinburgh's literary circles, but he was entirely at ease in Sandy Bell's bar - a working men's pub which he sought to turn into a 20th-century version of an an 18th-century howff, where music, song, intellectual debate and eccentricity flourished. After meetings at Sandy's, his study in the school would fill with singers, musicians and scholars.

He nurtured life and well-being, he had strong opinions, but he was always keen to know the news from elsewhere. He became a highly original translator of poetry - from Gaelic, French, German, Latin, Greek: always new poetry - much of it into Scots. Of course, he had enemies, and some pour contempt on Henderson's "lack of solid achievement", but he knew that his mission to revalidate the oral tradition was important beyond any measure of published articles.

Many of his recordings remain unheard and uncatalogued, but like his collaboration with Calum MacLean, they are a resource that will fuel centuries to come. When MacLean died tragically young, Sorley MacLean wrote an elegy that speaks also for Hamish: "There is many a poor man in Scotland/Whose spirit and name you raised:/You lifted the humble/Whom the age put aside . . ."

His books include several collections of poetry and songs, The Armstrong Nose, a huge volume of selected letters, and Alias MacAlias, "writings on songs, folk and literature". To his surprise, in the late 1980s, Henderson was offered an OBE by the Thatcher government. To no one's surprise, he rejected it.

Henderson was, like Burns, a Various Man, but he was never one to be bought by the "high heid yins". He was a staunch supporter of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, but never a pacifist. He honoured Field-Marshal Montgomery and Major-General Tam Wimberley; he admired Churchill's genius; he recognised the the greatness of Stalin and the sacrifices of the Soviet peoples. He was a fervent anti-racist and was arrested for his participation in the campaigns that ended the Springboks' rugby union tour in 1970. He supported the Clydeside shipworkers and coal miners; and he fought for the Scottish parliament. After the terrorist attacks on New York, he wondered about the lives of William Wallace, Robin Hood and Charles Edward Stuart, and their adversaries - Edward I, the Sheriff of Nottingham, Butcher Cumberland; and how many of today's murderous problems seem to be prefigured in his Eighth Elegy.

As Henderson's university career drew towards a close, he collaborated with me in the making of a series of films. Notable among them was The Tree of Liberty: The Songs of Robert Burns, which won the prize for best documentary at the Celtic international festival of film and television in 1987. Then there was Play Me Something, a feature film about storytelling which won the Europa prize for best film at the Barcelona film festival in 1989, in which Henderson starred alongside John Berger and Tilda Swinton.

A brilliant talker, Henderson had a natural genius for radio - unfortunately, BBC Scotland, for the best part of 50 years, determinedly kept this "dangerous man" at distance. They made one programme about his war experiences, The Dead, The Innocent, but they should have done much more and it is hugely ironic that, while Henderson's cultural values today permeate all aspects of Scottish broadcasting, the institution washed its hands of the man whose vision now shapes its very being. Such contrary forces, of course, helped make Henderson what he was, and will, in future, shape the legend this man is already becoming.

Sunshowers over the estuary

Cormorant black on the pale sands yonder

Taste of dank earth on my tongue

Trembling oak-leaves courtin' the Sun

And the twin dragons, life and death'

Jousting thegither under the Maypole.

Change elegy into hymn, remake -

Don't fail again...

He leaves a wife, Ketzel (Felizitas Schmidt), and two daughters.

· Hamish Henderson, folklorist and poet, born November 11 1919; died March 8 2002