In this section we will diachronically and comparatively discuss different economic and political organizations of sociocultural systems. We will further examine the infrastructural causes underlying these evolutionary organizations and the implications for the 21st century.
For more detailed definitions, consult:
Harris, Marvin. Culture, People, Nature: An Introduction to General Anthropology, 2000.
Harris, Marvin. Cultural Materialism: The Struggle for A Science of Culture, 1979.
Capital==>Commodities/Services==> Capital
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Principles of Capitalism
1) The necessity of Perpetual growth (Economic Growth)
2) The creation of need
3) The creation of dissatisfaction
4) The necessity of unemployment (The creation of a reserve labor source)
5) The neccessity of externalization of cost (socializing risk and privatizing profit)
6) The quantification of human and natural resources into measurable economic units.
7] The necessity of aggression, competition, and the survival of the mightiest.
8] Amorality
9) The necessity of Standardization (harmonization)
10) The valuing of scarcity
Purpose: To minimize cost and maximize profit
"... if you want to be a public figure, you have to serve people in power. After all, objective power is not in the political system. It's somewhere else, always,. Except in a totalitarian state, where it happens to be in the political system. That's what a totalitarian state is. But in a society like ours, or like eighteenth-century America, there's been a split between objective power, meaning the power to decide what happens in the society--investment decisions, production, and all that kind of stuff. That's theoretically separate from political power; it's not really separate, because the people have objective power also take political power. But it means that if you want to gain political power, you have to know how to serve them. There are various ways of doing this." (Noam Chomsky (interview) 1994 in Society, Language, and the University (Pp. 152) by Sol Sapporta).
In light of our class discussion, the handouts, and the passages below, try to critically answer the following questions:
Noam Chomsky Wrote:
The Four Freedoms... President Roosevelt announced in January 1941 that the Allies were fighting for freedom of speech, freedom of worship, freedom from want, and freedom from fear.[1]
... Roosevelt spoke of Four Freedoms, but not of the Fifth and most important: the freedom to rob and exploit. Infringement of the four official freedoms in enemy territory always evokes much agonized concern. Not, however, in our ample domains. Here, as the historical record demonstrates with great clarity, it is only when the fifth and fundamental freedom is threatened that a sudden and short-lived concern for other forms of freedom manifest itself, to be sustained for as long as it is needed to justify the righteous use of force and violence to restore the Fifth Freedom, the one that really counts. [2]
The central point was lucidly explained in an internal document written in 1948 by George Kennan, head of the State Department planning staff in the early post-World War II period:
... we have about 50% of the world's wealth, but only 6.3% of its population... In this situation, we cannot fail to be the object of envy and resentment. Our real task in the coming period is to devise a pattern of relationships which will permit us to maintain this position of disparity without positive detriment to our national security. To do so, we will have to dispense with all sentimentality and day-dreaming; and our attention will have to be concentrated everywhere on our immediate national objectives. We need not deceive ourselves that we can afford today the luxury of altruism and world-benefaction... We should cease to talk about vague and--for the Far East--unreal objectives such as human rights, and democratization. The day is not far off when we are going to have to deal in straight power concepts. The less we are then hampered by idealistic slogans, the better.[3]
This prescription is noteworthy not only for its clarity and forthrightness, but also because of its source, one of the most thoughtful and humane of US planners, who left his position not long after because he was considered not sufficiently tough-minded for this harsh world.
Kennan extended the same thinking to the Western Hemisphere in a brief for Latin American ambassadors in 1950. He observed that a major concern of American foreign policy must be "The protection of our raw materials"--in fact, more broadly, the material and human resources that are "ours" by right. To protect our resources, we must combat a dangerous heresy which, as US intelligence noted, had been spreading through Latin America for many years: "The wide acceptance of the idea that the government has direct responsibility for the welfare of the people...." [4]
From whom must we protect "our raw materials"? For the public, throughout our history we have been defending ourselves from one or another Evil Empire... In the real world, the enemy is the indigenous population which may attempt to use domestic resources for their own purpose, thus joining what the President called "the monolithic and ruthless conspiracy" to thwart our ends; President Kennedy, in this case. [4]
Chomsky, Noam. Turning the Tide: U.S. Intervention in Central America and the
Struggle for Peace. South End Press, 1985.
1. Page 45.
2. Page 47.
3. Page 48.
4. Page 50.