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Wednesday, March 18, 2009

let it die 

Rushkoff is an odd bird. From what I've gleaned from a quick perusal of his writings he seems to advocate some sort of market anarchist or mutualist economic system and defines his enemy as "corporatism". I can't see what distinction he makes between "corporatism" and "capitalism", and suspect it may just be a rhetorical choice to avoid getting dismissed as a leftist.

At any rate, he's got an interesting piece up that's worth a read:

if anything, it’s even more important for us to come to grips with the fact that the system in peril is not a natural one, or even one that we should be attempting to revive and restore. The thing that is dying—the corporatized model of commerce—has not, nor has it ever been, supportive of the real economy. It wasn’t meant to be. And before we start lamenting its demise or, worse, spending good money after bad to resuscitate it, we had better understand what it was for, how it nearly sucked us all dry, and why we should put it out of our misery.

...

President Obama may be smarter than most of us, but he’s still attempting to rescue the very institutions that robbed us in the first place. He’s not a socialist, as conservatives may be arguing, but he is a corporatist. Using future tax dollars to fund government job programs is one thing. Using future tax dollars to give banks more money to lend out at interest is robbing from the poor to pay the rich to rob from the poor.

As painful as it might be to watch, and as irritating as it might be to those with shrinking retirement savings, the collapse of the centralized corporate economy is ultimately a good thing. It makes room for a real economy to rise up in its place.

...

Deprived of centralized banks and corporations, we’ll be forced to do things again. And in the process, we’ll find out that these institutions were not our benefactors at all. They were never meant to be. They were invented to mediate transactions between people, and extract the value that would have passed between us. Far from making commerce or industry more efficient, they served to turn the real world into a set of speculative assets, and real people into debtors.

The current financial crisis is the best opportunity we have had in a very long time for a bloodless revolution against the faceless fascism under which we have been living, unaware, for much too long. Let us seize the day.

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