[p2p-research] Capitalism's Self-Inflicted Apocalypse by Michael Parenti

[Kevin Carson]

On 8/15/09, Paul D. Fernhout <pdfernhout at kurtz-fernhout.com> wrote:
> Someone just sent me this link; some people here might like it.
>
>  "Capitalism's Self-Inflicted Apocalypse" by Michael Parenti
> http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/Parenti/Capitalism%27s_Apocalypse.html

It never ceases to annoy me that people like Parenti take the "free
market" rhetoric of corporate capitalist apologetics at face value:

>   In sum, free-market corporate capitalism is by its nature a disaster
> waiting to happen.

"free market corporate capitalism" is by its nature a contradiction in
terms.  It is corporate capitalist precisely to the extent that it is
not a free market.

Condemning corporate capitalism as the 'free market" is about as silly
as denouncing Stalinist Russia as "socialism"--something Parenti no
doubt would object to loudly and strenuously from know-nothings on the
right.

Nevertheless, the following is brilliant as a description of Sloanist
mass production:

Its essence is the transformation of living nature into
> mountains of commodities and commodities into heaps of dead capital.

-- 
Kevin Carson
Center for a Stateless Society http://c4ss.org
Mutualist Blog:  Free Market Anti-Capitalism
http://mutualist.blogspot.com
Studies in Mutualist Political Economy
http://www.mutualist.org/id47.html
Organization Theory:  A Libertarian Perspective
http://mutualist.blogspot.com/2005/12/studies-in-anarchist-theory-of.html