capitalism | ZETEO

Brains, Literature, Disposable Selves

January 10, 2016 by Ed Mooney

The Self is Disposable, Isn’t It? Not for most of us for most of the time. But its reality can be brought into question. There are exotic cases of apparent persons who seem to lack a self. Bureaucracies and the structures capitalism seem to deflate any rich sense of self. And the splendor of brain science swallows our better judgment about the reality of selves. My previous Zeteo post, 01.03.2016, followed the incredible story of a girl of many disguises, […]

Categories: Ed Mooney, ZiR • Tags: capitalism, literature, love, philosophy, reading, science, theater

Leave a comment

Donald Trump the Fascist?

December 14, 2015 by fritztucker

Seemingly every statement regarding Donald Trump in recent weeks either explicitly or implicitly compares him to Hitler. It’s almost as though both social and mainstream media are trying to pay homage to Godwin’s Law, which humorously and tautologically states that any online discussion will eventually compare the subject to Nazi Germany. These comparisons highlight both the capacity and limitation of the American imagination. For these comparisons to have any meaning, however, historical facts must be addressed. It is true that Hitler was a uniquely effective rhetorician. Perhaps Trump is too. […]

Categories: Fritz Tucker, ZiLL • Tags: capitalism, civil rights, crime, death, ethics, History, immigration, India, law, literature, Narendra Modi, politics, race

Massacres, Slow Violence, Solidarity

December 6, 2015 by Ed Mooney

The massacres in Paris or Beirut, the stabbings and instant “justice-by-cop” in Israel, unabated slaughter in Syria or Yemen, or the crystal clear framing here in Zeteo of centuries of suffering attributable to brutal class warfare — if faced unblinkingly, all this can induce paralysis. Then we learn, within days, that three are murdered in Colorado Springs, and fourteen in San Bernadino. Slow-burning or explosive, the catastrophes seem to go on and on. Sad to say, if there’s a tropism […]

Categories: Ed Mooney, ZiR • Tags: capitalism, class warfare, crime, Marx, massacres, philosophy, solidarity

Class Warfare Poverty Death

December 1, 2015 by William Eaton

Out of the hundred million people living in Soviet Russia, we should be able get 90 million behind us. The others, there’s no talking with them, they have to be annihilated. — Bolshevik leader Grigory Zinoviev, September 1918 Results. Approximately 245 000 deaths in the United States in [the year] 2000 were attributable to low education, 176 000 to racial segregation, 162 000 to low social support, 133 000 to individual-level poverty, 119 000 to income inequality, and 39 000 to area-level poverty. — Sandro […]

Categories: William Eaton, ZiR • Tags: Bolsheviks, capitalism, death, disease, exploitation, hunger, immigration, minimum wage, poverty, Russia, Soviet Union

Fun, Football, and Carnality before Paris

November 15, 2015 by Ed Mooney

This post was largely finished before the Paris terror attacks. I criticized costumes that mock and mimic violence, writing, that these outfits “cut too close to the bone.” Those words of mid-week cut even deeper now. ♦ Halloween is over, but Fall Football isn’t. In his magisterial A Secular Age (45-6), Charles Taylor writes that Carnival and similar [Medieval] festivities, such as the feasts of misrule, or boy bishops, and the like [are] . . . periods in which the […]

Categories: Ed Mooney, ZiR • Tags: capitalism, children, politics

Paris, Terrorism, Religion, Justice

November 14, 2015 by William Eaton

The recent documentary about the Black Panthers called attention, among other things, to that group’s ten-point platform, which included such demands as “We Want Decent Housing Fit For The Shelter Of Human Beings” and “We Want Education That Teaches Us Our True History And Our Role In The Present-Day Society.” The Panthers were not a terrorist group; they engaged in demonstrations and political theater that at times included unconcealed weapons. They wanted revolution, but—like many Sixties leftwing groups in the US, […]

Categories: William Eaton, ZiLL • Tags: capitalism, class warfare, justice, Paris, religion, terrorism, Third World War, working class

Leave a comment

Halloween as Social Movement

November 2, 2015 by fritztucker

In Dancing in the Streets: A History of Collective Joy (Holt Paperbacks, 2007), Barbara Ehrenreich writes about the evolution of carnivals; from tribal societies masking and dancing to manufacture group solidarity (Intro, Ch. 1); to feudal festivals that challenged oppressive gender and class relations (Ch. 4). Writes Ehrenreich: Whatever social category you had been boxed into–male or female, rich or poor–carnival was a chance to escape from it. No aspect of carnival has attracted more scholarly attention than the tradition of mocking the powerful, […]

Categories: Fritz Tucker, ZiR • Tags: art, books, capitalism, childhood, children, civil rights, gender, History, homosexuality, law, literature, love, politics, social justice, women

Film, Marxism: Tanner, Berger, Jonas

October 13, 2015 by William Eaton

If now largely ignored, Alain Tanner and John Berger’s 1976 film Jonas qui aura 25 ans en l’an 2000 (For Jonas Who Will Be 25 In The Year 2000), remains warm, charming, lovable.[1] And the movie is particularly hard not to like now when the hopes and “Marxist humanist” analysis underlying it have come to seem a Romantic pipe dream. “[A]lles Heilige wird entweiht, und die Menschen sind endlich gezwungen, ihre Lebensstellung,” Marx and Engels wrote in the not-Marxist-humanist […]

Categories: William Eaton, ZiLL • Tags: Alain Tanner, capitalism, dreams, film, Frederic Jameson, French, Jean-Luc Godard, John Berger, Marx, Marxism, politics

Leave a comment

Eyes on the Street

October 5, 2015 by fritztucker

Perhaps Jane Jacobs’ most acclaimed contribution to urban studies in The Death and Life of Great American Cities is her “eyes on the street” theory. “[T]here must be eyes upon the street, eyes belonging to those we might call the natural proprietors of the street . . . to insure the safety of both residents and strangers” (1992, p. 35). According to Jacobs, this high-density street life not only provides safety, but a shared sense of civic duty. People must take a modicum of […]

Categories: Fritz Tucker, ZiR • Tags: books, capitalism, civil rights, crime, History, law, literature, New York City, politics, race, reading, social justice