CAPITALIST SYSTEMIC POVERTY

CAITLIN JOHNSTONE—The solution, obviously, is to stop this before it happens, because if it’s allowed to happen it will be far too late to do anything about it. People are going to have to wake up out of the propaganda matrix and take power away from the billionaire class, and that must necessarily include taking control of automation technologies. Artificial intelligence and automation are far too consequential for their future to be determined by a few billionaires who are only billionaires because they can think like a machine better than other people can.

PATRICE GREANVILLE—So the capitalists’ social, and, above all, political problem (as production is no longer an issue due to advances in science and technology) is the privately owned megacorporation’s built-in unresolvable tension (contradiction) between modern industrialism’s capacity to produce and the stingy way in which the ouput is distributed, a mode that resembles more and more a form of neofeudalism. IMAGE: The Walton heirs.

C J HOPKINS—“Self-radicalization” is a growing problem, and not just among Islamic terrorists. “Radicalism” in any form that opposes or questions global Capitalism, Neoliberalism, and other Western values, is spreading like a mass psychological disorder (see Jonathan Rauch’s recent article in The Atlantic, where he diagnoses the American public’s pathological resentment of the political class). Like the child with Oppositional Defiant Disorder, sometimes even the non-terrorist terrorist — or whatever type of “self-radicalized” person — doesn’t even realize he’s becoming a terrorist, or a non-terrorist terrorist, until it’s too late.

PHILIP A. FARRUGGIO—At my first marriage, we rented the ‘ walk in ‘ apartment of a two family house owned by an absentee landlord. This was in Brooklyn N.Y and our illustrious landlord lived in New Jersey. As shared in a previous column of mine, one day my wife told me that while she was giving a bath to our baby boy, there were giant bugs coming out of the drain. I immediately called Frank, the landlord (a fellow Italian-American, but ethnic ties mean squat to landlords) and told him of this problem. He was reassuring by telling me that he would come by over the weekend and put some Chlordane down the drain to solve the problem.

PAUL TREANOR—Libertarianism is part of the Anglo-American liberal tradition in political philosophy. It is a development of classic liberalism, and not a separate category from it. It is specifically associated with the United States, and to a lesser extent with Britain and its former ‘white colonies’ (Canada, Australia, New Zealand). Many libertarian authors know only North American political culture and society. They claim universal application for libertarianism, but it remains culture-bound. For instance, some libertarians argue by quoting the US Constitution – apparently without realising that it only applies in the USA. Most online material on libertarianism contrasts it to ‘liberalism’, but that is also culturally specific.