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joncha
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North of FOPOG
Jan 2003
time: 21:33
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quote:
Originally posted by Ned
So what if Marx predicted the next Ice Age. Marx was not God.
A lot of what Marx had to say about capitalism has got to be put to a lie by the reality of the USA. Production is high. Things are cheap. Everyone is taken care of, including old people. We are trending, rapidly trending, towards that utopia Marx envisioned.
Given their prosperity in today's America, why would any worker want to "revolt?" |
Wow. Which America do you live in? The one with all the happy homeless people, I guess. Where everyone is in love with their minimum wage jobs, thinks their level of personal debt is just fine, and doesn't worry about paying their hospital bills if they get sick. I guess noone in your USA protests the government or goes on strike for better working conditions, either.
I think, if anything, conditions in the US show that Marx was right. To me, anyway, it shows all the signs of an advanced capitalist country in decay. One look at the latest "jobless recovery" ( or is it "job-loss" now) should be proof enough.
jon.
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Ned
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of Aptos, CA
Oct 1999
time: 21:33
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Jon, and here we have a glimpse of life in a communist paradise:
Girls for Sale
By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF
Published: January 17, 2004
Naka Nathaniel/NYTimes.com
Srey Mom
OIPET, Cambodia
One thinks of slavery as an evil confined to musty sepia photographs. But there are 21st-century versions of slaves as well, girls like Srey Neth.
I met Srey Neth, a lovely, giggly wisp of a teenager, here in the wild smuggling town of Poipet in northwestern Cambodia. Girls here are bought and sold, but there is an important difference compared with the 19th century: many of these modern slaves will be dead of AIDS by their 20's.
Some 700,000 people are trafficked around the world each year, many of them just girls. They form part of what I believe will be the paramount moral challenge we will face in this century: to address the brutality that is the lot of so many women in the developing world. Yet it's an issue that gets little attention and that most American women's groups have done shamefully little to address.
Poipet, 220 miles on bouncy roads from Phnom Penh, is a dusty collection of dirt alleys lined with brothels, where teenage girls clutch at any man walking by. It has a reputation as one of the wildest places in Cambodia, an anything-goes town ruled by drugs, gangs, gambling and prostitution.
The only way to have access to the girls is to appear to be a customer. So I put out the word that I wanted to meet young girls and stayed at the seedy $8-a-night Phnom Pich Guest House — and a woman who is a pimp soon brought Srey Neth to my room.
Srey Neth claimed to be 18 but looked several years younger. She insisted at first (through my Khmer interpreter) that she was free and not controlled by the guesthouse. But soon she told her real story: a female cousin had arranged her sale and taken her to the guesthouse. Now she was sharing a room with three other prostitutes, and they were all pimped to guests.
"I can walk around in Poipet, but only with a close relative of the owner," she said. "They keep me under close watch.They do not let me go out alone. They're afraid I would run away."
Why not try to escape at night?
"They would get me back, and something bad would happen. Maybe a beating. I heard that when a group of girls tried to escape, they locked them in the rooms and beat them up."
"What about the police?" I asked. "Couldn't you call out to the police for help?"
"The police wouldn't help me because they get bribes from the brothel owners," Srey Neth said, adding that senior police officials had come to the guesthouse for sex with her.
I asked Srey Neth how much it would cost to buy her freedom. She named an amount equivalent to $150.
"Do you really want to leave?" I asked. "Are you sure you wouldn't come back to this?"
She had been watching TV and listlessly answering my questions. Now she turned abruptly and snorted. "This is a hell," she said sharply, speaking with passion for the first time. "You think I want to do this?"
Another girl, Srey Mom, grabbed at me as I walked down the street. She wouldn't let go, tugging me toward the inner depths of her brothel — but she looked so young and pitiable that I couldn't help thinking that she really wanted me to tug her away.
So I did. I paid the owner $8 to spring her for the evening and then took her away for an interview.
The owner let Srey Mom go out unsupervised, it turned out, partly because she had been a prostitute for several years and was trusted to return — and partly because her dark complexion meant that she was of little value anyway. The brothel sold her to men for just $2.50, compared with the $10 commanded by the lighter-skinned Srey Neth.
I asked Srey Mom what her freedom would cost. Payment of about $70 in debts to her brothel owner, she said. Two girls in her brothel had been freed after they found boyfriends who paid their debts, she said, and she spoke of her longing to see her sisters and the rest of her family in her village on the other side of Cambodia.
"Do you really want to leave the brothel?" I asked.
"I love myself," she answered simply. "I do not want to let my life be destroyed by what I'm doing now."
That's when I made a firm decision I'd been toying with for some time: I would try to buy freedom for these two girls and return them to their families. I'll tell you in my column on Wednesday what happens next.
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Kidicious
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Diety of Kidiverse
Mar 2003
time: 21:33
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The Marxist theory of the business cycle is very accurate for the recent past. You have the Asian Financial Crisis, Japanese Deflationary Recession, recent recession in the US, and what is happening now in China. All of these were caused by over-investment and improvements in productivity.
quote:
The enormous power, inherent in the factory system, of expanding by jumps, and the dependence of that system on the markets of the world, necessarily beget feverish production, followed by over-filling of the markets, whereupon contraction of the markets brings on crippling of production. The life of modern industry becomes a series of periods of moderate activity, prosperity, over-production, crisis and stagnation. The uncertainty and instability to which machinery subjects the employment, and consequently the conditions of existence, of the operatives become normal, owing to these periodic changes of the industrial cycle. Except in the periods of prosperity, there rages between the capitalists the most furious combat for the share of each in the markets. This share is directly proportional to the cheapness of the. product. Besides the rivalry that this struggle begets in the application of improved machinery for replacing labour-power, and of new methods of production, there also comes a time in every industrial cycle, when a forcible reduction of wages beneath the value of labour-power, is attempted for the purpose of cheapening commodities.
A necessary condition, therefore, to the growth of the number of factory hands, is a proportionally much more rapid growth of the amount of capital invested in mills. This growth, however, is conditioned by the ebb and flow of the industrial cycle. It is, besides, constantly interrupted by the technical progress that at one time virtually supplies the place of new workmen, at another, actually displaces old ones. This qualitative change in mechanical industry continually discharges hands from the factory, or shuts its doors against the fresh stream of recruits, while the purely quantitative extension of the factories absorbs not only the men thrown out of work, but also fresh contingents. The workpeople are thus continually both repelled and attracted, hustled from pillar to post, while, at the same time, constant changes take place in the sex, age, and skill of the levies. |
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Ned
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of Aptos, CA
Oct 1999
time: 21:33
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ELEANOR HALL: While counting is still continuing, a fairly clear picture is now emerging out of the results of Sunday's elections in Cambodia.
The ruling Cambodian People's Party, led by Prime Minister Hun Sen, will remain the Party of government, with around 52 per cent of the vote, but it may not have secured enough seats in Parliament to govern on its own, and the other leading parties are so far refusing to join it in coalition.
The royalist Funcinpec Party, which was the junior coalition party in the previous government, is refusing to commit to another partnership with the Peoples' Party, and the leaders of the Sam Rainsy Party, which appears to have won about 20 per cent of the vote, are refusing to be part of any administration in which Hun Sen is prime minister.
International election monitors though, say they're "reasonably satisfied" that the poll was free and fair and that there was far less intimidation and violence than during previous elections.
But as Hamish Robertson reports, not all observers of the Cambodian political scene are so upbeat, and some deny that Cambodia is actually a democracy in any meaningful sense.
HAMISH ROBERTSON: Despite the efforts of the United Nations and the international community, the attempts to encourage the growth of democracy in Cambodia over the past 10 years haven't inspired much confidence.
And although last Sunday's poll was the third election held in Cambodia since the 1991 Paris Peace Agreement, human rights agencies claim that even this one was held against a background of continuing abuses by the ruling Cambodian People's Party which, they say, is determined to hang onto power.
According to Human Rights Watch, intimidation and coercion remain widespread, especially in the countryside, with elections conducted in a climate of fear. Despite widespread public revulsion at the culture of corruption amongst government officials, many Cambodians are simply too frightened to vote against the ruling party, as well as lacking sufficient knowledge of the alternatives, since the ruling CPP has almost complete control of the media.
Brad Adams is Asia Director for Human Rights Watch, and knows Cambodia well, having worked for the United Nations Human Rights office in Phnom Penh between 1993 and 1998.
So was he convinced by the positive reaction from the international election monitors, who reported less violence and intimidation than in previous polls, and who claimed that there had been greater access to the media for opposition parties?
BRAD ADAMS: No, actually I think that's nonsense. The fact that there have been fewer killings is of course welcome, although one shouldn't congratulate the Cambodian Government for killing fewer people now than it has killed in the past, because it is of course the Cambodian Government that's been responsible for the violence both in the 1993 and 1998 elections.
As to access to the media, the opposition parties have had only formal access to the media, in the sense that they've all been given an equal amount of time in large blocks of time on State TV and radio. So if a voter wanted to learn about the opposition parties, they would get short glimpses of each party in some relation to the amount of seats there have in Parliament, but of course the CPP controls the newscasts and controls all the private stations, and in fact launched vicious attacks against the opposition during the campaign, when the opposition brought up things like the coup in 1997 and other violence.
And in terms of intimidation, we've seen virtually the exact same story as in 1993 and 1998, which is that at the village level the CPP has used its control of the population to threaten them that if they didn't vote the proper way that they would lose benefits, they would not get rice distributed, that there would be violence against them and their family.
So, you know, it's not right to say that things are better and that this represents a reasonable outcome.
HAMISH ROBERTSON: So have the election observers been duped?
Even though the European Union Election Observation Mission has employed what it calls "long term observers" to monitor the campaign as well as the election itself, is it possible that the Cambodian Government has carefully orchestrated events by toning down its policy of intimidation in order to present the best possible face to the outside world?
Well, according to Brad Adams, Cambodia is not a democracy in any meaningful sense, even though it does have periodic elections, because real democracies are based on the rule of law and an independent judiciary, and fundamental principles such as free speech and freedom of assembly. And he's not optimistic that there'll be international pressure to encourage a genuine democratic environment, in which real democracy will be allowed to flourish.
BRAD ADAMS: International law requires genuine and periodic elections. Cambodia has periodic elections, but it doesn't have genuine elections.
Cambodia still are quite vulnerable to international pressure, because more than 50 per cent of the Cambodian budget is financed by the international community. The economy of Cambodia would collapse if the international community took a strong line on these issues. But, actually, I don't expect much to change.
The international community has been content to walk away from Cambodia since the UN mission ended in 1993, and essentially as long as Cambodia doesn't have armed fighting and doesn't have armed clashes that threaten to spill into regional problems, the international community seems disinclined to interfere in Cambodia in the way that it has in other countries, where democracy has failed to take root. And so Cambodians are really left to their own devices, which is a very sad state of affairs because the Cambodian Government under Hun Sen rules by fear and by force.
ELEANOR HALL: Brad Adams from the Asia Division of Human Rights Watch speaking there to Hamish Robertson.
http://www.abc.net.au/worldtoday/co...003/s913605.htm
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18-01-2004 03:55
Paying attention to? That Agathon goes to far? That is old news man, old news.
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