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Post by hettyspahetti on May 29, 2014 13:56:37 GMT -5
"The production knowledge that is read into a commodity is quite different from the consumption knowledge that is read from the commodity. Of course, these two readings will diverse proportionately as the social, spatial, and temporal distance between producers and consumers increases." --Arjun Appadurai
Greetings everyone, it's great to be a member here at the Conscious Collective board. I figured I would start a thread to journal some ideas that come to mind, discussion encouraged!
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Post by hettyspahetti on May 29, 2014 14:51:18 GMT -5
How have we developed the military-industrial complex? Think-tank's & Rolodex's
 "In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist." -President Eisenhower [ 421 - Farewell Radio and Television Address to the American People] "Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. The cost of one modern heavy bomber is this: a modern brick school in more than 30 cities. It is two electric power plants, each serving a town of 60,000 population. It is two fine, fully equipped hospitals. It is some fifty miles of concrete pavement. We pay for a single fighter with a half-million bushels of wheat. We pay for a single destroyer with new homes that could have housed more than 8,000 people. . . . This is not a way of life at all, in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron." -President Eisenhower[ Chance for Peace]  Manufacturing Pubic Opinion
The perpetuation of our military-industrial complex, a false dichotomy of strength and freedom, developed to guise World War 2 values. 
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Post by hettyspahetti on May 29, 2014 16:05:46 GMT -5
Marx's Contradictions of Capitalism
Overaccumulation - Overproduction, underconsumption
Capitalists are granted opportunities through the extraction of surplus value created from labor. Capitalists are incentivized by surplus value to increase production productivity and efficiency. Increasing specialization results in a higher barrier-of-entry to new capitalists; it also results in the labor wage dropping because less labor is needed. The margin for exploitation in surplus value appear to no longer be enough for these companies domestically, thus they have gone transnational to further wealth disparity and enjoy the benefits of cheap labor and relaxed regulation internationally.
Extraction of Resources - The commodification of nature, how we impose "costs" on natural resources
"Examples include high tech commodities produced in countries with low average wages by multinational firms, and then being sold in distant high income countries; materials and resources being extracted in some countries, turned into finished products in some others and sold as commodities in further ones; countries exchanging with each other the same kind of commodities for the sake of consumer's choice (e.g., Europe both exporting and importing cars to and from the U.S.)."
We are offered a diagnosis for this economy, but the solutions are often lacking. This provides us incentive to establish TRANSPARENCY in our production process, inherently granting us the ability to promote RESPONSIBILITY. Our bodies, vehicles of Global Consciousness, can thrive in this dissemination of information; but we must pave these roads.
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