Comments by "LS O\x27Brien" (@lsobrien) on "On Left and Right | George Galloway, Peter Hitchens, Noam Chomsky, Steven Pinker" video.

  1. Pangloss was a professor of Voltaire’s invention, who, despite living in a world where rape, destitution, war and weaponised stupidity were all commonplace, insisted that this was the “best of all possible worlds”. Certainly living between the ivory tower and the highest courts of the land helped in maintaining the delusion. But even when he was forced face-to-face with just some of the horrors produced by his species, his insufferable brand of Optimism, that had made him a star in salons across Europe, prevented him from registering them. So it is with Pinker. His grand thesis goes: as capitalism went global, so did Liberalism, and they, together, became the source of all good things. Passed over is the brutal institution of capitalism, of which Marx (capitalism’s greatest surveyor yet) was only too aware. The discovery of gold and silver in America, the extirpation, enslavement and entombment in mines of the aboriginal population, the beginning of the conquest and looting of the East Indies, the turning of Africa into a warren for the commercial hunting of black-skins, signalised the rosy dawn of … capitalist production.⁵ Blankly ignored is the forceful imposition of state-backed capital in the “Third World,” an invention of that those Victorian decades. An overlooked and tragic episode excellently explored by Mike Davis,⁶ where perhaps 60 million perished. It was Locke, Hobbes, Malthus and the race scientists⁷ which carried the day. The horror of the industrial revolution in Europe is only mentioned in the context of how better it is for the majority of the population now compared with then. It is often said that “capitalism lifted millions out of poverty,” without considering what it is was that dispossessed them to begin with. Morons on message boards may be excused, a “leading public intellectual” can not. But even if you could disregard the explosion of those dark, satanic mills, and our vast “underclass” of slaves, on which the whole beast — from its very inception⁸ — depends, you’re still left with the looming cliff edge. Capitalism, and its insidious cult of growth, is not sustainable. Liberal Capitalism saw off feudalism, Fascism, Communism and countless threats from the Third World; it can’t, it seems, survive hegemonic domination. Building upon Karl Polanyi’s concerns about disembedded markets, Wolfgang Streeck has written: “…Having no opposition may actually be more of a liability for capitalism than an asset. Social systems thrive on internal heterogenity, on a pluralism of organising principles protecting them from dedicating themselves entirely to a single purpose, crowding out other goals that must also be attended to if the system is to be sustainable.”⁹ Without the counterforces of trade unionism and socialism, capital accumulation — that “mad quest for singularity”¹⁰ — has made Progress synonymous with suicide: the telos, fittingly, of Professor Pangloss’s logos. https://medium.com/@lsob/the-new-charlatans-73bc6d198491
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