United States
1950s until now
Economics- Keynes- things you need can be
made by robots within seconds such as food. Culture exhaustion and tiredness
every need is satisfied and problems dealt with, a problem free society.
Problems such as famine, war, disease, famine need to be dealt with. The new
industrial estate machine (system) satisfies anything that can be seen as a
human need. This makes us a lot richer than anyone from previous years due to
the way we live nowadays such as travelling and technology.
There is mass unemployment as everything is
made cheaply and it is hard to make profit from anything anymore. Everything
used to be made by hand whereas today it is made by machines or cheaply by
people in the third world. The Olympics is a prime example of getting the
unemployed back into jobs as it was a large event that needed many people to
make it happen.
Vince Cable- Keynesian a politician who
studied Keynes at University.
Max Weber was first person to look at
bureaucracy which is where there are many sources of power such as economic
power. He talks about charisma as a source of bureaucratic power such as Obama
and Nelson Mandela. Legal routine authority and constant reference to other
lawyers implement the system of rules which bureaucracy takes place and is the
most important.
Karl Marx failed in economics as he didn’t
cover much political philosophy. He wrote about economics classically like Adam
Smith about the free market and efficiency, wages and how to make them more
efficient which the factories are at now.
Wages have now been pushed down by competition but people working for a
low wage know that people from other countries will come in and do the job for
even less. Eventually everyone will become so poor making clothing they cant
afford to buy their own stuff and it will all crash. But this problem was not
spotted by Marx in his theories.
Keynes said you need to go to these third
world countries with a lot of money to keep them over there and not come to
where the money is. This will lead to an overflow of population and even
greater job losses. They will stop this crisis by allowing people to have
credit or government spending to buy the things they need to buy which can
defer the problem. Keynes thinks we should always just print money but didn’t
take into account the problem of inflation that can still be controlled.
The depression is where Capitalism ended
and the economy collapsed in the 1930’s in mass unemployment. Most people went
into the army which created jobs for the men and allowed women to take over and
work back at home in the jobs that were left. It used to be that individual
people owning factories and coal mines instead of large factories that are attached to the
bureaucracy and controlled by the government.
Communism took on a concrete form in Eastern
Europe and is still the system that is in place in China. Central planning of
everything is key and is where you plan everything through having a committee.
It works out through statistics and amount of people when and how much of items
we will need (State Socialist Planning).
1950s was the era of American prosperity
where Keynes is the great God. Neo-classical economics is a museum piece or
rhetorical only or a laughing stock particularly on monetary policy. But a
critique of the ‘managed’ society saw a new form of ‘soft’ totalitarianism. The
Keynesian consensus was attacked from both the left and the right.
The far left was Heidegger and Sartre and saw
American civilisation as a Weber a country ruled by bureaucrats ‘bureaucratic
technological (robots replace people in manufacturing things) militaristic
(answer to the Keynesian problem vast amount of money spent on military)
nihilism (people that do not believe in anything but they say they believe in
things as it is convenient).’ The left was Maoism, the third world-ism,
ecology, feminism, anti-globalisation and the green movement.
The third world-ism is:
America were the 1st world holds
power and is super developed
2nd world-
3rd World –China, Africa, Brazil
is exploited by the 1st world in terms of development. This world
will rise up in the future and overtake the western civilisation.
Right consists of radical disintegration,
cultural decadence, economic parasitism, loss of national identity, economic
decline of the West. Heidegger says it is a death machine with no future,
culture and cannot produce music. All it does produce is ‘trash’ all of the
time such as waste material that cannot be disposed of as well as pop and films
that are ‘trash’ where nothing works.
Existentialists are highly committed to
things in their politics and religion. If they believe in a religion they will
feel strongly about its beliefs and values. They invest a purpose of their life
that they can fulfil.
Conspiracy theories (the crazy people) need
to be avoided. The Elite people all share the same outlook, education and
training so they all believe in the same thing. They used to tell the people
what they wanted to hear even if it is not what they are going to do as society
cannot be ran by the public but everything will work out. The last thing these
people want is democracy.
America are run by the Elite who are clever
and do know what they are doing. The Liberal Elite are cleverer than most
people in society so know how to run the country well and are trained.
The aim of the system run by the Elite is
pragmatic, violent and is decaying from within as the Elite will have trouble
replacing itself and values. Heidegger said it is a nihilistic
‘technological-bureaucratic system.
Conspiracy theories have a grain of truth
in them in terms of there being interlocking bureaucracies. Interlocking
complex relationships with the newspapers and televisions can be a ‘false
reality’ and give off a ‘false consciousness’ of the reality. The media is
important in forming the Elite and mind control on the public such as the
legacy of George Orwell in 1984 and the actuality of the attempted mind control
by Goebbels.
Economic criticism of the managed society
starts with Hayek who was the first person to criticise the orthodox and
controlling the money supply by allowing things to be ran by the free market.
He believes that we need a objective value of measuring things and should go
back to the American Revolution and the way of things back then.
The nationalist imperialist Hegelian right
wing, believe it is too late and nothing can now be saved. Europe is doomed and
Western Civilisation is over and cannot be saved. They think that only a God
could save them now.
Vietnam: Apocalypse Now (film version of
The Golden Bough)
1.
Joseph Conrad, heart of the
darkness
2.
Anthropology- reveals the
essential irrationality of man, rejection of Rousseau (noble savage
civilisation corrupts people) and Marx. It is the view of the prehistoric human
nature. The true human is a violent Schopenhauerian monster murder and the
human female exists solely to reproduce.
3.
Frazer- The Golden Bough- the
high priest of Nemi; and the observed behaviour of other apes (patriarchy, rape
of all the females by the dominant male, murder of the dominant male by the
subordinate males- this is the ‘real human nature’. It is how property gets
passed down generations via the male that dominate. In the film Kurtz at the
end has two books- The Bible and the Golden Bough. Fazer went round the world collecting
religious beliefs from different tribes and people. A version of The Golden
Bough is found in every continent. This idea of male control was observed in
Apes but is a necessary concern of human progress in biological terms. The
healthiest and fittest males are needed to inseminate women and have around two
children in a state of nature as most of them will die.
4.
Vietnam- the first entirely
‘bureaucratic technological’ war fought by economists and bureaucrats known as
the ‘automated death machine;. The end of the age of the nation state; the
defeat of the US; end of the age of the enlightenment in Heidegger terms. Not
merely a set back but a complete malfunction of the civilisation.
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