Andrew L. wrote:
Capitalism is a system. It is a relation between people mediated by my money, commodities, images, culture, institutions, and so on. It is also a set of rituals. Rituals of thought, behavior and action.
Precisely because capitalism is such an exploitative and violent system however--because misery, havoc and uneven development are its life-blood--it has always required a lot of State violence and terror to persist. Because people organize and resist.
Attempting to locate the Gordian knot or Achilles' heel of such a system in the sinister machinations of a discrete network of suits is, to be as charitable as possible, fundamentally misguided.
Andrew, you seem like an expert on capitalism, so with your trained eye, I don't see what's keeping you from crossing the doorway you're standing in front of.
A capitalist system operating at peak efficiency consolidates wealth into the hands of a small number of people. New people with new products or new ideas get rich, of course, but when they do, they begin to climb the pyramid. Visualize distribution of wealth in a capitalist world, and you don't see a plateau, do you?
This wealth is like an island in an ocean. Events occur in the waters surrounding it, elected officials come and go, governments change direction, but the hands gripping the wealth never flinch. They choose their heirs, they choose their partners. And they make alliances. They die, but the wealth lives on, in New York, in London, in Geneva.
They make alliances to make their businesses more profitable. They conspire. They use their wealth as leverage, shuffling around the livelihoods of the under classes like chess pieces.
You could see these people as suits, as you say. Most of them are white men in suits. You could see their club as a knot, as you say. You or I will never unravel it. Why you don't see these men as conspirators, I don't understand.
They are members of elite organizations who make plans without the oversight or control of any elected representatives. You seem to want to narrow the definition of conspiracy to only allow only a small segment of their daily business to qualify; just because every plan they make isn't followed by the instructions, "Keep this a secret", that's meaningless.
Every plan they make begins life as a secret, in the sense that they never expect to have to answer for it.
They don't have to plot- they just have to
do. It's like breathing for them.
You say that people organize and resist the state-sponsored violence required by capitalism. They don't. Even when they think they do, they don't. They kill each other and they draw some blood, but they never get near the top of the pyramid. Bad guys ultimately win, every time.
Control of the wealth swiftly returns to the same capitalists, different names maybe, but usually the same blood lines. The Russian revolution threw out the Romanovs so a different crew of parasites could run things, and they lied and called it communism.
The same elite interests controlled the governments of the USA, the UK, Russia, and Germany during WWII. They concocted a great war to enrich all sides, and yet people have the gall to tell me that a country wouldn't kill 3,000 of its own citizens on 9/11 to provoke a war?
Andrew L. wrote:Maybe capitalism is not your target: maybe it's merely the backdrop to the event under investigation. It's just that the bad guys should be held accountable. But bad guys of this stature are simply not held accountable within the system. Because it's their system. And there's always someone waiting in line to take their place if they are discredited (i.e. the next administration).
Capitalism is not any sane person's target, because capitalism cannot be killed. It runs on greed and lives in all of us, some far more shamefully than others. So I agree, the true bad guys are never going to be held accountable. You can only hope to control capitalism, minimize the voracity of the chewing people up and shitting them out aspect of capitalism.
I look at the people at the top, the ones that I call conspirators, because I hate them. They're evil. I'm powerless to stop them, so trying to trace crime after crime to them is a draining exercise because those efforts will either die on the vine or live on in fringe conspiracy nut land for other kooks to find with Google, but since I have enough free time to permit such a huge waste of time, I intend to persist.
And to persist in examining conspiracy theories. I call it exercising my bullshit detector ( some readers of this forum might think I have broken my bullshit detector with this training, but so be it ). I feel like it helps me to understand economics and politics better when I include conspiracy theories into my studies.