Yogic alternative to capitalism

I came across this book After Capitalism: PROUT's vision for a new world. It was written by a monk from the organization Ananda Marga. (in another life I used to be very involved with them, but now allergic to transendentalism, dogmatism, and the whole Guru concept).

Still their Guru was sort of an interesting figure. He developed a socio-political system called PROUT, i.e. progressive utilization theory. It's been many years since I read anything about this, so do not know the details. But I think some points would connect to that k-punk post about anti-capitalism and energy.

Anyway, I am always very sceptical now about anything that hints of mysticism. But I think PROUT is at least grounded in rational argument. And the book has an intro by Noam Chomsky, which to me gives it some credibility. If anything, this is another angle/perspective..

Have not read the book myself, but thought I would post the summary now, for general info, and maybe buy it. It might, at some point, be an interesting addition to the discussions.

After Capitalism

- Dada Maheshvarananda

This book offers a better, practical alternative to global capitalism. It explains the Progressive Utilization Theory, or Prout, a socio-economic model based on decentralized economic democracy, cooperative enterprise, the ethics of inclusion and universal spiritual values. The book asserts that capitalism contains the seeds of its own destruction, based as it is on greed, intense competition and tremendous concentration of wealth. In contrast, Prout provides a model of economic development grounded in universal values. It seeks to balance regional self-reliant economic development with ecological protection, and encourages creativity and innovation. (Jeroen)

This weeks reading (for tuesday 14th) is the first chapter of a thousand plateaus - rhizome.
download it here

Foucault and Lefebvre

Hello,

Here is the link to the Foucault article I mentioned in which he presents his concept of 'heterotopias'. Heterotopias are sites in which space and time have an alternative ordering to the dominant spatial and temporal orderings of a society. Could possibly be usefully applied to understanding non-capitalist spaces.

http://foucault.info/documents/heteroTopia/foucault.heteroTopia.en.html

And an introduction to Henri Lefebvre's The Production of Space (1974). For those not familiar with his work, Lefebvre is a French Marxist theorist of space who argued that capitalism reproduces itself through the production of an 'abstract space' which is fragmented and hierarchical and dominates over 'lived space'

http://www.notbored.org/space.html

Maybe these could be our two readings one week?

Lucrezia

D/G, desire and scarcity

Here's two related Posts I found on the theme of desire and scarcity that we spoke about last time - going into some more philosophical depth...

http://larvalsubjects.wordpress.com/2008/06/22/scarcity/

http://larvalsubjects.wordpress.com/2008/06/22/how-revolutionary-is-desire-anway/

As I mentioned last time I think it would be really cool to try and author a text collectively - perhaps the theme of scarcity would be a good place to start?.. I will try to write some initial thoughts/notes on this and put them up on the blog and then other can add their thought and change / edit what we have?...

"We might mention that the dialogue of scarcity is something we really see beginning in the early modern social contract theorists (most importantly Hobbes and Locke). But scarcity wasn’t the dominant paradigm previously. Most medievals and ancient Greeks emphasize that nature provides humans with the necessary goods in a great deal of abundance – as long as humans, as part of good political regimes, take steps to ensure that the human population is supportable by nature and that the desires of the citizens do not become uncontrollable.

The argument that nature produces abundance rather than scarcity (or that nature is friendly as opposed to hostile) is a plausible one: humans are quite omnivorous, able to eat numerous types of food and find many different kinds of food delicious – from meat and fish to fruits to vegetables to nuts to grains to sea plants. Humans can reside in a wide array of environments. A properly small number of humans can easily find abundant resources for commodious and moderate living."

Basic Economics

Natalia has kindly made a document about basic economics with a glossary and some exerpts from Adam Smith etc..

click here to download it

So for next tuesday (7th) we will read this along with the k-punk text below. Hopefully we can grasp a good understanding of the assumptions of neo-liberal economics and go someway towards formulating a critique of it.......

Anti-capital

Here's the K-punk reading for next tuesday (7th july):

K-punk - Anti-capital (some modest beginnings)

I think it would be good to look not just at the article but also at the discussion section at the end, as thats where some of the most most interesting points come up (rational actor theory etc..)

I'm also very keen on the idea of energistic economies or energistic critiques of capitalism - perhaps i will try to make some notes on this for the meeting.

Andres

Adorno mk. II (banging on)

First of all I found a link to a copy of "The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception" written by Adorno and Horkheimer, which I think is really a must read. It's located here.

Second, here's the excerpt from Adorno in Minima Moralia which uses the example of film cliche. Then after that I'll stop banging Adornianonandonandonandon.

"In general, subjective class membership roday shows a mobility that allows the rigidity of the economic order itself to be forgotten: rigid things can always be moved about. Even the individual's powerlessness to calculate his economic fate in advance makes its own contribution to this comforting mobility. Downfall is decided not by incompetence but by an opaque hierarchical structure in which no-one, scarcely even those at the very top, can feel secure: an egalitarian threat. When, in the most successful film of the year, the heroic squadron leader returns to be harrassed by petty-bourgeois caricatures as a drug-store jerk, he not only gives the spectators an occasion for unconscious gloating but in addition strengthens them in their consciousness that all men are really brothers. Extreme injustice becomes a deceptive facsimile of justice, disqualification of equality. Sociologists, however, ponder the grimly comic riddle: where is the proletariat?" From fragment 124. Puzzle-picture in Minima Moralia.

Ed