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From: lkk@mit-eddie.UUCP (Larry Kolodney)
Newsgroups: net.philosophy
Subject: Re: Re: Re: Whither Are We Drifting?
Message-ID: <2294@mit-eddie.UUCP>
Date: Sun, 1-Jul-84 20:44:10 EDT
Article-I.D.: mit-eddi.2294
Posted: Sun Jul  1 20:44:10 1984
Date-Received: Mon, 2-Jul-84 03:35:37 EDT
References: <1005@ihuxq.UUCP> <88700003@hpfclk.UUCP>
Organization: MIT, Cambridge, MA
Lines: 28

From: mike@hpfclk.UUCP:
  Goods and services  produced by slave labor is not
Capitalism;  it's slavery and  barbarism.  Capitalism  cannot exist in a
totalitarian,  fascist, or slave labor state.  If there is no  political
freedom,  there can be no economic  freedom for  Capitalism to function.
_____________
You're forgetting one very vital aspect of capitalism, namely IMPERIALISM.
There may indeed be political freedoms in the advanced industrial
capitalist countries, but we are only able to maintain our high
standards of living by keeping the third world in the state of fascist
slave labor that you claim to detest [viz. Central America, South
Africa].
	These countries supply us with raw materials and cheap labor,
while we supply them with weapons so that their governments may continue
to keep their populations docile in the face of widespread hunger and
poverty.
	You also ignore the role of economic coercion in capitalist
societies.  Certainly in the US, nobody is physically forced to work
behind a McDonalds grill for $3.35 an hour, or walk the streets for lack
of adequate low income housing, but people do it anyway.  Do you think
they LIKE doing that?  (Just contemplate for a second the idea of
spending the rest of your life working at McDonalds, or some equally
vile job). Of course not, but they are forced into that situation by
circumstance, by the system which locks them into a dim future merely
because of where and to whom they were born [the one out of a thousand
who make it like horatio alger notwithstanding].  This kind of coercion
is JUST as powerful as explicit physical force, and is more insidious
since it is not as easy to realize even its existence.