[iDC] iDC Digest, Vol 55, Issue 31

[Michael Bauwens]

Hi John,

Look again to the exploited worker that you mention ... and amidst whom I live in this working class neighborhood in bangkok ...

He/she is often heavily in debt, this represents a double exploitation

Then look at his employer ... they too are heavily in debt, and their rate of profit is actually not that high ...

Then look at the people lending to both the worker and his employer ... their profit rates are higher ...

Through debt and compound interest, there is a direct flow of money from the poor to the rich, from the productive sectors to the 'unproductive' financial sectors ...

This is just as real a face of exploitation ...

I'm not at all afraid to say this to the worker in the extractives industry ... he/she is just as aware of the reality of this form of exploitation ... look at the farmer's suicides in India .. they kill themselves not because they are being exploited, they have always been, but because very specifically of their debt situation ...

I think this is where your yikes should be directed at, not at those correctly pointing out the financial exploitation,

Michel



----- Original Message ----
> From: John Hopkins <jhopkins at tech-no-mad.net>
> To: idc at mailman.thing.net
> Sent: Friday, July 17, 2009 3:07:25 AM
> Subject: Re: [iDC] iDC Digest, Vol 55, Issue 31
>
> Michael Bauwens wrote:
> > Thanks Douglas for explaining this, we are on a pretty similar wavelength,
> 
> Hallo Michael:
> 
> nothing like resonance; but I have to dissonate with the following 
> statement (whilst otherwise only able to occasionally scan the contents 
> of the iDC box -- Trebor, you need to write something more or less 
> precise/poetic about how you *do* your facilitation work here on iDC and 
> perhaps what your own personal desires are around it! :-)
> 
> > We could argue that today, a very large part of surplus value extraction is 
> not done directly at production, but indirectly through the financial system
> 
> Yikes, really, say that to someone working in the extractives industry, 
> at the lower levels of the techno-social pyramid as it were...  That 
> argument comes from looking too long at view-point-limited/ing screens! 
>   You are luxuriating at a level of abstractions that are subsidized 
> ("brought-to-you") by a massive globe-spanning process of concentrating 
> and refining basic material energies -- a process which is run via human 
> bodies, at its most fundamental level.  And it is precisely there, at 
> the level of embodied life-energies and life-times, that surplus value 
> (energy) accumulates and becomes directly available to the service of 
> those up higher in that pyramid...  When one gives ones attention 
> (Michael Goldhaber...) in the form of life-time and life-energy to 
> anyone (regardless of mediatory path), that energy or surplus, as you 
> call it, is, in real-time, transferred...
> 
> 
> cheers,
> John
> 
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