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Slavoj Zizek's thinking on violence is worth quoting here: "The two faces of Bill Gates parallel the two faces of Soros. The cruel businessman destroys or buys

Slavoj Zizek's thinking on violence is worth quoting here: "The two faces of Bill Gates parallel the two faces of Soros. The cruel businessman destroys or buys out competitors, aims at virtual monopoly, employs all the tricks of the trade to achieve his goals. Meanwhile, the greatest philanthropist in the history of mankind quaintly asks: 'What does it serve to have computers, if people do not have enough to eat and are dying of dysentery?' In liberal communist ethics, the ruthless pursuit of profit is counteracted by charity. Charity is the humanitarian mask hiding the face of economic exploitation. In a superego blackmail of gigantic proportions, the developed countries "help" the underdeveloped with aid, credits, and so on, and thereby avoid the key issue, namely their complicity in and co-responsibility for the miserable situation of the underdeveloped" (Violence 22). Gates "give away your wealth, billionaires. It's fun!" rhetoric focuses only on subjective violence - violence, as Zizek writes, "which is enacted by social agents, evil individuals, disciplined repressive apparatuses," etc. The "do-this-now-its-fun" call distracts attention away from the systematic violence nestled at the root of capitalism. Zizek writes, and I think he's right, that Gates call for a friendlier robber baron "signals a sad predicament of ours: today's capitalism cannot reproduce itself on its own. It needs extra-economic charity to sustain the cycle of social reproduction" (24). That is not to say that Gates money will not do some good. I imagine it will do and has done. However, I do think it is a distraction from the real issue, which is the massive global economic exploitation necessary to produce Gates's wealth in the first place.

swombat 17y ago
That's a thoroughly unfair assessment. It assumes that all wealth is ill-gotten, and that is utterly baseless. Microsoft created and distributed an operating system that brought affordable computing to the masses. They generated enormous wealth for all of mankind, and they did so mostly playing by the rules that were set down for how commerce should be conducted. Certainly, they did some things outside of those rules, and for those they should be and have been punished. But on the whole, the world is still a better place with Microsoft than it would have been without. Taking Warren Buffet or Soros next, capitalism functions well because there are fiendishly clever people like those trying to figure out where to best allocate their capital to maximise their returns. This fundamental principle allows us to move wealth to wherever it's needed, whatever is the next big thing that humanity should be working on. Without them, we would be worse off too, since capital would be badly allocated - for example, to building countless overpriced houses rather than other things. What you suggest here is dangerous, because there is a grain of truth in it. Yes, there have been centuries of everyone exploiting everyone else. But pointing that out is useless, because it doesn't help make the situation better. And ascribing that blame to a few individuals, particularly those who started from nothing and built tremendous wealth through their hard work, is completely unfair and unwarranted. If you have some practical suggestions, rather than pointless muck-stirring, please do share them instead of quoting conspiracy theorists.
- Silentio 17y ago
  The idea that the wealthy started from nothing and ascribing their wealth to the "hard work" of building from nothing is romantic, but ultimately it's a fantasy. No doubt much individual hard work goes into building a fortune, but the fortune itself owes much more to the labor of thousands, if not millions, of workers, right down to the janitor who sweeps the floor, than it does to the individual who had the next big idea. Labor certainly has more to do with wealth than capital itself. Inequality is embedded in capitalism. When the invisible hand moves capital from one place to another, it does not only give, it takes away. For someone like Bill Gates to give as he does, he has to have taken away (you might prefer "created") in the first place. It may be muck-stirring, but I am less interested in saving the world than I am in understanding the ideological assumptions implicit in, for instance, Gates's actions, and the systems that allow those actions to take place. To leave the muck unstirred, to forget it exists, is to live in a world that does nothing but support conventional wisdom, excludes alternatives, and limits debate. The useful question is not, "is this True or not," but rather, "what would it mean if it were true." Finally, if Zizek is a conspiracy theorist, was Hegel, was Marx?
  - swombat 17y ago
    Inequality is embedded in capitalism. When the invisible hand moves capital from one place to another, it does not only give, it takes away. For someone like Bill Gates to give as he does, he has to have taken away (you might prefer "created") in the first place. That is where your misunderstanding lies. The world is not a finite-sum game. Wealth created is not wealth taken away. Someone like Bill Gates accumulated a lot of wealth because he created a lot of wealth - not because he took it from someone else. The difference between "taking away" and "creating" is like the difference between murder and sex.
    - zouhair 17y ago
      How is that our World is not finite? Simply take the U.S., the difference between the rich and the poor widened immensely, because most of the profit (or what you call "created wealth") is not shared equally among those who made it. I doubt Bill Gates would have gained so much if he were alone doing the job, we favour only the one who bring the money not the one who do the actual job. There is a capital gain in people's work and their wages are far from covering it.

swombat 17y ago

That's a thoroughly unfair assessment. It assumes that all wealth is ill-gotten, and that is utterly baseless. Microsoft created and distributed an operating system that brought affordable computing to the masses. They generated enormous wealth for all of mankind, and they did so mostly playing by the rules that were set down for how commerce should be conducted. Certainly, they did some things outside of those rules, and for those they should be and have been punished. But on the whole, the world is still a better place with Microsoft than it would have been without. Taking Warren Buffet or Soros next, capitalism functions well because there are fiendishly clever people like those trying to figure out where to best allocate their capital to maximise their returns. This fundamental principle allows us to move wealth to wherever it's needed, whatever is the next big thing that humanity should be working on. Without them, we would be worse off too, since capital would be badly allocated - for example, to building countless overpriced houses rather than other things. What you suggest here is dangerous, because there is a grain of truth in it. Yes, there have been centuries of everyone exploiting everyone else. But pointing that out is useless, because it doesn't help make the situation better. And ascribing that blame to a few individuals, particularly those who started from nothing and built tremendous wealth through their hard work, is completely unfair and unwarranted. If you have some practical suggestions, rather than pointless muck-stirring, please do share them instead of quoting conspiracy theorists.

Silentio 17y ago
The idea that the wealthy started from nothing and ascribing their wealth to the "hard work" of building from nothing is romantic, but ultimately it's a fantasy. No doubt much individual hard work goes into building a fortune, but the fortune itself owes much more to the labor of thousands, if not millions, of workers, right down to the janitor who sweeps the floor, than it does to the individual who had the next big idea. Labor certainly has more to do with wealth than capital itself. Inequality is embedded in capitalism. When the invisible hand moves capital from one place to another, it does not only give, it takes away. For someone like Bill Gates to give as he does, he has to have taken away (you might prefer "created") in the first place. It may be muck-stirring, but I am less interested in saving the world than I am in understanding the ideological assumptions implicit in, for instance, Gates's actions, and the systems that allow those actions to take place. To leave the muck unstirred, to forget it exists, is to live in a world that does nothing but support conventional wisdom, excludes alternatives, and limits debate. The useful question is not, "is this True or not," but rather, "what would it mean if it were true." Finally, if Zizek is a conspiracy theorist, was Hegel, was Marx?
- swombat 17y ago
  Inequality is embedded in capitalism. When the invisible hand moves capital from one place to another, it does not only give, it takes away. For someone like Bill Gates to give as he does, he has to have taken away (you might prefer "created") in the first place. That is where your misunderstanding lies. The world is not a finite-sum game. Wealth created is not wealth taken away. Someone like Bill Gates accumulated a lot of wealth because he created a lot of wealth - not because he took it from someone else. The difference between "taking away" and "creating" is like the difference between murder and sex.
  - zouhair 17y ago
    How is that our World is not finite? Simply take the U.S., the difference between the rich and the poor widened immensely, because most of the profit (or what you call "created wealth") is not shared equally among those who made it. I doubt Bill Gates would have gained so much if he were alone doing the job, we favour only the one who bring the money not the one who do the actual job. There is a capital gain in people's work and their wages are far from covering it.