We are encouraged to be greedy as individuals. By several forces. Advertising is but one. The mass Media does it too, telling us about the latest .........................et cetera.

we are told on all sides that if we stopped consuming, our civilisation would collapse.

bush has just given the Americans a load (?) of cash with the patriotic duty being to go and buy IN ORDER TO GET THE SYSTEM MOVING again. So, no not just advertising.

By the 'keeping up with the Joneses' syndrome.

By a psychology that 'believes' buying more will bring satisfaction.Factually erroneous but part of the psychology of many.

by industry and commerce constantly having the new, the improved, and the different. Do encourage us to keep buying. Look at CDs. They got introduced, and people bought their existing collections all over again in a 'new' format'

You sell 'stuff' by many meanings of sell. There's not much to be made out of valuing, rather than stuff, relating, intimacy, contentment, authenticity, personal creartivity(I'll keep that). Still less, satisfaction. And gratitude for what one already has.

Our system is so designed as to try to make us constantly dissatisfied.

The there's fashion, another driver of dissatisfaction, and going shopping and consuming.

So - no, not just advertising.

And a big driver is shareholder/stockholder demand that the share value keeps rising, otherwise the investments will go elsewhere. So there's pressure from there to grow, to innovate, to sell, sell, sell. And sell more.

And the rich and the well-off are as likely to be envious as anyone, if not more so.

you credit people with intelligence, yet advertising persists and grows. And business wouldn't chuck money into advertising if it was useless. So it plainly is invaluable.

of course greed is not the preserve of one particular politics, tho the insurance man who taught me a lot about money said people were motivated by but two things - need or greed. We were selling savings plans, insurance, pensions.

on the other hand, the valuing of accumulation in itself does seem to me more fundamental to the thinking of the right than to the left.

you say my capital/labour account is ludicrous, yet you don't address the point that for capital, Labour is a cost to be kept under control. Even if capital is making millions in profit, costs (including wages and salaries) being kept under control is basic. Especially when, as I said above, it's the shareholders who have to be satisfied above all and constantly. Meanwhile, Labour is replaceable, and no particular workers are indispensable.

Nor have you met the point that even in the UK, the (approx) 5th biggest economy in the world, that strong economic fact doesn't persolate or cascade to all - 1.6 million unemployed, millions encircling the minimum wage. So if they can't benefit in a good economic time in a strong economy, when exactly will they? meantime, because they are good boys and girls who've been whupped into line, and wouldn't say boo to a goose in many numbers,............

When successively Russia and China took on capitalistic methods, suddenly millions and dire poverty appeared almost overnight. You get rich by working hard? Didn't look like it. And the response to those developments was, 'well that was bound to happen once capitalistic practices were introduced.'

Why?

because the divergence into rich and poor is not a law of nature or providence. It's inherent, a necessary part , of capitalism.

btw, have you ever wondered why the 'trickle-down' theory wasn't the 'cascade-down' theory?

management is Labour from the point of view of its position in the economy; Capital in the sense that it does the work of Capital rather thasn labour at the coalface. Insofar as management deosn't think of itself as labour, its members have (along with millions of others), false conscousness; i.e. managers' beliefs about their function is at variance with their actual function.

No, Capital is not 'just' money, but one side of a fundamental divide in society. it is also 'money'. the job of capital is Biblical - to go forth amd multiply. If it doesn't, it's not doing its job.

"Turning £100 into £110 is work; turning "100 million into £110 million, is inevitable." (some rich bloke - might have been Buffet.)


   Ivor