Name: Peter Joseph interview w/ Abby Martin | Empire Files : Abolishing Capitalism
Uploaded: 2018-11-29T07:59:19.000Z
Duration: 45 min 41 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

[Abby] Peter Joseph is the founder of The Zeitgeist Movement,

the grassroots worldwide organization that advocates an alternative economic system

based on sustainability, cooperation and human need.

His most recent book 'The New Human Rights Movement'

delivers a startling expose' about the violent oppression that defines our economic order

while issuing an urgent call for global activism to unite to replace it.

I sat down with Joseph to talk about the contradictions and crises of capitalism

and what he advocates to save the future of the planet from catastrophe.

Peter you have a very interesting background

having worked both in advertising and equity trading.

What function does this industry serve in today's society?

[Peter] The best way to explain that is to look at the fact that our economy

and advertising is the arm of creating artificial demand.

And without that arm - and it's so polluted as you know,

I can't even imagine what the world be like without advertising -

you wouldn't have people aspiring to things that are highly irrational,

When advertising presents something into the community

that seems to be something that some people want

it spreads like a virus and then everybody wants it

because it's an issue of social inclusion which is a part of our biology,

We identify and define ourselves by how others see us

So it manipulates our most primal sense of humanity

in order to sell things, and again back to my original point:

in our consumption-based society since the Industrial Revolution,

That's a very unique point to make because

when you first start an economy of this nature

like in the agrarian society and then in the handicraft industry, you're MEETING demand right?

But at some point this kernel seed had to change

because when you have such a highly efficient productive society that we have now,

(not in a distribution sense because we have poverty and all that)

at least in the technical sense of what we can create, the efficiency, abundance,

And that's basically the kernel seed of one of the central flaws

but destroying the environment simultaneously

because you have an insatiable culture that's been literally generated!

And as I detail in my book, in the National Association of Manufacturers

in the 20th century, they were actually arguing

that consumerism was the best defense against communism and totalitarianism.

They had this incredible PR campaign that went on for,

well it still goes on really but it's echoes of the original intent

to transform society into one that just wants to buy and consume,

and then progress of course being defined by what we produce,

the more stuff we produce, the more you buy the more you own:

just realization that this does nothing to benefit society,

created to keep society afloat, the economy afloat.

- Yeah, it's a kind of cultural violence.

The more people promote consumeristic values,

vain materialistic values, the more they want, more and more

this and that, the more they flaunt that kind of phenomenon,

the more they create what is termed by Johan Galtung "cultural violence."

Because if you create a society that thrives in this type of self-identification

you're basically also promoting not only the destruction of the environment

but the diminishment of others because you're saying that

"I can afford this, I have the status, and I'm better for that,

And we see that phenomenally amplified today in the modern world

with the "winning" community and our lovely president and his rhetoric.

It also carries over into misogyny and everything else as I'm sure you know.

"We want to have rich people in charge of the economy

because clearly they must be good at it!"

So we have a complete absence of "where's the sympathy?"

purpose of an economy which is to provide for everyone ideally?

No. So the sickness has become increasingly more palpable.

I often wonder what a world would be like without advertising,

which would be a world without marketing and markets.

And I can tell you it would be a whole lot different

and far more peaceful and sustainable and

amiable, and just humane than what we see today.

- From an insider's perspective how exactly does the stock market work?

The stock market is a proxy system that was developed-...

It was contrived out of the original foundation which

were a board of directors for a company, so a bunch of people,

each have a million dollars, they get together, they invest say 10 of them,

$10 million into a company and then they get dividends, right?

That made basic sense, you know, years ago.

But someone said "You know what? I want to sell this stock

and this guy's gonna buy it from me for a little bit more and I make money off of that."

And then suddenly the exchange system began.

And slowly but surely, the idea of selling artificial shares of nothing effectively,

Subtitles ListPlay Video

Peter Joseph interview w/ Abby Martin | Empire Files : Abolishing Capitalism

perception

incredible

phenomenon

basically