Dirty gossip about the capitalist mode of production Guess who’s not getting that rose garden??? You would have to search long and hard to find someone who was better at sticking it to the working class than The Economist. It has perfected one of the most truly remarkable posturing acts in the annals of propaganda. When times are good, its contempt for working-class aspirations borders on the domineering, despite the fact that the working class not only runs capitalism from top to bottom but also compliantly does its bit to legitimate the system during elections. When times are bad,...
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Erin McKean, a lexicographer writing in the Boston Globe, gives us a dictionary tour of today’s corporate capitalism and its private jargon that lights up a few interesting dark alleys. “The Word” of the day is “bonus” (as in “Bonus reduced”). For example: …major financial institutions continued to pay massive bonuses to executives despite losing even more massive amounts of money. Last year Merrill Lynch essentially collapsed, but still paid almost 700 executives cash bonuses of more than $1 million each. (Boston Globe,...
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It is not uncommon to hear leftists talk knowingly of “ongoing struggles” when they project the day after tomorrow of an anti-capitalist revolution, as if it weren’t really over yet with the expropriation of the capitalist class. The working class must evidently “smash” the capitalist state and set up a “proletarian” régime holding down the entire capitalist class, if we are to take our cue from Lenin (The State and Revolution). The truth, however, is at once simpler and more complex: an anti-capitalist revolution cannot stop with promising capitalism’s eventual replacement worldwide but must make immediate global common...
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Advocates of reform often make the mistake of reducing capitalism to a logical structure rather than seeing it “holistically” — as a dynamic process. Even as they note its continued evolution, when they talk about changing it, their interest tends to focus on parts and wholes, on mechanical interactions. Hence, they usually assume it will be a massive job from the standpoint of some mythical observer. That it might conceivably be more of a chain reaction having “emergent properties,” where individuals and groups all begin to adopt a massively coherent response at around the same time (without warning or...
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If we may go by the trend emerging from the presidential primary results so far, we very likely will see the end of the CheneyBush era next November. Voters both Democratic and Republican have turned out in large, often record-breaking numbers to make preliminary choices from among the presidential candidates who have offered themselves. This is a healthy democratic trend. According to the Pew Research Center, the upsurge in voter interest is sharpest and heaviest on the Democratic side and therefore concerns a much larger constituency than on the Republican side. More interesting, younger Democratic voters “are considerably more...
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We read in the Boston Globe (Friday, January 4th) that the results of the Iowa caucuses among Democrats and Republicans are important for the unprecedentedly intense grassroots interest they reveal in the upcoming presidential election. But more to the point, to the extent voters in Iowa are still trying to make those two creaky old suits of armor work, they remain profoundly clueless. On the surface, they appear to be lining up once more to perform the symbolic ritual of Throwing the Rascals Out. This time, it is true, the Rascals are a smelly bunch of radical pro-corporates quaintly...
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R. What is the condition of the working class today? How do you see the status of people who work for a living? W. Speaking very generally, in the early 21st Century, it’s true that certain luxuries are more easily available: it seems that everybody has television, running water, electricity. Certain consumer goods are very available. Food is also widely accessible in the United States as well, unlike in other parts of the world. In some ways, particularly the American working class is in some respects, I think, sheltered from some of the more horrible aspects of global capitalism....
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While you might not be surprised to learn that it’s customary at Holocaust commemorative events for German politicians to remain silent , you might find it interesting to know who else shows up at them. Remember the folks who brought 100,000 dead Iraqis shock and awe? Well, one of the survivors, U.S. strongman Dick Cheney (temporarily out of the loop at Halliburton), galvanized an audience in Krakow, Poland, the day before the Auschwitz event with some poignantly immortal prose. “Gathered in this place,” he pontificated, “we are reminded that such immense...
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Now that it has become comfortable, even de rigueur, to admit capitalism can’t necessarily deliver the goods, we hear a lot less about that old standby, the standard of living. Socialists have often pointed out that capitalism is much better at providing us with poverty than with a living, and that we should more accurately speak of a standard of poverty instead. Capitalism, more than any previous form of class exploitation, runs on empty promises (See the Socialist Standard, May 2003). In “The Collapse of Globalism” (Harper’s Magazine, March 2004), John Ralston Saul points out that sometime in the...
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The concept of turnover is related to production for exchange, in particular to the production of surplus value by wagelaborers. If society becomes the owner of the means of production, then what happens to surpluslabor and the production of surplusvalue? Surplusvalue is of course a form of exchangevalue, the moneyform of commodities produced by living labor in excess of its daily requirements. If society as a whole replaces the capitalist as the owner of the means of production, and therefore replaces him also as the employer of labor, then the mass of laborers the entire population capable of working...
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