When we learn as children that getting money allows us to do things (without necessarily understanding the obligatory character of it), that realization generates an expectation that is lifelong in its durability. One of childhood’s many lessons, in a society that runs on buying and selling, is that getting money makes things happen. People routinely rely on this institutional or systemic paradigm and pass the information on, in the process, to each subsequent generation, which incorporates it behaviorally without question as a fundamental assumption. When a four-year-old expresses a relationship between “going to the place where the monkeys are”...
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Few types of literature put capitalist views on class struggle with such explicit and appalling candor as that dealing with “disciplinary problems” in the workplace. With economic development has come a certain mellowing in the shrill tone of the anti-employee diatribes of the 19th-century class-warhawks; but it has lost none of its virulence or its domineering aspiration, for it self-consciously promotes the atmosphere of coercion that justifies unpaid labor as the source of capitalist profit. The American Management Association (AMA), “the nation’s #1 business trainer!” according to its brochure titled “How to legally fire employees with attitude problems,” is...
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Utopian socialists have always as a rule blithely ignored one unavoidable reality. A revolution against capital can only happen on the basis of a fully functioning alternative to the capitalist system of production. Setting up a real economy that uses no capital and whose unique raison d’être is meeting everyone’s needs extends beyond successfully establishing an experiment at the margins of capitalism resting on the latter’s implicit prevalence. The record of history shows, however, that wherever capital in its expansionist wanderings has encountered isolated societies fitting the above description, it has without hesitation moved in and assimilated them. The...
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A spectre is haunting America – the spectre of the middle class. Ever since Alexis de Tocqueville proclaimed the US to be a “middle-class country”, North Americans have anxiously sought to moralise and ennoble their notion of class struggle: Most were regular employees of major corporations like McDonnell Douglas, Grumman and Hughes Aircraft. If they didn’t go to work, they risked losing their livelihoods, their houses and their cars. They were, in fact, not middle- class at all in the Marxian sense of the word. They were working-class, but, unlike similar people in Britain or Germany, they called themselves...
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