From a long-term historical point of view, the current highly unequal societies are exceptional, since the vast majority of humans have lived in extremely egalitarian societies. Now the gap between those at the top of society, and the rest of us, is actually getting bigger. Reports from other countries suggest that this is a...
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SPGB
Inequality or Equality?
Drug Dealers
The Independent (UK) today reports on the story that SPGB previously reported upon in June of how the pharmaceutical industry preys on the poor to trial new drugs. Clinical trials for new pharmaceutical drugs are a sensitive business. But tests can be expensive. If they go wrong, companies are liable for compensation. No surprise, then, that in...
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This Land is Our Land
There was a time when ‘land’ used to refer to those parts of our habitat that were cultivated for food, grazed by animals for hide, wool, meat, milk and fertilisation, and to forests from which timber, firewood and food were collected and also to where communities lived sharing the common wealth. Now, as with...
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Crisis: the stories so far
Business As Usual: The Economic Crisis And The Failure Of Capitalism by Paul Mattick. Reacktion Books: 2011. Just yesterday, we were all supposed to believe that the globalisation of capitalism and free markets was the route to freedom, peace and prosperity for all. Then, with barely an explanation, and somewhat out of the blue,...
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Class against class
It’s exploitation that causes workers’ problems. On an ultra-simplistic level we could say that capitalism in the persona of capitalists uses capital (in its basic form, money) to make a profit. By utilising capital in the form of property, equipment, machinery, investment or speculation the capitalist needs to employ members of the working class...
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Union Maid
The Guardian makes an interesting comment upon the the head of the IMF’s alleged rape of his hotel’s chamber maid, ”…it is likely that Strauss-Kahn’s alleged victim might not have felt confident enough to pursue the issue with either her supervisors or law enforcement agencies, if she had not been protected by a union contract.” The housekeepers...
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Capitalism – barrier to useful work
Many are suffering the misery of unemployment while much useful, necessary work remains undone. One of the contradictions of capitalism. We want free time, to reduce the working day so that we can move beyond the tyranny of survival into free and creative mutual activity. Both employment and unemployment are capitalism preventing our human...
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Poverty is Being Poor
The number of American people living in poverty has soared to record-high levels. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, 47 million Americans out of a population of about 310 million live in poverty in the Unites States. In January, figures released by the U.S. Census Bureau stated that one in five children in the...
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Seeing the Trees and the Wood
A tree surgeon reflects on why no business can give due regard to the needs of workers and the environment I am, I suppose, a businessman; not, I should say, from choice but more from the need to follow a prescribed and necessary course; necessary, because, were one not to, inevitably the business would...
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Libya: brutality and hypocrisy
When the popular movements against long-standing despots in the Arab world spread from Tunisia and Egypt to Libya the Western powers thought that something they had long wanted – regime-change in Libya – was about to be handed them on a plate. But they didn’t have the same control over Gaddafi as they did...
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