Capitalism has been widely celebrated for its capacity for rapid technological advance. Thus Marx in the Communist Manifesto of 1848: “The bourgeoisie cannot exist without constantly revolutionizing the instruments of production.” A century later Joseph Schumpeter declared that “creative destruction” is “the essential fact about capitalism” (Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy, 1942). And surely this fact has never been truer than it is today, in the age of microelectronics and bioengineering? The technological dynamism of capitalism is undeniable, especially in comparison with earlier historical formations. This, however, is only half the story. The functioning of capitalism also entails the shelving...
Read more »
Each year half a million people in India and other tropical countries catch visceral leishmaniasis, also known as black fever. Infected by the bite of a sand fly, they rapidly weaken and lose weight before dying with painfully swollen livers and spleens. A safe and effective treatment for black fever was found long ago: the antibiotic paromomycin (cure rate 95 percent). But the firm that developed it — Pharmacia, a precursor of Pfizer – shelved it in the 1960s for lack of a “viable market.” What that means is that the people who need it cannot afford to pay...
Read more »
It’s now 110 years since Theodor Herzl wrote Der Judenstaat (The State of the Jews) and launched the Zionist movement, nearly 60 since the state he envisaged came into being. Upset by the Dreyfus case (Dreyfus was a French Jewish army officer framed as a spy for Germany), Herzl had concluded that Jews would only be safe when they had a state of their own. As they ran for the shelters during the war with Hezbullah, Israelis may well have wondered whether there is any country in the world where Jews are less safe. And although the...
Read more »
As an act of war, the al-Qaeda attack on the Pentagon and the World Trade Centre was somewhat unusual,though not unprecedented, in three respects.First, the method used was non-standard.Standard military practice is to blow things and people up by dropping bombs or firing shells and missiles on them. But flying planes right into the target has been done before. Japanese kamikaze pilots used the technique against US warships in the Pacific during World War Two. Second, al-Qaeda is a non-state actor.Such actors rarely have the capacity to carry through such a complex and costly operation.Therefore al-Qaeda must have hadfinancial...
Read more »
In the village of Orlovka, in the Chui region of Kyrgyzstan in post-Soviet Central Asia, there used to be a uranium mine. Its closure in the early 1990s led to massive unemployment in the area. But now the desperately poor local residents have found a new way to survive. They sift through the waste dumped near the disused mine °©- “a moonscape of grey slag” – in search of material that they can sell to scrap merchants. There is iron and other metals, and graphite, but most valuable is silicon, which fetches $10 per kilo and ends up at...
Read more »
Futurologists, Alvin Toffler being the best known, have long heralded the imminent arrival of the “post-industrial society” – an arcadia in which automation has almost done away with work and our main problem will be how to cope with an excess of leisure. Indeed, labour productivity has risen steadily and at an accelerating rate throughout the last century, except for a blip in the period 1975-85, when labour productivity in the US (though not in Western Europe) fell slightly. But it is only in a rational (i.e., socialist) society, where the means of life serve the community as a...
Read more »
You must have heard the song by Woody Guthrie: “This land is your land, This land is my land, … “ It should be, but in fact it isn’t. Many millions of working people own no land at all. Those who are a bit better off own the small plot on which their house stands — a fraction of an acre. So who does own the land? Over 95 percent of the privately held land in the United States is owned by just 3 percent of the population. (1) These are the people who own the land, the industry,...
Read more »
