An interesting article in the Santa Fe Reader. From a liberal “radical” on the consequences of income disparity… Bowles offers a key reason why this is so. “Inequality breeds conflict, and conflict breeds wasted resources,” he says. In short, in a very unequal society, the people at the top have to spend a lot of time and energy keeping the lower classes obedient and productive. Inequality leads to an excess of what Bowles calls “guard labor.” In a 2007 paper on the subject, he and co-author Arjun Jayadev, an assistant professor at the University of Massachusetts, make an astonishing claim:...
Read more »
In April 2009, interviewers working for the Rasmussen agency asked 1,000 people: ‘Which is a better system – capitalism or socialism?’ 53 percent said capitalism, 20 percent socialism, and 27 percent were not sure. Although ‘capitalism’ came out the clear winner, commentators were shocked that almost half the respondents failed to give the ‘correct’ response on a matter so crucial to the dominant ideology. ‘Capitalism’, ‘socialism’ and ‘the free market’ The interviewers did not define ‘capitalism’ or ‘socialism’, so we are left to guess what respondents understood by these words. No doubt most of those who answered ‘socialism’ did...
Read more »
A neighbour goes on holiday and another keeps her greenhouse watered. Then he goes away and she willingly feeds and waters his cat. The local school recruits volunteers from the community for a reading programme to benefit the students. A rota of parents run extra-curricular sports options. An army of volunteers delivers regular meals to the housebound and incapacitated via ‘meals-on-wheels’. Volunteer drivers take the infirm and elderly to doctors’ and hospital appointments or for occasional outings. Youth groups, sports clubs, drama societies, music groups, choirs and orchestras, baby-sitting circles, car-pools, annual fête organisations, donations of books, clothes and...
Read more »
People are angry at the banks. They blame them for causing the crisis. They blame them for having to be bailed out and then still paying their top people obscene bonuses. They see them as producing nothing, just making money out of shuffling money around. Some of these criticisms are justified. Some are not. Banks don’t produce anything useful, even if they perform a useful, in fact an essential role, under capitalism. On the other hand, they didn’t cause the crisis, even if they did overstretch themselves like any other capitalist business does when faced with easy profits. It...
Read more »
“No weak men in the books at home The strong men who have made the world History lives on the books at home The books at home It’s not made by great men (x4) The past lives on in your front room The poor still weak the rich still rule History lives in the books at home The books at home It’s not made by great men (x4) The past lives in the books at home No weak men in the books at home History lives in the books at home The books at home It’s not made by...
Read more »
The number of UK children living in “severe poverty” rose in the four years before the recession Save the Children says The number of children in homes in this category rose 260,000 to 1.7m from 2004 to 2008. The report warns there is a danger that severe poverty could rise even further. The government defines relative low-income poverty as less than 60% of contemporary household median income, and absolute low-income poverty as less than 60% of 1998/99 median household income. However, Save the Children defines severe poverty as those living in households with incomes of less than 50% of the UK...
Read more »
Marx begins his examination of capitalism in Capital with the analysis of the commodity; and he succinctly explains the reason for his starting point in the first paragraph: “The wealth of societies in which the capitalist mode of production prevails appears as an ‘immense collection of commodities’; the individual commodity appears as its elementary form. Our investigation therefore begins with the analysis of the commodity.” (Penguin edition; p. 126) The term “wealth” is used here not to refer to riches in the form of money, but rather to the material wealth essential to any form of society: the...
Read more »
This series of short articles will examine the first volume of Marx’s Capital from a “socialist perspective,” which is to say, with an eye to how an understanding of capitalism can contribute to our understanding of socialism. I should recognize the obvious fact, right away, that a worker hardly needs to read Capital to arrive at an anti-capitalist position. Life under capitalism is negative advertisement enough for that social system. Who knows, there may have been a budding capitalist at some point in time who mistook Capital for a how-to guide, and part-way through reading it saw the error...
Read more »
The earthquake in Haiti and similar misfortunes are presented as unavoidable natural disasters. To some extent, this is true. But it ignores the consequences of the deliberate pursuit of profit at the expense of environmental protection. It is not a coincidence that the number of victims of recent disasters such as the Asian tsunami and the Katrina hurricane and now Haiti are clearly related to the degree of their poverty. The reality with earthquakes is they kill only if we let them. They are inevitable, but the death toll is not. It is collapsing buildings that take lives, not...
Read more »
