by The idea that authoritarianism attracts workers harmed by the free market, which emerged when the Nazis were in power, has been making a comeback. Pushback is not the major reason why capitalism is a threat to democracy. Modern capitalism, characterized by extraction of economic rent — land rent, monopoly rent and financial rent — results in oligarchy.The populist and progressive backlash is a reaction to the excesses of the system now generally called "neoliberalism." It has also been called "plutonomy," plutocracy," "plutonomous oligarchy," "monopoly capital," "financial capitalism," and "managerial capitalism." It is a dictatorship of elites as a class-based network. There is a huge body of literature about this, the modern origin of this lying in classical economics and its
Topics:
Mike Norman considers the following as important: capitalism, democracy
This could be interesting, too:
Peter Radford writes The Geology of Economics?
Dean Baker writes Capitalism and Democracy: The market is far more flexible than Christopher Caldwell imagines
Peter Radford writes Election: Take Four
Peter Radford writes Who brought us Trump?
The idea that authoritarianism attracts workers harmed by the free market, which emerged when the Nazis were in power, has been making a comeback.Pushback is not the major reason why capitalism is a threat to democracy. Modern capitalism, characterized by extraction of economic rent — land rent, monopoly rent and financial rent — results in oligarchy.
The populist and progressive backlash is a reaction to the excesses of the system now generally called "neoliberalism." It has also been called "plutonomy," plutocracy," "plutonomous oligarchy," "monopoly capital," "financial capitalism," and "managerial capitalism." It is a dictatorship of elites as a class-based network. There is a huge body of literature about this, the modern origin of this lying in classical economics and its culmination in Marx. It was described much earlier by Aristotle in Politics.
This is a good article based on Robert Kuttner's “Can Democracy Survive Global Capitalism?” Considers Karl Polanyi, John Maynard Keynes, The New Deal, Milton Friedman, the rise of neoliberalism, and the current backlash against it by those caught holding the short end of the stick.
Worth a read, or save it for the weekend.
Caleb Crain
See also
Do you have a job that you secretly believe is pointless?It's not necessary to have a job that is totally BS. A lot of people also have jobs they deem socially necessary but which are infected with a load of BS, too.
If so, you have what anthropologist David Graeber calls a “bullshit job.” A professor at the London School of Economics and a leader of the early Occupy Wall Street movement, Graeber has written a new book called Bullshit Jobs: A Theory.
He argues that there are millions of people across the world — clerical workers, administrators, consultants, telemarketers, corporate lawyers, service personnel, and many others — who are toiling away in meaningless, unnecessary jobs, and they know it.
It didn’t have to be this way, Graeber says. Technology has advanced to the point where most of the difficult, labor-intensive jobs can be performed by machines. But instead of freeing ourselves from the suffocating 40-hour workweek, we’ve invented a whole universe of futile occupations that are professionally unsatisfying and spiritually empty.
This, at least, is the story he tells in his book. Much of it is persuasive, some of it overly simplistic, but nearly all of it is interesting. I reached out to Graeber to talk about the book and the broader phenomenon of “bullshit jobs.”
When I was serving as a naval officer, one job I was tasked with for a time was "Career Counseling Officer." The principal aspect of it was interviewing those not reenlisting and reporting the reason. The reason was almost invariably the same: "I love the Navy, sir, but I just can't take the chickenshit anymore."
ht Raúl Ilargi Meijer at The Automatic Earth