Tag: Labor
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Elites Explain Why Class Warfare is Good for Productivity
On September 12, 2023, Tim Gurner, the owner of Gurner Group, addressed a crowd at the Australian Financial Review’s Property Summit: I think the problem that we’ve had is that people decided they didn’t really want to work so much any more through COVID and that has had a massive issue on productivity… They have…
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Veblen: The Theory of the Leisure Class
If you’re looking for a non-Marxist critique of Capitalism and modern society in general, then you need to read Thorstein Veblen’s The Theory of the Leisure Class. Published in 1899, the book is an economic treatise and detailed social critique of conspicuous consumption, as a function of social-class consumerism, which proposes that the social strata…
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The Christian Communist Manifesto
Hi, In the past, I’ve argued in that Karl Marx unfairly gets a bad reputation for simply writing down what most people already knew. Marx’s ideas on wage slavery, capital, exploitation, and private property were nothing new and are, in fact, centuries old. It’s time to read the writings of the True Levellers (a.k.a. Diggers)…
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John Locke Justifies the Theft of Land from Native Americans
Let’s talk John Locke. On 16 January 1811, Thomas Jefferson wrote a letter to Benjamin Rush stating: The room being hung around with a collection of the portraits of remarkable men, among them were those of Bacon, Newton & Locke. Hamilton asked me who they were. I told him they were my trinity of the…
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Citigroup’s Plutonomy Memo: “There are rich consumers, and there are the rest”
In October 16, 2005, Citigroup came out with a brochure for investors called “Plutonomy: Buying Luxury, Explaining Global Imbalances” urging investors to put money into a “Plutonomy Basket” Here are my favorite excerpts: The World is dividing into two blocs – the Plutonomy and the rest. The U.S., UK, and Canada are the key Plutonomies – economies…
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Leisure vs. “Total Work”
It’s time we take leisure seriously. Today, in our culture of productivity-fetishism, we have succumbed to the tyrannical notion of “work/life balance” and have come to see the very idea of “leisure” not as essential to the human spirit but as self-indulgent luxury reserved for the privileged or deplorable idleness reserved for the lazy The Greeks…
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Karl Marx, the American Worker, and the Natural Rise of Socialist Movements
Karl Marx is possibly history’s most divisive figure. I argue that he unfairly gets a bad reputation for simply writing down what the world was already thinking. Marx’s ideas on wage slavery, capital, and exploitation were already on the minds of the American labor class years before they even knew who Karl Marx was. That…
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Jefferson on Wage Slavery
In my recent article, Wage Slavery: A Quick History, I gave several historical references to the term “wage slavery”. I came across a letter form Jefferson to his friend Thomas Cooper where Jefferson was comparing the population of England to that of the United States. In the letter, Jefferson does not use the term “wage slavery”, but…