Sunday, March 20, 2011

A chronicle of capitalism

A very interesting critique of capitalism, not least because it was published in The Chronicle of Higher Education. What's going on? Has it been infiltrated ?

"As a result, although today's capitalism is in many ways a much-transformed version of its 19th-century self, this transformation has not brought an abatement of the systemic problems diagnosed by its critics in that century. It presents them, instead, in new forms. In fact, the crisis looming before us is likely to be, if anything, more terrible than the Great Depressions of 1873-93 and 1929-39. The continuing industrialization of agriculture and urbanization of population—by 2010, it is estimated, more than half the earth's inhabitants lived in cities—has made more and more people dependent upon the market to supply them with food and other necessities of life. The existence on or over the edge of survival experienced today by the urban masses of Cairo, Dhaka, São Paulo, and Mexico City will be echoed in the capitalistically advanced nations, as unemployment and government-dictated austerity afflict more and more people, not just in the developed world's Rust Belts but in New York, Los Angeles, London, Madrid, and Prague." (Thanks Deborah)

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