After fleeing Hitler, brilliant Jewish economist Karl Polanyi was never welcomed by the British. Now, for the first time in 80 years, his masterwork The Great Transformation has been be published in the UK
Polanyi had observed that, in the 1930s, wealthy Germans who saw the Nazi party as a “battering ram” against trade unions and socialists were persuaded to overlook Hitler’s antisemitism because it allowed the market system to flourish, Dale said. “In the same way that a lot of Americans who find Trump distasteful today will still vote for him, a lot of German elites said to themselves: we’re quite happy funding Hitler because his street fighters will help crush the trade unions, so that we can make more profits.”
They got the metaphor wrong. Billionaires see Trump as a battering ram to break what remains of the US social support system and claim victory over the ashes.
Capitalist oligarchs want a system based on having money to pay for education, health care, childcare, etc. Each part of our lives will have a price tag and only the rich will be free to live as they want - the rest of us are tied to their decisions and will accept the scraps given to us.
Part of their plan is to dismantle the education system and make everyone too stupid to know how we lived and how much we are being abused.
Its working. My daughter is a teacher now and it seems like they don’t want kids to read. Far to worried about getting sued for giving bad grades.
I’ve been saying this for years: The US economy is not “growing” not because we’re making more and better products, but because we’re commercializing social support systems that we used to get at low cost, or for free, from our families, relatives and neighbors: Health care, child care elder care, live-at-home spouses and homemakers, even talking with your neighbors and friends has been replaced with social media.
The cost of birthing and raising a child is even commodified in the health care system.
Is it any wonder why wealthy countries’ birthrates are falling? Asides from environmental factors, like microplastics and climate change.
The reasons why the US population is growing are related to immigration: Both directly counting immigrants, and those who still retain enough social capital in their communities to have families.
The so called post-capitalism economy is not productivity growth and making lives better for everyone.
It’s making the production of wealth increasingly meaningless for the average person.
It’s mining social and middle class wealth into the pockets of the wealthy elite and non-human corporations.
But what happens when the wealth in the mines is all gone?
Oh, wow, another book for the reading list :O
Am surprised that I genuinely hadn’t heard of him, just highlights the point the article is making.
Everyone’s suddenly an expert here. Nobody has read the book past the title.
