The Hippie Dog Whistle Work Ethic Silent-Majority Counter-Offensive Following up on my last post, I was searching for coverage of Ronald Reagan’s infamous “strapping young buck” comment from 1976 and found this wonderful commentary by Ian Haney López on Bill Moyers’s show. In his book, Dog Whistle Politics, López mentions the “work ethic” angle several times. The […]
The “Work Ethic” Hoax The story has been told that Martin Luther invented the doctrine of the “calling” and that John Calvin (“my friends call me Jean”) intensified it with his doctrine of predestination. Subsequent pastoral literature softened the predestination blow with the Protestant ethic that working hard and succeeding would show that you were […]
Rescued from Oblivion! I was sure that the English translation of Friedrich Engels’s Preface to volume 2 of Capital had used the expression “rescued from oblivion” in referring to the 1821 pamphlet, The Source and Remedy of the National Difficulties. But the only translations I could find didn’t agree: “In this pamphlet, the importance of which should have […]
William Godwin’s ethic of leisure and the riddle of social justice In An Enquiry Concerning Political Justice (1793) William Godwin declared, “the object, in the present state of society, is to multiply labour; in another state, it will be to simplify it.” In The Enquirer (1797), he affirmed, “[t]he genuine wealth of man is leisure, when it meets with […]
Disposable People Disposable people are indispensable. Who else would fight the wars? Who would preach? Who would short derivatives? Who would go to court and argue both sides? Who would legislate? Who would sell red hots at the old ball game? For too long disposable people have been misrepresented as destitute, homeless, unemployed, or at […]
Disposable people are indispensable. Who else would fight the wars? Who would preach? Who would short derivatives? Who would go to court and argue both sides? Who would legislate? Who would sell red hots at the old ball game? For too long disposable people have been misrepresented as destitute, homeless, unemployed, or at best precariously […]
Karl Marx/Benjamin Franklin Mashup Capital itself is the moving contradiction, in that it presses to reduce labour time to a minimum, while it posits labour time, on the other side, as sole measure and source of wealth. Remember that time is money. Hence it diminishes labour time in the necessary form so as to increase […]
Doing the world a favor. For Michael. I did indeed post Dilke’s work. Then I reposted it. Then, ten years later, Contributions to Political Economy reprinted Dilke’s pamphlet, along with an essay about it by Giancarlo de Vivo. And forthcoming in the next issue of CPE is my article on the “Ambivalence of Disposable Time.” Thank you, Michael, for asking me to […]
Two hundred years ago this February, Charles Wentworth Dilke anonymously published a pamphlet titled The Source and Remedy of the National Difficulties, deduced from principles of political economy. Four decades later, Karl Marx would describe the pamphlet in his notes as an “important advance on Ricardo.” In his preface to volume two of Capital, Friedrich […]
You’ve Already Seen These Questions Why is it that no existing society, nor society that ever existed, has arrived at universal prosperity, considering that in all times, and in all societies, excepting only the very barbarous, a few years would naturally have led to it? How is it that notwithstanding the unbounded extent of capital, […]