Mention socialism online and you’ll, typically, get a scorched Earth reaction of total anger and disgust.
Decades of right-wing propaganda means “socialism” conjures up a panic amongst a certain political sect. The type of people who complain about “snowflakes” yet have hysterical meltdowns about:
- Feminism
- Veganism
- Immigration
- Socialism/liberals/THE WOKE MOB
This inability to comprehend the basics of socialism is getting a tad annoying. Books like Economics for the Many seek to address the misinformation, consisting of various essays to do so.
It is intriguing, but we do feel it’s the type of work socialists will read and nod along to. But the people who really need to read it would rather burn it on a fire.
Economics for the Many: Essays on the Failures of Capitalism and the Need for a Fairer Economy
“We are seeking nothing less than to build a society that is radically fairer, more democratic, and more sustainable, in which the wealth of society is shared by all.”
That’s the blurb on the front of this work, edited by British politician John McDonnell. He’s a Labour Party MP who served as the Shadow Chancellor of the Exchequer from 2015-2020.
The fundamental aspect of a socialism is this—to distribute wealth in a fairer way across everyone in society. That way we don’t end up with the horrendous wealth disparity we now see in 2023 across many hard-right capitalist nations (the UK and US being prime examples).
An alternative take, straight off, on socialism is Margaret Thatcher’s analysis:
“The problem with socialism is that you eventually run out of other people’s money.”
She also said of those living in poverty (reminder: she actively drove millions into that poverty with her government policies):
“Nowadays there really is no primary poverty left in this country. In Western countries we are left with the problems which aren’t poverty. All right, there may be poverty because people don’t know how to budget, don’t know how to spend their earnings, but now you are left with the really hard fundamental character—personality defect.”
In the UK, we’re heading for 14 straight years of Tory, hard-right induced austerity. It’s had a devastating effect on the country. Apart from for the wealthy, as the Tories have provided those types with fantastic tax breaks.
Everyone else? Royally screwed over and lied to.
It’s that type of thing that leads empathetic people to lean towards liberal values and socialist leanings. Which are then undermined by this continuous “woke mob” whining from the right-wing press. That lot is so hysterical with its hyperbole it’s quite convincing and you forget that, hang on, socialism actually would be very beneficial if applied correctly.
Along with books like The Struggle for Identity in a Market-Based Society (2011) and Utopia for Realists (2019), Economics for the Many launched in 2018 without a huge amount of fanfare.
Most people are more likely to read a get-rich-quick scam book than something about socialism, clinging to this ideal we’re all temporarily embarrassed millionaires (whilst 63% of Americans work from paycheck to paycheck).
And here we have the essays:
- Democratising economics in a post-truth world (Antonia Jennings)
- Rising to the challenge of tax avoidance (Prem Sikka)
- Better models of business ownership (Rob Calvert Jump)
- Beyond the divide: Why devolution is needed for national prosperity (Grace Blakeley and Luke Raikes)
- Public investment in social infrastructure for a caring, sustainable and productive economy
Now, we’re not economists. But we don’t need to be when we look at the official poverty statistics for the UK after going on 14 years of austerity. Or at the United Nation’s scathing report on extreme poverty in the UK.
That was published by Philip Alston after he spent two weeks touring the country in November 2019. The response from the Tories? “Leftist propaganda”. And people buy that.
From Antonia Jennings, an associate director at the Centre of Local Economic Strategies, she states in her essay:
“Poor economic literacy contributes to a democratic deficit. This means that the degree to which people can understand the forces significantly affecting their lives is severely limited … If we think about some of the major economic problems facing the UK today, such as growing inequality and falling productivity levels, how like is the public to call for change if people do not fully understand the matters at hand? The harsh reality of many of these issues is that it is often not in the interests of the political establishment to remedy them.”
The essays in this work make for powerful reading and promotes a fairer and more sustainable world.
For the sake of balance, some critics felt the work is “short of answers” (the words of Chris Giles from The Financial Times). Whilst others felt it had factual inconsistencies.
However, other feedback highlighted how our “blind faith” in capitalism continues to create serious consequences. All so a handful of people can get loaded and go about pretending they just worked harder than everyone else.
There are 16 essays here and, if a fairer society is on your mind, we can recommend a read of it to gain a counterpoint to the endless pro-capitalist trumpeting of day-to-day life.
I must check out this book – will be interesting to see how it co-ords with my own thoughts (which I developed via working in a central bank and watching how bad the system was). To me there is nothing wrong in general principle with capitalism overall, if applied reasonably and with due checks-and-balances, but that is NOT what we have today. Nor is there anything wrong with the general principles of old-school socialism that emerged as a response to early capitalist extremism (ie: socialism as a thoughtful mechanism of reasonable equitability for all, and again NOT what it’s portrayed as these days). To me the problem is how it’s all been applied in the specific. The key principles of old-school socialism, as applied by Keynes and others of like mind after WW1, and when blended reasonably with capitalism and democracy, and worked very well for most developed western nations for a generation after the Second World War. Take New Zealand, for example: prosperity was tremendous until the 1970s. But the ‘neoliberal’ revolution that occurred after a Prime Minister got drunk and called a snap election in 1984 failed to produce any growth – it wasn’t until a later PM took the government’s foot off the throat of the people and let them breathe that things began recovering. But the neo-liberal frameworks have never been altered. True across the former western world unfortunately. So what’s happened today is that the current version of capitalism (and it is merely a VERSION, and an extreme one at that) has been portrayed as the ONLY definition of that idea-set. It isn’t. Nor is this current version sustainable. An economy that is structured to funnel all the money towards an increasingly small number of hyper-wealthy usually ends up with the dispossessed turning up at the doors of said wealthy, armed with pitchforks and torches. It’s happened before (vide: Europe, 1830, 1831, 1848, etc…)
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“To me there is nothing wrong in general principle with capitalism overall, if applied reasonably and with due checks-and-balances” – Yes, that’s the thing. Capitalism should work fine – work hard and get rewarded over time. It just doesn’t play out like that anymore, despite the desperate attempts by the right-wing sect to claim otherwise.
I’d actually support capitalism if it worked like its supposed to, but it has (especially after the 2008 recession) just turned into a select few funnelling vast fortunes towards themselves.
And with the social media era, you get all these pent up types living out their billionaire fantasies vicariously through Elon Musk and co. Any sort of slight criticism towards him and it’s “jealousy about his wealth and genius”.
It’s like the argument 99% of the time has been reduced to schoolground shouting, which I suspect was the plan of the Murdoch and co. Like arguments about the best games on any playground.
“What’s better – Doom or Half-Life 2?”
It’s Half-Life 2, by the way.
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