Saturday, October 26, 2013

The Coercive Power of Capitalism

Click here to access article by Yves Smith from her blog Naked Capitalism. (Note: There are numerous minor errors sprinkled throughout, but one must make allowances for bloggers (like myself) who write in haste on a daily basis. For example, "concommitent" must be a French word for concomitant.)

She describes what several other political observers have expressed: there is currently a buildup of social pressures that could result in some explosive social consequences. I think she's right, although she doesn't articulate it: we are headed either for a revolution or a full-fledged police state.
...you can see the obvious tension: the capitalist classes in America, to increase their riches further, have been squeezing workers harder by not hiring as they did in the past. We’ve never had a “recovery” in the post-WWII era with so little of GDP growth going to labor (meaning both hiring and wage increases). In the past, the average was over 60% and the lowest was 55%. I haven’t seen a recent update, but the last figures I saw was that the level for this “recovery” was under 30%. Yet simultaneously, theres’s a full-bore effort on to gut the remaining safety nets. If this isn’t a prescription for social and political instability, I don’t know what is.
She provides a very stimulating essay about the more hidden coercive powers of capitalists. There is much food for thought here, and she leaves us with a "conundrum".