Monthly Archives: March 2020

noun

a person who works for a wage, especially with total and immediate dependency on the income derived from such labor.

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First recorded in 188590

OTHER WORDS FROM wage slavewage slavery, noun

Dictionary.com UnabridgedBased on the Random House Unabridged Dictionary, Random House, Inc. 2020

I was as faithful a wage-slave as ever a capitalist exploited.

The wage-slave lives for the evening's liberty, the business man for his wealth, the preacher for his church.

She sat in another chair, very straight in her lavender dress, and joined with the flapper in her survey of the wage-slave.

Slave and slave-owner, serf and baron, wage-slave and capitalistso the classes have struggled.

The wage-slave, when he is out of work, must now starve or go into the workhouse and be made miserable, or commit suicide.

wage slave

ironic a person dependent on a wage or salary

Collins English Dictionary - Complete & Unabridged 2012 Digital Edition William Collins Sons & Co. Ltd. 1979, 1986 HarperCollins Publishers 1998, 2000, 2003, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2009, 2012

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Wage slave | Definition of Wage slave at Dictionary.com

It is natural to think there is something deeply unfree about work in the contemporary United States. Describing her job in an Amazon warehouse, journalist Emily Guendelsberger writes, I walked up to sixteen miles a day to keep up with the rate at which I was supposed to pick orders. A GPS-enabled scanner tracked my movements and constantly informed me how many seconds I had left to complete my task. A man employed at a different facility said he found pervasive surveillance and inhuman speed so soul-sucking I found myself nearly crying in my car right before I was supposed to walk in.

That feeling is connected to a real material fact about the workplace: one of the defining features of the employment relationship in all capitalist countries is that the workers will is, by law, subordinate to the employers. The employer has the right, within broad bounds, to define the nature of the task, who performs it, and how. This shows up in all kinds of surveillance, control, and submission also known as maximizing productivity and extracting profit.

Just consider who controls one of the bodys most essential functions: going to the bathroom. Workers in the United States can be forced to urinate during employer-mandated drug testing; or forbidden from urinating if it isnt break time. In Amazon warehouses, workers, whose every move is tracked, forego trips to the restroom to avoid being disciplined or fired for too much time off task. In a poultry-packing plant, employees were forced to wear diapers to work because they said they knew they would be let go if they demanded the bathroom breaks their bosses denied them. Employers control or seek to control many other aspects of workers lives, from their Facebook posts and political speech to the wages they earn and the rates at which they work.

It is no surprise, then, that there is a long history of comparing capitalist wage labor to chattel slavery.

In 1873, Ira Steward, son of abolitionists and founder of the eight-hours movement, looked out over the United States industrial sweatshops, its fourteen-hour days for poverty wages, and wrote, Something of slavery still remains. His point was not that wage labor and slavery were the same, but that, for all the talk of emancipation, many aspects of the employment relationship smacked more of servitude than of freedom.

By the time Steward wrote those words, the critique of wage slavery was at least fifty years old. In 1828, Thomas Skidmore, avowed critic of slavery and founder of the New York Working Mens Party, wrote:

For he, in all countries is a slave, who must work more for another than that other must work for him. It does not matter how this state of things is brought about; whether the sword of victory hew down the liberty of the captive, and thus compel him to labor for his conqueror, or whether the sword of want extort our consent, as it were, to a voluntary slavery, through a denial to us of the materials of nature.

Fifteen years later, a Skidmore collaborator turned land reformer, George Henry Evans, found something of slavery in the poor, landless worker: he must ask leave to live ... he is liable to be driven away at the will of another. When arguing against propertylessness and for the redistribution of land to all workers, Evans said, The National Reform measures would not merely substitute one form of slavery for another, but would replace every form of slavery by entire freedom.

Not everyone decrying wage slavery did so on egalitarian grounds. In the early republic, some racist white workers invoked wage slavery not to argue against chattel slavery and wage labor together but, instead, to maintain that white workers should not be reduced to the condition of black people. Theophilus Fisk, for instance, worried in the 1830s about the white slaves of the North but denounced abolition. Freedom was, for racist figures like Fisk, a racial privilege rather than a universal end. It was possible, then, to object to wage slavery as white slavery and to use the term to divide people by race, rather than to unite them in class struggle. But that was generally the less common use of the term.

After the Civil War, the critique of wage slavery really took off. A group I have elsewhere called labor republicans drew on and extended the earlier views of people like Skidmore and Evans to argue that capitalist labor relations failed to live up to their promise.Labor republicanism formed the guiding ideology of the Knights of Labor. Founded in 1869, the Knights were the first national labor association to organize relatively unskilled black workers together with whites on a mass basis an effort not meaningfully duplicated in the United States for another fifty years. In 1886, their membership peaked at nearly 1 million workers, with everyone from predominantly white Northern shoemakers to Southern black cane-cutters carrying a Knights of Labor card.

In articles with titles like Wages Slavery and Chattel Slavery, the Knights argued that the whole process of civilization has been to emancipate human beings from the condition of slavery in which they have been held by their fellow men ... [however] civilization has not yet reached its highest point of development, nor can it develop much further without first having abolished wages slavery, for that form of slavery stands to-day as one of the greatest barriers to the progress of civilization.

This wage slavery, the Knights contended, first appeared in the dependence of propertyless workers on their employers. Lacking any reasonable alternative but to look for a job, workers were in a structurally subordinate role. This made the labor contract something less than fully free. As George E. McNeill, one of the Knights leading figures, put it, in a labor contract, the workers assent but they do not consent, they submit but they do not agree.

Once at work, submission was the order of the day. Is there a workshop where obedience is not demanded not to the difficulties or qualities of the labor to be performed but to the caprice of he who pays the wages of his servants? asked one Knight. Another Knight complained, Thus is sycophancy deified in our workshops ... thus is abject servility ennobled, as it were, by bosses and foreman.

They sought to abolish as rapidly as possible, the wage system, substituting co-operation therefore, by which they meant a national economy of interconnected worker-governed cooperatives and publicly owned utilities (such as railroads and schools). The vision appealed to everyone from Southern black agricultural workers to Anglo-American and immigrant workers in the North and the West, who joined under the Knights banner.

The Knights were not the only ones who thought something of slavery was to be found in so-called free labor. In 1865, former slaves who had appropriated land on Edisto Island wrote the Freedmens Bureau Commissioner: We were promised Homesteads by the government but the government was now in the process of returning all land to its previous owners their former masters. Abolition, however, was not emancipation.

The federal government, they insisted, now takes away from [us] all right to the soil [we] stand upon save such as [we] can get by again working for your late and [our] all time enemies. Being thrown into the labor market was not the condition of really freemen. To be truly free, they demanded land where we shall not be slaves nor compelled to work for those who would treat us as such.

Frederick Douglass, arguing for unity among black and white laborers in 1883, said that experience teaches us that there may be a slavery of wages only a little less galling and crushing in its effects than chattel slavery, and that this slavery of wages must go down with the other.

The critique of wage slavery was then taken up by anarchists, socialists, and labor radicals of various stripes, who railed against the capitalist labor market and organized for a multiracial struggle against the owners of capital. Lucy Parsons, born a slave and later a widely known anarchist, declared in one of her most famous speeches:

How many of the wage class, as a class, are there who can avoid obeying the commands of the master (employing) class, as a class? Not many, are there? Then are you not slaves to the money power as much as were the black slaves to the Southern slaveholders? Then we ask you again: What are you going to do about it? You had the ballot then. Could you have voted away black slavery? You know you could not because the slaveholders would not hear of such a thing for the same reason you cant vote yourselves out of wage-slavery.

We can find similar quotations from famous left-wing leaders like Emma Goldman, Eugene Debs, and Big Bill Haywood, and less famous figures, like Alexander Howat, Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, and Hubert Harrison.

For all these thinkers, three thoughts tended to go together. First, wage labor was wage slavery not because it was the same as chattel slavery but because it was shot through with its own forms of subservience and subjection. The project of emancipation was therefore unfinished. Second, the solution was to replace wage labor with some form of democratically managed cooperative commonwealth. Third, the demand for liberty could unite workers across race and gender in a project to seize control of the economy and turn it to collective purposes.

This was the holy trinity of the Lefts emancipatory program one that guided millions in the nineteenth and twentieth century.

This week, the Daily Beast unearthed statements from when Bernie Sanders was chairman of a Vermont-based socialist party in the 1970s. They found Sanders saying things like Basically, today, Vermont workers remain slaves in many, many ways, because we end up with an entire state of people trained to wait on other people. They report Sanders as stating: We believe ultimately that companies like Vermont Marble should be owned by the workers themselves and that workers not a handful of owners should be determining policy. If a worker at Vermont Marble has no say about who owns the company he works for and that major changes can take place without his knowledge and consent, how far have we really advanced from the days of slavery, when black people were sold to different owners without their consent?

And, in another outrage, Sanders commented: If we are free people and not slaves, then the working people of this country, who constitute the vast majority of the population, should seize control of the economy rather than allow small groups, like mine owners, to decide their fate.

Somehow, the Daily Beast decided this was a sign that Sanders has a massive race problem as if the Vermont senator was saying the problems workers face today are the same as the evils of racial slavery. What the publication missed, out of ignorance or bad faith or a blind desire to boost clicks, was that Sanders was tapping into the aforementioned (and still valid) tradition of criticizing wage slavery.

It is obvious from his appeals to the majority, not to mention his identification of the employer class as the enemy, that Sanders was not part of that pernicious tradition of viewing freedom as a racial privilege. Rather, he was appealing to the idea that the daily oppression of the labor market is something that the vast majority of people have a shared interest in overcoming. His critique of wage slavery was a way of naming the problem that made it a potential source of multiracial unity.

Since the 1970s, one of the Lefts greatest challenges has been finding a language of common purpose, something to unify and orient a common mass struggle. Identifying and acknowledging differences in a movement is essential and important. But solidarity only fully emerges by rising above differences in the name of what everyone seeks together, what they can only win for themselves by winning it together: their freedom.

Leave it to the chattering classes to stoke racial divisions with fake controversies and absurd accusations. As Sanders says, its not just up to him, but to us, to develop and act on a language of freedom that unites the vast majority.

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Bernie Sanders Was Right to Talk About Wage Slavery. We ...

Farmworkers feed the world. This is the rallying cry of the Student Action with Farmworkers (SAF), an organization that works with students, advocates, and farmworkers across the United States to create a more just agricultural system. The crucial contribution that farmworkers make to the food system has only heightened amid the C0VID-19 pandemic, as farmworkers are among the list of critical positions that the United States Department of Homeland Security encouraged to continue a normal working schedule.

Although a lower population density in agricultural regions may delay the spread of COVID-19, farmworkers may face heightened risks to the disease due to their exposure to environmental and chemical hazards. Most farmworkers also lack comprehensive healthcare benefits as well as paid sick leave. According to the U.S. Department of Labor just 47 percent of farmworkers report having health coverage, meaning they have no benefits to fall back on if they get sick.

From March 25-31, 2020 SAF is celebrating the 21st Annual National Farmworker Awareness Week at a time when it may be more important than ever to advocate for farmworkers rights. SAF and their partner organizations aim not only to celebrate farmworkers but also to raise awareness about the many challenges that farmworkers continue to face. For instance, agriculture ranks among the most hazardous industries but farmworkers have considerably lower wages and less access to social benefits than others in hazardous occupations.

The week culminates on Cesar Chavez day, which commemorates the historic activist and founder of the United Farmworkers of America. To amplify the message of National Farmworker Awareness Week and support farmworkers during this uncertain time, Food Tank is highlighting 18 organizations that advocate for farmworkers rights and wellbeing.

1. American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations (AFL-CIO)

The AFL-CIO is the largest U.S. based federation of unions that protects the rights of workers in a variety of industries, including food and agriculture. They take action to prevent child labor in agriculture, support diversity in farming and land access, improve farm and food worker wages, ensure overtime pay, and fight for immigration policies that help agricultural workers attain employment security.

2. Center for Good Food Purchasing

The Center for Good Food Purchasing encourages large institutions to adopt the Good Food Purchasing Program (GFPP) an initiative that facilitates shifts in institutional food purchasing toward local food economies, environmental sustainability, valued workforce, animal welfare, and nutrition. Implementation of the GFPP is currently being carried out in multiple cities and school districts across the U.S.

3. Coalition of Immokalee Workers (CIW)

The CIW is a worker rights organization that exemplifies the power of farmworker community organizing. Their internationally recognized Worker-driven Social Responsibility paradigm led to significant advances in human rights within corporate supply chains. Through this approach, the CIW successfully negotiated agreements that improved worker labor standards and wages with Whole Foods, McDonalds, Subway, and Walmart through its Fair Food Program focused on Florida tomato growers.

4. Community Alliance for Global Justice (CAGJ)

CAGJ is a grassroots organization based in Seattle, WA that aims to strengthen local economies by transforming unjust trade and agricultural policies. Through community education, grassroots organizing, research and analysis, and media outreach they support healthy local food economies in which optimal labor rights are achieved.

5. Fairfood International

Fairfood international works to create a food system in which value is distributed along the supply chain proportionally and food is produced with the wellbeing of people, animals, and the planet in mind. By advancing supply chain transparency they help the agri-food sector identify improvements in sustainability and solutions for the payment of a living wage in supply chains.

6. Fair World Project (FWP)

FWP is a global organization devoted to promoting fair trade for small producers and labor justice for workers. They emphasize that unfair trade policies and corporate-friendly business practices continue to harm people and the planet. Their solution is to educate and advocate for a just global economy that respects the environment and they have active campaigns supporting coffee, melon, and cocoa farmers and farmworkers.

7. Farm Labor Organizing Committee (FLOC)

FLOC is a labor union affiliated with the AFL-CIO that aims to give farmworkers a voice in the decisions that affect their economic security and wellbeing. Baldemar Velasquez founded the organization in 1967 and built it into a more than 20,000-member strong organization that mobilizes, educates, and trains farmworkers to advocate for their labor rights.

8. Farmworker Justice

Farmworker Justice seeks to empower migrant and seasonal farmworkers to achieve fair wages, occupational safety, immigration status, and improved overall living and working conditions. They frequently engage with government officials and administrative agencies to advocate for improvements in U.S. labor laws, guest worker programs, and clearer paths to U.S. citizenship for the approximately 1.25 million seasonal workers on U.S. farms and ranches that lack authorized immigration status.

9. Food Chain Workers Alliance (FCWA)

The Food Chain Workers Alliance is a Los Angeles, California based coalition of worker rights organizations. They advocate for improved wages and working conditions for the people who plant, harvest, process, pack, transport, prepare, serve, and sell food. The FCWA also leverages the Good Food Purchasing Program as a tool to win fair wages and improve working conditions within institutional supply chains.

10. International Labor Organization (ILO)

The ILO is a United Nations agency devoted to promoting social justice and ensuring that internationally recognized human and labor rights are upheld. Their Decent Work Agenda focuses on working with stakeholders in their 187 member states to set labor standards and develop policies and programs that support decent work, fair globalization, and poverty reduction.

11. La Via Campesina

La Via Campesina is an international coalition of organizations that defend food sovereignty as a way to promote social justice and worker dignity. They built a movement that amplifies the voices of smallholder peasant farmers and aims to decentralize the power of corporate driven agriculture, which they argue is destructive to the environment and social relations.

12. Migrant Justice

The mission of Migrant Justice is to strengthen the capacity and power of the farmworker community to collectively organize for economic justice and human rights. By investing in leadership development, Migrant Justice enhances farmworker community members skills in community organizing and capacity to produce systemic change. Among their accomplishments is the Milk with Dignity agreement with Ben & Jerrys Ice Cream, an industry contract to implement a worker-driven social responsibility program.

13. Northwest Atlantic Marine Alliance (NAMA)

As an organization led by fisherfolk, NAMA was founded to promote healthy and economically secure fisheries and fishing communities. Their organizing efforts extend beyond human rights to include sustainability efforts that ensure the long-term resilience of marine food systems and the promotion of equitable access to fair markets for small and medium-scale community-based fisherfolk.

14. Oxfam International

Oxfam international operates in more than 90 countries and is centrally focused on ending the injustice of global poverty. They place a large emphasis on food and farming in their work because they note that three-fourths of the worlds hungry people live in rural areas, many of whom are farmers, fishers, herders, and laborers. Through Oxfams Behind the Brands Campaign, consumers can track major food brands progress in supporting farmworkers and the planet.

15. Solidarity Center

The Washington, D.C. based Solidarity Center is an international organization partnering with over 400 labor unions and human rights organizations in 60 countries to support workers rights. Seafood, agriculture, and food processing are among the many industries that they aim to effect change in by providing technical and legal expertise, bolstering unions advocacy efforts, connecting workers to protective networks, and more.

16. Teamsters

Teamsters is one of North Americas most diverse labor unions, representing workers in a wide range of industries from sanitation workers in New York to vegetable growers in California. The organization supports workers in advocating for contracts that ensure fair wages, health coverage, job security, paid time-off and retirement income. Once these contracts are negotiated, Teamsters works to hold companies accountable by invoking contract grievance procedures if necessary.

17. United Farmworkers of America (UFW)

National Farmworker Awareness week ends on a day commemorating the founder of UFW, Cesar Chavez, because the organization is the nations first union explicitly for farmworkers. Their work to protect labor rights in the agricultural sector continues today as they have facilitated dozens of UFW union contract victories that secured farmworkers rights including fair wages, overtime pay, protections from occupational health hazards, and more.

18. Walk Free

Walk free tackles one of the worlds most complex and prevalent human rights issuesmodern slavery. They devote resources and collaborative organizing efforts to drive behavior and legislative changes that liberate people trapped in slavery. They also conduct research to build a comprehensive database of the estimated 44 million people living in modern slavery and have campaigned to protect children working in the chocolate industry as well as farmworkers in the palm oil industry.

Farmworkers truly are the backbone of our food system and these 18 organizations work to ensure that their rights are being adequately met or exceeded. By continuing to work during the COVID-19 pandemic, farmworkers are risking their health to prevent disruptions in the food supply. National Farmworker Awareness Week provides a time to reflect on the contributions farmworkers make to society and raise awareness about the issues they continue to grapple with, especially in the face of global pandemic.

Student Action with Farmworkers has a number of resources and to help individuals and organizations engage in the 21st Annual National Farmworker Awareness week from March 25-31, 2020.

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18 Organizations to Support During National Farmworker Awareness Week - Food Tank

Capital and Ideology

Thomas Piketty, translated from the French by Arthur Goldhammer

Harvard University Press, pp. 1150, 31.95

The French economist, statistician and polymath Thomas Piketty sprang to fame in 2013 with a daunting tome, Capital in the Twenty- First Century. In it he documented a fundamental force of divergence in the capitalist system, which he represented by the equation r>g the tendency for returns to capital to grow faster than national income, and therefore for wealth to concentrate in fewer and fewer hands. This tendency was reversed between 1914 and 1980 by the impact of two world wars, the Great Depression, social democracy and the trade unions, but it has since reasserted itself, restoring levels of inequality last seen 100 years ago.

In his new blockbuster, Capital and Ideology, Piketty studies the transformation of inequality regimes from premodern trifunctional and slave societies to todays hyperglobalisation, concentrating on the capitalist or proprietarian period from 1800. The book culminates in a programme for social democratic renewal to overcome the distempers of hyperglobalisation. The whole trajectory of human history is compressed into this framework if compression is the right word to describe this sprawling production of more than 1,000 pages

Piketty has amassed a huge amount of learning in support of a single thesis: that inequality societies have been the historical norm but they are not inevitable. Rather, they depend on ideologies of justification, and much of the book is devoted to examining these ideologies, showing how they have always been contested and how they might be transcended, It is impossible not to admire the skill and perseverance with which he deploys his massive arsenal of data and arguments. Still, what caused this reviewer to rub his eyes was Pikettys audacious self-assurance. Despite much cosmetic homage to the daunting complexity of his subject matter, he really does believe that he has solved the riddle of history. The magic key is not Marxs class struggle but ideological conflict over property systems. Property ownership, Piketty writes, always involves workers sacrificing a substantial proportion of her [sic] wage to an owners profit or landlords rent ...That is why property relations are always conflictual. Each new property-ownership system creates contradictions which lead to its demise. Conflict ceases when private property ceases to be important. Thus Pikettys history too leads to the end of history.

In the light of this reading, his reform agenda seeks, logically enough, to rob property of its sting. He rejects public ownership of the means of production the communist fallacy. Rather, he seeks to modify the property system by supplanting sacralised private ownership with public, social and temporary ownership, realised by co-partnership and steeply progressive taxes on wealth and income. Political control over international capital would be secured by regional, and eventually global, federalist structures:

What I have just described is a cooperative and ideal (not to say idyllic) scenario that would lead, via concentric circles, to a vast transnational democracy, ultimately resulting in just common taxes, a universal right to education and a capital endowment, free circulation of people, and de facto abolition of borders.

Piketty repeatedly insists that his is the only progressive way of overcoming the social anger of our own times. Nineteenth- century European ownership societies conquered the world but failed to establish fully legitimate governments because the extreme concentration of wealth they produced generated social tensions which ultimately led European nations to self-destruct. The compression of inequality in the mid-20th century, made possible by social democratic ideas and labour and democratic mobilisation, eased social conflict, but didnt go far enough, allowing neo-proprietarianism to creep back. Today we again face a choice between progress and self-destruction.

Whatever we think of Pikettys remedies, we should not ignore his warning. Since the crash of 2008 there has been growing discontent with the hyper-globalist model of progress, in which financial capital is set free from national control, allowing it to accumulate without limit. Piketty argues that the justified anger of the least advantaged, now being mobilised by nativist and identitarian political movements (Piketty rightly rejects calling them populist), may well develop a destructive momentum unless it is harnessed to a renewed model of social progress. His giant historical tome is thus conceived as an antidote to both hyper-capitalism and the post-colonial identitarian trap. Social democracy is the only way to save the planet from disaster.

The obvious question is: has Piketty read the plot of history right? There are at least five reasons to doubt it.

First, Piketty is unable to explain the historic persistence of inequality of wealth and power. The so-called trifunctional systems of pre-modern times, in which society was divided into priests, warriors and cultivators, did not need to be justified ideologically: it was seen as part of the natural order of things. It was only when property lost its regalian (governing) functions to the centralised state in the 19th century that the legitimacy of unequal property holdings started to be politically questioned. This happened with capitalism. Capitalism, which emancipated property from social duties, was not natural, so a function had to be invented for it, which was to lift humanity out of poverty. Setting capital and labour free to be bought and sold in global markets would benefit all. Piketty is particularly good on the role of neoclassical economics in robbing capitalism of its taint of illegitimacy.

But what his account ignores is that conflict has always been as much about identity as about equality, and the first cannot be reduced to the second, as Piketty wants to do. The idea that property relations are real and national borders are artificial smacks of the old Marxist fallacy. It led Marxist parties to believe that workers had no country and would not rally to the national cause in 1914. The same blindspot leads Piketty to a partly wrong diagnosis of our present discontents. What he attributes to anger at rising inequality is just as importantly fear of loss of national identity. Borders define communities, as the Brexit vote showed. Identity, like nature, has a habit of turning on those who ignore it.

A second quibble is Pikettys overuse of counter-factual history. The transparent object of this strategy is to show that at no switch point in the past has an inequalitarian outcome been inevitable. The history of what might have been protects us from the error of determinism the belief that whatever is had to happen. The trap, though, into which Piketty often falls, is a failure to distinguish feasible alternative futures from fanciful ones.

The first world war might have been avoided had the balance of forces been modestly different, but Pikettys belief that the French Revolution represented a missed opportunity to establish a system of progressive taxation is fanciful: as he himself admits, it would have required a change of mentalities, which came only 100 years later. Piketty might have heeded Marx on this: Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please, but under circumstances given and transmitted from the past.

Third, Piketty fails, it seems to me, in his heroic attempt to generalise his theme by including the property trajectories of non-European societies. His basic idea is that the forced incorporation of overseas colonies into the European property system had the double effect of increasing the concentration of wealth in the metropoles and foisting highly unequal property regimes on the conquered countries, which stifled social transformation. Much of this is quite plausible. But on the way, Piketty uncritically embraces two highly disputable tenets of post-colonial history: that Europes industrial revolution was financed by the profits of slavery, and that Europes intrusion into the affairs of the great civilisations of India and China was an important cause of their economic retardation. A bit of counter-factual history would have been a useful counter to these arguments.

Fourth, Piketty fails to provide a convincing explanation for the collapse of the social democratic regime in the 1970s. The accepted view, that it ran into an inflationary crisis, seems to me to be broadly right. He gives much more weight to its failure to deliver on its promise of equal educational opportunities. The parties of the left increasingly attracted the support of university educated professionals,who were more concerned to maintain their improved position on the property ladder than to widen educational opportunities for the bottom 50 per cent. Thus the meritocratic promise was dimmed, weakening the appeal of the left to the left-behinds. There is again something in this. But the dates dont work out, and one is aware of Piketty laundering the facts to fit his theory.

My final quibble is that Piketty completely ignores the role of John Maynard Keynes in developing the social democratic alternative to both communism and fascism in the interwar years. Perhaps this is due to the French perception of Keynes as anti-French, dating back to his attack on the Treaty of Versailles. More charitably, Keynes cannot be slotted easily into Pikettys historical plot. Keynes wrote in 1936: The outstanding faults of the economic society in which we live are its failure to provide for full employment and its arbitrary and inequitable distribution of wealth and incomes.

Pikettys story of social democracy is told entirely in terms of its impact on inequality. He fails to mention its impact on employment. In general, he underplays the role of the Great Depression and indeed the historic specificity of the social democratic epoch, in which the problem of unemployment and social security was much more important than the question of equality. Since he fails to understand that full employment and progressive taxation formed a single social democratic package, it is not surprising that he ignores the employment consequences of the great financial collapse of 2008 in stirring present discontent, and has nothing to say about job security in his idyllic vision of the future.

In this flawed masterpiece there are, nevertheless, many thoughts and phrases which stay in the mind and can help organise thought about the past and future. I particularly appreciated Pikettys conceit that western politics is now split between a Brahmin Left and a Merchant Right, leaving the least advantaged out in the cold. Decent politics must find a way of re-engaging with them.

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What makes Thomas Piketty so sure he can save the world? - Spectator.co.uk

When exceeding this threshold, the Commission is limited by the threshold of 0.5% of the transfer amount, but not more than 1.5 thousand rubles. This decision was taken by the Bank of Russia in the package of measures related to the spread of coronavirus infection and the fall in oil prices.

We conducted an analysis of transfers in the System of quick payments, as well as the level of average salaries in different regions. He showed that 100 thousand is the average value, which covers the needs of citizens to freely carry out operations in the SBP, told RG the representative of Bank of Russia. First of all it will allow no Commission to transfer funds to relatives and friends in case of their isolation or inability to transfer cash. And in the current environment is vital. In addition, it will allow you to transfer funds in repayment of loans (if the accounts are in different banks), and carry out other transfers between banks, for example, to translate the salary in a convenient Bank, thereby avoiding wage slavery.

the Central Bank launched a System of quick payments are at the beginning of last year as a cheap and convenient alternative to card transfers. ID is the phone number of the addressee of payment, regardless of which Bank party account is opened.

the Decision of the Central Bank guarantees the free transfer average salaries in a convenient Bank, thereby avoiding wage slavery

Previously the Bank of Russia has allowed only the introduction of a ceiling for client commissions for transfers in your system, if it appears that banks will install them on the defensive level, that is, if they were comparable to the fees for card transfers. These commissions completing customer within one Bank, and this dependence typically begins with the selection of RAborodale salary project, which does not account for the individual interests of worker (size of kesbeke on the map, the usability of the app, bonuses for services a subsidiary of the broker and so on). It is possible to say about the change of the salary in Bank accounts, but in practice this right is not just to implement and not many people use it.

the Bank of Russia planned to destroy the roots of wage slavery, giving the employee the opportunity to transfer to the accounting Department only phone number, so that the salary came into the Bank and to the account which is selected to receive transfers through the System of quick payments. But this project is complicated by the fact that you need to eliminate the risks associated with the loss of phone or change numbers. In addition, CBP has not yet implemented the possibility of payments from legal entities to individuals. In any case, the zero commissions for the manual transfer Moscow wage mitigates the problem.

the Majority who joined SBP banks do not charge for transfers of natural persons, including because earlier, the Bank of Russia took a decision to do such operations free for banks from April 1 (or more than two years). However, the market waited to see what the Commission will introduce a savings Bank (as reported, he should join SBP in early April). Sberbank, to build the largest system of transfers from card to card on the telephone for six months delayed the implementation of the requirements of the Bank of Russia on accession to SBP systemically important banks.

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Transfers from Bank to Bank to 100 thousand roubles per month will be free - The KXAN 36 News