George Orwell on why economic inequality exists

[yurbud]

I stumbled upon this a couple of years ago, but it is even more relevant today.

It is a neat piece of doublethink that has distracted us from how much more wealth a worker creates than in the past, yet isn't shared with them.

Instead, we have been convinced that being given a job is a form of charity bestowed upon us by "job creators" and that they deign to pay us at all is further sign of their altruism and generosity.

The investor class could let a lot more of the grain the ox tramples make it into our feed bag and still be wealthy beyond human imagination, but the reason they don't is precisely what Orwell mentions here.

From the moment when the machine first made its appearance it was clear to all thinking people that the need for human drudgery, and therefore to a great extent for human inequality, had disappeared. If the machine were used deliberately for that end, hunger, overwork, dirt, illiteracy, and disease could be eliminated within a few generations. And in fact, without being used for any such purpose, but by a sort of automatic process -- by producing wealth which it was sometimes impossible not to distribute -- the machine did raise the living standards of the average human being vary greatly over a period of about fifty years at the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth centuries.

But it was also clear that an all-round increase in wealth threatened the destruction -- indeed, in some sense was the destruction -- of a hierarchical society. In a world in which everyone worked short hours, had enough to eat, lived in a house with a bathroom and a refrigerator, and possessed a motor-car or even an aeroplane, the most obvious and perhaps the most important form of inequality would already have disappeared. If it once became general, wealth would confer no distinction. It was possible, no doubt, to imagine a society in which wealth, in the sense of personal possessions and luxuries, should be evenly distributed, while power remained in the hands of a small privileged caste. But in practice such a society could not long remain stable. For if leisure and security were enjoyed by all alike, the great mass of human beings who are normally stupefied by poverty would become literate and would learn to think for themselves; and when once they had done this, they would sooner or later realize that the privileged minority had no function, and they would sweep it away.


http://professorsmartass.blogspot.com/2008/01/orwells-1984-war-economy-exists-to.html

[DirkGently]

1. +++ One smart Socialist, Orwell. n/t

[orwell]

2. Trivially true.

The great benefits reaped by the productivity gains of the last century are increasingly deflected toward the ruling class.

They are more than happy to keep us all at each others' throats to obscure this basic fact.

The media conglomerates and Hollywood image factories happily comply with the mandate and perpetrate the enduring Horatio Alger myth.

Hard work no longer corresponds with reward, rather your position on the crony capitalist pyramid.

We have more than enough to go around. Unfortunately we have been conditioned to think otherwise.

Doubleplus good!

[yurbud]

11. that was exactly my point.

[ErikJ]

3. Forget about NAFTAand TPP. A Guaranteed Basic Income is the only answer

We might as well face it, the Internet of Things and robotic technology will replace half of all jobs in the next 10-15 years. We need to start getting people used to it and start fighting for a GBI

[yurbud]

10. It works for Trump, Bush, Mittens, the Walton family, and various other trust fund babies.

Unless the right wants to argue that those trust fund babies are shiftless, amoral layabouts.

[cprise]

4. This is why we have consumerism, and plenty of circuses

to go with our bread. They don't want people to do hard thinking about their predicament.

I think that's why is always good to read Huxley along with Orwell. They are not really opposite views, but instead complement each other. Police states don't have to be about material deprivation, and economic insecurity can be a dominant state of mind in the midst of an obesity epidemic and pervasive overconsumption.

[yurbud]

5. we are closer to a Brave New World than 1984. You can reveal the worst sins of the government

and people mostly don't care.

[bemildred]

6. John Ruskin:

“Men nearly always speak and write as if riches were absolute, as if it were possible, by following certain scientific precepts, for everybody to be rich. Whereas riches are a power like that of electricity, acting only through inequalities or negations of itself. The force of the guinea you have in your pocket depends wholly on the default of a guinea in your neighbors pocket. If he did not want it, it would be of no use to you; the degree of power it possesses depends accurately on the need or desire he has for it, – and the art of making yourself rich, in the ordinary mercantile economist's sense, is therefore equally and necessarily the art of keeping your neighbor poor.”

– John Ruskin “Unto the Last”

[yurbud]

7. someone once told me capitalism is buying people and things for less than they are worth and selling

them for more than they are worth.

And most of us don't have the power to negotiate.

[bemildred]

8. We do love our monopolies here, despite all the disingenuous bullshit about competition.

Competition for the employee class, monopoly for the "ownership class". And if you have no property, no money, you have no rights either, just like the Founding Fathers intended.

[yurbud]

9. it would be more tolerable if unions were allowed a level playing field with corporations

Corporations can have monopolies and be transnational, but unions cannot.

And I never heard of a senator or congressman leaving office and becoming a lobbyist, president, board member, or lawyer for a UNION.