Category: Economics Page 25 of 89

A Long, Hot Summer

On June 3, 2020

Back when Obama was elected, I was still an A-list blogger, and had some access. We advised Obama and the Senators creating the new financial laws that the correct action was to take over the banks and break them up, while bailing out Main Street. Criminal charges should be laid against bankers under RICO statutes for fraud, to ensure nothing like this happened again.

If they did not follow our advice, we warned that it would eventually lead both a strengthening of the populist right and to civil unrest.

Of course, they didn’t take that advice, and given who Obama chose to run his administration that should hardly have been a surprise. Indeed, it was Obama who pushed TARP through after it failed the first time–Pelosi was not going to pass it if Republicans would not vote for it in equal percentages, and they wouldn’t. Obama twisted arms, and the reports I received were that the threats were absolutely savage. TARP was, though most Democrats will not admit it, ultimately Obama’s bill, whether it was originally Bush’s or not.

It is after the 2008 financial crisis that American pathology starts going off the charts: We start seeing declining life expectancy among the working class, the opiate crisis spreads to poor and many middle class whites, and so on. It takes years for jobs to return, and inequality soars; it was worse under Obama than any other previous president. Yes, this is a continuation of trend, but Obama could have stopped it, simply by enforcing laws as written.

The response to the financial crisis set the standard: Bail out the rich, fuck the poor people–they receive some crumbs. This was repeated when Covid-19 hit, with multi-trillion dollar bailouts for the rich, and a single $1,200 check for everyone else, with some technocratic fixes around the edges. Billionaires gained control over more of the economy, small businesses were and are being gutted, and crisis capitalists are waiting to snap up billions in distressed businesses and properties.

The rich get richer, the poor get poorer.

Meanwhile the neoliberal playbook, which was always about making the rich richer and everyone else poorer and about gutting the middle class the New Deal order built, kept the poors down by locking them up and with routing police brutality. Incarceration soared under neoliberal rulership, and Joe Biden was one of the architects, though you can see the trend starts under Reagan.

And so here we are, with protests and riots throughout the US. This was a long time coming, and it came because the lords and masters in the US refuse to throw anybody but the rich more than scraps. They funnel gold and caviar to the already wealthy at every opportunity; cat food to everyone else. They beat down anyone who acts uppity, giving cops massive license to be brutal, arming them with military weapons, and having them taught by Israelis whose experience is in beating down Palestinians in the occupied territories: people with no rights, regarded by Israelis as subhuman (no, don’t even pretend otherwise).

The cops see violence and brutality as their right. Any challenge to their authority is met with cruelty and abuse of power. They are fundamentally cowards, because they don’t believe their victims have any right to fight or even talk back. (Their essential cowardice has been proven when they are threatened, and is a weakness which could easily be exploited.)

Right now there is no reason to believe than any of the new Covid-19 bills will do more than give crumbs out. Food stamps are under threat of further restriction and, in New York, Governor Cuomo (whose popularity has increased despite his complete malign incompetence in handling Covid-19) used the crisis as part of his excuse to cut Medicaid, while keeping non violent offenders locked up in prison so that Covid could kill them.

Long and short, neoliberal elites don’t know how to give. They don’t have the instinct that New Deal elites, for all their flaws, had, that the job of government is prosperity for the masses. They know it is prosperity for the few, they feel in their bones that anyone who is poor doesn’t deserve more than a little bit of pity charity, and their instinct is punitive; the poor and middle class are undeserving and if they get uppity, what they need is a good smack.

Covid is not going to go away this summer. Multiple states have reopened without getting it even remotely under control. Testing has been reduced, but even so numbers show only minor decreases.

So we have a pandemic, a population nearing 30 percent unemployment, people who can’t pay the rent, and 40 years of impoverishment and brutality.

This summer has been a long time coming, and it’s only starting. Even if this wave of protests is crushed, or dies down, the smart money is that it isn’t the last wave.

And that’s a good thing.

Because as long as your lords and masters know they can only give you scraps and feed themselves at gold plated troughs, that’s how it’ll be.

If you are reading this, understand that this dynamic means that there can be no peace while the current ideology rules. The only possible peace is the peace of impoverished serfdom, of people beaten so far into the ground that they simply accept that everything will keep getting worse for them while the rich feast.

There is no good future for the US if neoliberalism, and neoliberal elites, continue to rule.

Take that into account in your planning.

And get ready for that long, hot summer.

The results of the work I do, like this article, are free, but food isn’t, so if you value my work, please DONATE or SUBSCRIBE.

Protect Yourself from Retaliation After the Riots

By Ian Welsh

On May 30, 2020

Comments

In the years since the Ferguson riots, prominent protesters have been systematically killed. Nobody knows who is killing them, and police somehow can’t catch anyone.

The most likely explanation is that they are being killed by cops.

In New York, the man who filmed the choking death of Eric Garner was repeatedly hassled by cops, and is now in jail.

After the Minneapolis riots, the police will take revenge. If they know who you are, they will come for you. If they can find a way to get you legally, they will. If they can’t, they’ll take care of you anyway.

Fortunately, we are in the age of Covid-19.

WEAR A MASK. During the day, wear shades as well. Do not carry your phone, it is a tracking device which the police can use, retroactively, to see exactly where you were at all times. If you must have a phone, use a burner. If you are going to take pictures and video and upload later, make sure you don’t have people’s identifiable faces in them. Do your research into how to upload data safely, in a way you can’t be identified. To begin with, do NOT use a US-based VPN. I suggest a VPN from an unfriendly country: Vietnam, Russia, whatever.

Also, if you are willing to destroy property, make sure to destroy all surveillance cameras first. Every camera you destroy may save multiple people from jail or death.

Insurrections such as this one come to an end. The cops will want revenge, and they will take it.

Protect yourself.

The results of the work I do, like this article, are free, but food isn’t, so if you value my work, please DONATE or SUBSCRIBE.

The False Choice of Deaths Versus the Economy

By Ian Welsh

On May 19, 2020

Comments

There is a vast amount of hand-wringing and angst going on about how we can either save the economy by re-opening, or we can let the economy crash and save lives. Of course, the economy crashing (and the US unemployment rate will probably hit 30 percent) will cause the loss of lives also.

This is a manufactured, completely unnecessary choice.

To understand why, you have to understand three facts about money:

Money is imaginary. It is a fiction created by humans. People are not fictions. Land is not a fiction. Buildings are not fictions and neither are physical objects. Money, even when it exists in paper form rather than 0s and 1s in a computer, is fictional. It has value only because we agree it does.
Money is used for two things: First, it determines who controls what. Can you control land, people, or objects? If you buy land or an object, you control it for as long as you own it. If you hire a person, you control their time. Money is control of people, land, and things.
Second, money is a feedback mechanism. If people who have money want less of what you offer, you get less money and control less people, land, and things. If people who have money want more of what you offer, you get more money and can control more people, land, and things. (What people who have no money think is of no concern.)

What Covid-19 closures are doing is providing feedback–“people with money want less of these things.” That causes the people who control businesses, or live in apartments, or have to pay mortgages to run out of money, and lose control of those things. Businesses go out of business. People can’t pay rent or mortgages or their employees.

That causes an economic crash.

This is 100 percent unnecessary. We want feedback in an economic system because we don’t want people doing things that other people don’t want or need (or, in Capitalism, other people with money).

But when a one-time event happens which does not reflect a fundamental shift in what people want (i.e., this pandemic will end) then you actually want to stop the feedback, because it’s bad feedback. You don’t want to change long-term economic arrangements because of something that is a one-time event.

So, because money is fictional, because we just create it out of thin air (central banks create trillions routinely), this means that we can do one of two things:

We can just give people who have lost their income due to Covid-19 enough income to pay their bills
we can freeze payments up and down the line – rent, mortgages, interest payments.

Or, of course, we can (and should) do a combination of these two things.

When Covid-19 closures have clearly run their course, we stop doing these things. If there are permanent changes (a lot of people keep working from home, or we don’t get a vaccine and restaurants aren’t going to be popular again) at that point the feedback is allowed to operate.

To allow a one-time event of limited duration to fundamentally reshape the economy means one misunderstands what an economy is. An economy is not money, it is people, land, and objects. Those are what must be preserved, not money. When the one-time event is over, if those objects still exist and are still controlled by people who can use them to create what other people want, then the economy has been preserved.

To allow people to die to preserve the economy is idiocy: It hurts the economy. People are the economy; it is people and natural resources which produce everything of value.

So, when people squeal about the economy vs. lives, understand that they don’t know what an economy is or how money works. Or, they do know how money works and what an economy is, but they are taking advantage of the situation to give themselves more money, and are good with other people dying while they get more money, because they are concerned with their relative position.

If the Fed and the government give rich people lots of money, and everyone else not much, and if assets become cheap and can be bought out, and if small businesses go out of business, at the end the economy is smaller, BUT the rich people control more of it

And that’s what they want. Too bad your grandma and your dad have to die for it, but that’s not their problem.

The results of the work I do, like this article, are free, but food isn’t, so if you value my work, please DONATE or SUBSCRIBE.

How Covid Will Play Out in America

By Ian Welsh

On May 11, 2020

Comments

Almost every day this blog publishes the John Hopkins Covid-19 numbers. They are undercounts of both deaths and cases, but they give the trendline. Recently the trendline has very slowly started to move down.

Meanwhile, Trump and many governors have started to move to ease isolation requirements. This map shows that only five out of 50 states (and Puerto Rico) aren’t easing.

There are three problems here.

First, the curve hasn’t been crushed. In fact, in some states, it’s still increasing.

Second, even once a curve has been crushed, to keep it under control without a vaccine, you need to test and trace. The US would need to hire hundreds of thousands of tracers to do this, and would need many more tests than are currently available. If you don’t test and trace, one person can infect many other people, and then all those people infect many other people.

Third, Covid-19 takes about two weeks from infection before people show symptoms, and two weeks more before they start dying. During that asymptomatic period, carriers are contagious.

What this means is you can have a significant outbreak going on and not know it is happening. That’s why countries that got Covid-19 under control crushed it into the dirt, then put everyone coming in from outside the country into quarantine, and they test like mad.

Humans are really bad at making decisions where the consequences are delayed. (See Change, Climate). Even a two week- to month-long delay is more than the decision makers in many countries, including the US, can handle.

So, the numbers seem to be in decline, and there will be removal of restrictions, and then the numbers will start increasing again in two to six weeks. Because infection rates will be moving off a larger base, they will create a second wave where people start dropping like flies–much larger than the first wave.

This is acceptable to the people who run the US because they have jobs where they can work from home, and if they don’t, like in the White House, they can test every day. It is the lower class who will be forced to go back to work and to die.

That’s not a problem for American elites; killing unimportant people for money is pretty much what they do for a living.

It’s possible this narrative can be cut off if those states which are handling Covid properly close their borders to non-isolating states, presumably by calling up the national guard. There is also some hope because Americans are generally not flocking back to venues like restaurants–even in States which have re-opened.

But overall, this looks like the first wave passed its peak, is slowly declining, before the second wave comes in and culls the poor for the rich. Numbers of deaths will be in the hundreds of thousands at a minimum. If this is bungled completely, it could be that 80 percent of the population will have to get Covid-19 to create herd immunity, and that a little under one percent will die. The rich will isolate and test throughout all this, of course.

This is a worst case scenario, and many mocked the possibility even two months ago. Surely, they said, American elites couldn’t fuck this up that much?

They can, and they are. But it isn’t fucking up. They’re now isolated and in little danger. They’ve bailed themselves out, given themselves even more control over the economy than before. If ordinary Americans get sick, die, or can’t pay rent and go hungry, well, why should American elites care? It doesn’t effect them.

That’s their bet.

As for you, do what you can to prepare. We may get lucky and get a vaccine earlier than expected, but if not, the US has made the choice to let Covid-19 continue to wend its way through the population.

And remember, Americans, if you decide you’d rather not die so the top one percent can own more of the US, they have names and addresses.

Never riot in your own neighbourhood.

The results of the work I do, like this article, are free, but food isn’t, so if you value my work, please DONATE or SUBSCRIBE.

How Neoliberalism Destroyed Capitalism

By Ian Welsh

On May 7, 2020

Comments

During the 2007/8 financial crisis, the Federal Reserve and other central banks printed trillions of dollars to support banks and big businesses. They prevented capitalism from working: While some firms that had nothing to do with the crisis should have been bailed out, those that caused the crisis by allocating money badly should have been allowed to go under.

This is supposed to be the virtue of capitalism: If people allocate resources (which we count with money) badly, they are supposed to lose the ability to allocate resources in the future. Those who allocate resources well are supposed to receive more resources. This has a lot of flaws (what makes money isn’t always what improves human welfare), but at least it’s a feedback loop.

It’s the GOOD thing about capitalism.

The Fed broke what was left of capitalism; there is very little that is good left when the allocation system doesn’t work– even under capitalism’s own terms.

It was clear that the central banks had decided that their primary purpose was to make sure that the rich stayed rich, no matter the cost to others. If they had let those firms go under, the economy would have fallen faster and recovered far better for over 90 percent of the population.

They patted themselves on the back for saving the world, and when Coronavirus hit they did the same thing.

At this point, the world economy–and especially the US economy–only works as long as you keep it hooked up to a ventilator, and it works badly.

I had been curious to see how this would be played out. As I have said many times, “there is a real economy.” There are people who make or grow things or provide actual necessary services (not your tax accountant, the people being labeled “essential workers” right now + farmers, factor workers, designers, and so on).

So, since the rich and powerful have decided that under no circumstances would they allow their class to lose money or power, no matter how badly they did their jobs, the question has been, “What are the effects of this?”

One of the effects is the complete bungling of Coronavirus in the US and the UK, the heartlands of neoliberalism. Another effect is suggested by this:

More than 40 percent of the U.S.’s 30 million small businesses could close permanently in the next six months because of the pandemic: Chamber of Commerce survey.

The stock market is doing fine, because it was bailed out. Small businesses aren’t, because they weren’t.

Covid-19 is no one’s fault, but how to deal with it is a policy decision. That policy decision reveals that the folks who run our economy will take care of the parts of the economy from which they directly benefit, and won’t help other parts of the economy.

Meanwhile, the US couldn’t make ventilators, couldn’t produce PPE, couldn’t track and trace infected people, and so on.

The effect of central bank and legislative policy is simple: There is a real economy, and the policies pursued by the elites will contract it. There’s a lot of bullshit around inflation stats, but the simple fact of the matter is that, for over 50 years, the cost of things people must actually have has risen faster than salaries. The BLS figures don’t show this, but you can’t run a middle class family with a 60s lifestyle on one middle class income today.

There is a real economy, which produces food and items people need or want. There is a financial economy, which produces financialized returns which are almost wholly disconnected from the health of the real economy. Billionaires pile up more billions as the economy gets sicker. The stock market is supported in the middle of a pandemic while actual businesses, comprising the real economy, are allowed to die.

So this is the future of neoliberal states: Elites will continue to produce “money” for themselves while damaging the real economy. At some point, a stressor will hit the economy which the actual production and logistics chains cannot handle. Elites, completely unable to do anything but manage financial numbers, will not be able to handle it, and there will be an actual economic collapse. Meanwhile, for most of the people in the US, the UK, and other neoliberal states, the long constriction of actual standards of living will continue.

If you want a good life, and you want to avoid, not disaster (like Coronavirus or huge wildfires) but absolute catastrophe, these elites and their entire supporting apparatus have to go.

If they don’t, they’re going to kill a lot of people–certainly including people you know.

The results of the work I do, like this article, are free, but food isn’t, so if you value my work, please DONATE or SUBSCRIBE.

On the Causes and Consequences of the Oil Price Crash

By Ian Welsh

On April 23, 2020

Comments

Image by Yuan2003

So, we had a crash of oil prices, where some futures contracts were actually negative, which means that sellers had to pay people to take oil off their hands.

Obviously, oil use has dropped during the Covid-19 crisis, and before that, prices had already decreased in an attempt by non-US producers to reduce prices low enough to crush US shale production.

Oil is a real thing: It takes up storage. Storage space is running out, and it’s not clear when demand will recover, so oil that is to be delivered now-ish is an expense–you have to pay to store it. Thus, the negative prices.

There was a bounce Wednesday, ostensibly due to Trump saying he had ordered the US Navy to blow up Iranian boats if they continued to hassle other ships. (If they do this in the Gulf, and it goes to shooting, Iran will win the initial confrontation. They have a lot of missiles.)

One could equally say this is a dead-dog bounce.

At any rate, even double digit prices are below most people’s production costs for oil, and they are above the price every major government that relies on oil needs to balance their books. This means Saudi Arabia, the four gulf oil states, Iraq, Iran, Russia, and so on. Ironically, Iran, having been under sanctions already, will be in better shape than most of the others.

It is also, obviously, low enough to make US (and Canadian) shale oil production completely uneconomical: generally that needs at least $60/barrel, and much of it needs more.

So we have countries and companies with bleeding treasuries. The US has the ability to print money, presumably it will do so to keep Shale oil around in Zombie form. Countries which cannot print money and have other countries accept it could be in trouble. This depends mostly on how long this goes on. A couple months, even three or four, uncomfortable, but no big deal.

If this crisis bubbles on for a year and a half of shutdowns, partial relaxations, then more shutdowns, we’re into some very dangerous territory. I’m not sure the House of Saud, for example, can survive that scenario (it couldn’t happen to a nicer country, etc.).

The world has been in a very long economic relationship, in which the most important commodity has been oil, and the producers sold it in dollars, so the US and the swing producers all benefited. Obama and Trump more or less broke the deal with the promotion of shale oil, and China has increasingly been insisting on buying oil in Yuan, but the relationship had stumbled on, even though it meant enabling countries that the US has been treating as enemies, like Russia.

Trump wanted to force Europeans to buy more American oil and less Russian oil: This was a major part of his economic plan, such as it was. Trump likes to find a place where he’s more powerful, and push that as hard as possible, and things like sanctions against Russia, Iran, and Venezuela were–and still are–situations in which he has unilateral power that no one else has been entirely able to get around (though China has somewhat). The EU has proven unwilling to stand up to the US in the case of sanctions.

Right now, there’s no particular reason to think this can’t continue. The US can still print infinite dollars, because foreigners will still accept them–even though the US is no longer the most important manufacturing state. So the US can bail out shale oil. Oil producers, who do not have hegemonic currencies, do not have infinite rope.

This changes only the major producers of things the US needs cease to be willing to trade in US dollars. China and the EU could (but I very much doubt will) cut the US’s throat if they ever chose to act together. Perhaps China could even do it alone. The problem, of course, is that there would be a lot of collateral damage to them. US oil is expensive, but the US can produce it. China and the EU need to import it. If they want to make such a change, they have to secure strong supply guarantee from other nations.

This is theoretically possible, but the problem is simple: Any nation that did this would then fall under (even more) US military threat. Bombs are very good at ending oil exports, and neither the US nor China is willing to go to war over this. Perhaps China could move troops and nukes into vulnerable countries, but that would trigger a new cold war, and the Chinese don’t want that–at least not yet. China is working on their own trade area, to compete with the US-led trade area (which the US is abandoning anyway, as it shits on the WTO it created), but it is not ready yet (the Belt and Road Initiative is China’s name for this trade restructuring).

The current collapse of oil prices is unexpected; while a pandemic has always been possible, knowing when it would happen was not. The pandemic has simply revealed the current production’s costs and dynamics. Saudi Arabia has been moving towards vast danger for ages because of its over-reliance on oil; this simply means the consequences may hit sooner. Oi-consuming nations have been maneuvering to reduce their dependence on imported oil in general, and unreliable oil in particular, but they were not yet ready to make any big moves. Almost everyone has been chafing under the petrodollar and under the current world payment system, which the US has abused with its constant sanctions. Despite this, no one has created a viable alternative and been willing to take the hits necessary to move off the dollar and the US/eu payment system (“EU” is in lower case deliberately).

Most oil producing nations, including the US and Canada, are generally bad actors on the international stage: with crimes ranging from moderately bad to invading oil producing nations regularly and sanctioning other ones constantly, or to being the world’s premier supporters of fundamentalist religion and terrorists.

So don’t cry too much for oil producing nations, nor even for their customers, who have enabled them greatly. But beware that the game is changing: Covid-19 has highlighted existing issues and if it continues long enough it could precipitate changes which have been desired by many, but remained unimplemented because people have been unwilling to bear the costs and risks.

The results of the work I do, like this article, are free, but food isn’t, so if you value my work, please DONATE or SUBSCRIBE.

Is America Going to Have a Covid-19 Apocalypse?

By Ian Welsh

On April 17, 2020

Comments

The Course of Empire by Thomas Cole

Covid is one of those disasters which tests whomever it happens to. Countries like Vietnam and Taiwan and even Germany stayed on top of it, or got ahead of it, and are doing fine. Those who mishandled it are taking some hard hits.

This isn’t primarily about deaths, though those are awful, it is about the mishandling of the economy. In Canada, there’s a benefit of $2,000 dollars per month for which most people who lost their jobs qualify. Other countries have done even better: freezing mortgage payments, rent, and so on, and organizing food delivery.

In the US, we have predictions of a 30 percent unemployment rate. I just saw that less than half of Los Angeles county still has a job.

The bailout for regular people is $1,200. In a place like Los Angeles, that won’t even cover most people’s rent.

There’s been a vast bailout, mainly–though not exclusively–through the Fed, for the rich. Basically, as much free money at the trough as they can gorge on.

But small businesses are toast. A third of households, at least, are on the verge of not just homelessness but not being able to eat.

Meanwhile we have a lovely display of typical US business incompetence. The US’s logistics system is a wonder of the world, but it was created in the 80s and 90s by people who are retired or dead now. Meat packing plants are shutting down because of multiple cases, truckers and warehouse workers are getting sick and scared. Farmers complain of problems getting workers. The price of beef for farmers has crashed through the floor, but they can’t get the animals to consumers.

Meanwhile, multiple states have not instituted isolation, and there are “protests,” backed by Republicans, to reopen states that have.

Not isolating nationally means there are pockets of plague which are still expanding exponentially, and which can reinfect the areas which did isolate. Coming out of isolation too soon will mean that cases will explode again a month to a month and a half after self-isolation ends.

The job issues mean trouble. People who can’t afford food become violent. Food riots bring down nations.

Assuming these storms are weathered, or that Americans are so beaten down they won’t riot even when starving, when the economy does re-open, many of the jobs will be gone. People who did not earn during the time down will still have to pay back-rent. At best, their spending is crippled, at worst they get evicted.

Many landlords will lose their property in any case, many small businesses will go bankrupt and never re-appear. The likely scenario, longer term “after” the Coronavirus is another ten-year depression, except this one is likely to be a deflationary depression: No one but the rich has money, and no one is spending.

But imagine the fairly standard scenario of multiple waves of coronavirus with multiple waves of self-isolation. No national policy, so some states stay open as others are closed. People in warehouses keep getting hit, logistics people get hit, migrant workers get hit or can’t even get into the country.

The system, already drawn tight to extract maximum profit and efficiency, starts breaking. Prices surge, there are actual shortages in many places.

This is some months out, I’d guess, although this is the sort of scenario that goes from “eh, it’s OK” to BOOM very, very fast when it does go.

The US is fragile. The choice to not freeze mortgages, rent, interest payments and so on, and to not bail out ordinary people as I instructed is going to explain to the rich that it is everyone else who makes the actual economy run.

There is a real economy, Virginia, and if it freezes up, there will be hell to pay. Logistics workers need PPE and they need them now. Freezes of rent, mortgages, interest payments, and so on, need to be done now. If a complete idiot wasn’t running the country, taking national control of when states close and reopen should happen now. I would suggest that if Americans don’t want their country in a new great depression, that they find a way to depose Trump now, and if Pence won’t be competent, ditch him too.

There is a chance that the US will fumble through, as governors and mayors who aren’t complete incompetents (and the rare, actual competent governor, which doesn’t include New York’s Cuomo), plus the rare competent CEOs, manage to hold thing together–barely.

But right now, this is looking like an epic clusterfuck.

Remember, however, when the riots come, if they do, if you won’t just die quietly for the peace of your masters, to go to where they live, or where the Fed employees live, and riot there. Explain to them about what people do to fat, happy, rich people when they can’t eat.

The results of the work I do, like this article, are free, but food isn’t, so if you value my work, please DONATE or SUBSCRIBE.

The Transition to Capitalism

By Ian Welsh

On April 16, 2020

Comments

One of the most important things to understand about industrial capitalism is that the lower classes didn’t want it.

Peasants did not leave the land voluntarily. They were forced off, often violently, in a series of enclosures, through which their millennia-old rights to use the land were taken together.

This was a vast, albeit “legal” (because bills were passed that made it legal), seizure of property rights. Property is just rights, and those rights were taken from the peasantry and free farmers and given to the lords.

The justification for this was that “enclosed lands are more productive,” but detailed study has found this was only somewhat true: Commons fields were about 80 percent to 90 percent as productive, and their productivity increased at the same rate as enclosed fields. For some crops, common fields were more productive.

With the the fields enclosed, the peasantry lost control of capital (land is capital). They couldn’t grow their own food, raise sheep for wool, chop down trees for fuel, and so on.

They were thus forced off the land, into the city slums, and had to work for industrialists, six and a half days a week, 12 hours a day on average. They died younger, there was far more disease, they were maimed often, and they lived worse.

They knew this. They resisted. They hated.

Capitalism, among the many things that it is, is the concentration of capital in the hands of a few people. That means access to capital is removed from most people. Most people must now work for someone else. In some times and places that work is nice, at others it is not, but it is a loss of control and choice.

Peasants and free farmers in Britain had far more control over what they did and when than factory workers. In fact, they had more control than most modern American workers do today.

Yes, they had to engage in demeaning status rituals from which we are largely exempt, but they had a type of freedom most wage slaves don’t.

The choice for most people today is to choose their master, not to choose to have no master. The local gentry or nobles did not supervise the peasants most of the time, they let them get on with their work, took their share of the proceeds, and got a certain number of days of work from the peasantry.

But they were not close-supervising them.

Again, we tend to compare today with then, but this is the wrong comparison. The comparison is then (peasant/yeoman) with then (factory worker). The first was so far superior to the second as for there to be no comparison.

Was all of this disempowerment, this removal of capital from everyone but the few, necessary for industrialization and its benefits? Did people have to be forced off the land and into satanic mills, where they worked like dogs and died young?

Or was there a better path, which we did not take?

And what are the results today? The results are, in fact, that fewer and fewer people have control over capital or the means of production, and the rest of us have to do what those people say, not just for a month or two every year and here’s a share, but for five or more days a week, with intrusive monitoring and micro-managing bosses.

They control the capital. We do what they tell us to, negotiating only who wields the whip.

That’s capitalism.

Did it have to be that way?

The results of the work I do, like this article, are free, but food isn’t, so if you value my work, please DONATE or SUBSCRIBE.