Time it Was...

I was mulling over just how we've arrived at our current point in economic and political history, and that we really don't seem to have learned much at all in the last century and a half or so; let's face it, modern political and economic history is still that: modern. It's not like where we are at present was baked into humanity in the Garden of Eden, although the apologists for class and the establishment still cling to the idée fixe of inherent privilege and class hierarchy: concepts which we thought naively had withered on the vine of history decades ago.

To this end, I have just downloaded "Das Kapital" [Marx, if you didn't know it already, and you should], and "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction" [Walter Benjamin] to my Kindle, to dip into whilst in Shropshire next week. The facts of capitalism don't change - commerce, in my opinion, is not inherently bad: business and basic capitalism foster change and progress - but where the strings of power are inextricably controlling of the means of survival of the workers of the world, who de facto produce the wealth of the controllers of those strings, then capitalism is fatally skewed against the many at the benefit of the few.

I go back, time and time again, to my father's mantra: the Labour Party should have nationalized land when they had the opportunity, in 1948. It was the last remaining vestige of privilege and control left to the - at the time - ailing and spent, spendthrift gentry, clinging onto the vestiges of their accidental and ill-gotten 'heritage'. That they've managed to claw back so much in such a relatively short time, is testimony, at least, to their tenacity and desperation to avoid actual participation in our world. Time for change. Time for new politics. Time for a new economics. Time to call time...