Revisiting Stony Ground...

Economically and socially, where we stand appears substantially to be where we stood back in the dark days before the Enlightenment of The New Left, and - in the UK at least - the Social Contract of the postwar era. For a fleeting period of our history, we seemed to have finally shed ourselves of the shackles of capital and inherited privilege. From the perspective of my youthful self, growing up in the fifties and sixties, the rest of the twentieth century and beyond offered the promise of a more egalitarian, equitable and simply fairer and saner society than had obtained prior to the Second World War, for centuries.

As Thomas Piketty saw it - cf. the interview with him in the current New Statesman - in his 2014 book, "Capital in the Twenty-First Century", we have regressed, economically and politically, to an age of ..."patrimonial capitalism", paralleling the 'great' families of the landed gentry and the wealthy industrialists of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, whose wealth accrued through ownership of capital: either land by birth, or the materially acquired capital of industry. Either way, the accumulation of further wealth was essentially unearned, with a 'natural' social and financial inequality the result: a status quo we are apparently returning to at a rate of knots.

We've spent centuries attempting to escape the oppression of such 'capital', with, as I said a brief, sweet hiatus in that heinous exploitative cycle, only to default back to a spineless supinity of consumption without engagement: we buy, therefore we are. Except of course, the tacit aim of patrimonial capitalism is the sequestration of money by the already wealthy, in the guise of paternal/maternal responsibility: momma/papa knows best, and the books of society and the economy have to be 'balanced', lest the money supply ends up in the 'wrong' hands/pockets, ie. the hoi polloi. Legislation, taxation and control of capital worldwide is the only answer to righting our out-of-control global economy. Let's hope we achieve that goal before the fuckwits crash the whole deal, yet again, as they did spectacularly in the 1920/30s, and to a slightly lesser extent in the 1980-90s, noughties and most recently with the execrable Truss. I, for one, would like to die in the knowledge that the human race was making some progress at last [again], but I fear that might be a vain hope...