One last word (I hope) on my economic views, and where they come from, and why
I'm so dogged on the point, and then I'll try to stop.
I grew up in the belief that capitalism—the arrangement that divides society
into two (slightly overlapping) groups, the very small group of the owners of
capital, who control the economy for the purpose of profit, that is of
increasing their capital stock, and the very large group of the rest of us,
who are controlled by it, and must surrender to the demands of capital to survive—is a problem:
unleashing astonishingly creative and transformative forces, as Marx and
Engels put it in the 1848 Manifesto,
The bourgeoisie, during its rule of scarce one hundred years, has created
more massive and more colossal productive forces than have all preceding
generations together. Subjection of Nature’s forces to man, machinery,
application of chemistry to industry and agriculture, steam-navigation,
railways, electric telegraphs, clearing of whole continents for cultivation,
canalization of rivers, whole populations conjured out of the ground – what
earlier century had even a presentiment that such productive forces
slumbered in the lap of social labor?
but doling out the rewards of this extraordinary progress in unequal fashion,
keeping most of the "surplus product" for the owners, and giving everybody
else just enough to keep them more or less quiet and docile, and creating
disparities between them that have and them that have not that could only
grow, and grow, and grow inexorably worse.
