{"id":11400,"date":"2015-08-23T16:59:26","date_gmt":"2015-08-23T21:59:26","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=11400"},"modified":"2015-08-23T17:00:04","modified_gmt":"2015-08-23T22:00:04","slug":"does-capitalism-cause-poverty","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=11400","title":{"rendered":"Does Capitalism Cause Poverty?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Does Capitalism Cause Poverty?<\/a><\/h3>\n

Capitalism gets blamed for many things nowadays: poverty, inequality, unemployment, even global warming. As Pope Francis said in a\u00a0recent speech<\/a>\u00a0in Bolivia: \u201cThis system is by now intolerable: farm workers find it intolerable, laborers find it intolerable, communities find it intolerable, peoples find it intolerable. The earth itself \u2013 our sister, Mother Earth, as Saint Francis would say \u2013 also finds it intolerable.\u201d<\/p>\n

But are the problems that upset Francis the consequence of what he called\u00a0\u201cunbridled capitalism\u201d<\/a>? Or are they instead caused by capitalism\u2019s surprising failure to do what was expected of it? Should an agenda to advance social justice be based on bridling capitalism or on eliminating the barriers that thwart its expansion?<\/p>\n

The answer in Latin America, Africa, the Middle East, and Asia is obviously the latter. To see this, it is useful to recall how Karl Marx imagined the future.<\/p>\n

For Marx, the historic role of capitalism was to reorganize production. Gone would be the family farms, artisan yards, and the \u201cnation of shopkeepers,\u201d as Napoleon is alleged to have scornfully referred to Britain. All these petty bourgeois activities would be plowed over by the equivalent of today\u2019s Zara, Toyota, Airbus, or Walmart.<\/p>\n

As a result, the means of production would no longer be owned by those doing the work, as on the family farm or in the craftsman\u2019s workshop, but by \u201ccapital.\u201d Workers would possess only their own labor, which they would be forced to exchange for a miserable wage. Nonetheless, they would be more fortunate than the \u201creserve army of the unemployed\u201d \u2013 a pool of idle labor large enough to make others fear losing their job, but small enough not to waste the surplus value that could be extracted by making them work.<\/p>\n

Read more at http:\/\/www.project-syndicate.org\/commentary\/does-capitalism-cause-poverty-by-ricardo-hausmann-2015-08#ZHmOTir0drCVm34s.99<\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Does Capitalism Cause Poverty? Capitalism gets blamed for many things nowadays: poverty, inequality, unemployment, even global warming. As Pope Francis said in a\u00a0recent speech\u00a0in Bolivia: \u201cThis system is by now intolerable: farm workers find it intolerable, laborers find it intolerable, communities find it intolerable, peoples find it intolerable. The earth itself \u2013 our sister, Mother […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[111,260,8403,6471,642,8402,1808],"class_list":["post-11400","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-economics","tag-capitalism","tag-employment","tag-means-of-production","tag-pope-francis","tag-poverty","tag-project-syndicate","tag-wages"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11400","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=11400"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11400\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":11402,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11400\/revisions\/11402"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=11400"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=11400"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=11400"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}