The T-shirt argument
Lately I’ve been reading John Perkins’ “Confessions of an Economic Hit Man”, which I heartily recommend if you are anxious to get steamed up about imperialism and debt slavery and the like. Anywho, therein Perkins says the following:
I recalled an economics professor from my business school days, a man from northern India, who lectured about limited resources, about man’s need to grow continually, and about the principle of slave labor. According to this professor, all successful capitalist systems involve hierarchies with rigid chains of command, including a handful at the very top who control descending orders of subordinates, and a massive army of workers at the bottom, who in relative economic terms truly can be classified as slaves.
This is a pretty powerful indictment of capitalism, if you have any kind of commitment to anti-poverty, equality, social justice, etc. And certainly many capitalist cheerleaders will promise you that capitalism will, indeed, inevitably lift everyone out of poverty and provide us all with the stable, eco-friendly utopia we’d all love to be a part of.* This led me to construct what I call “The T-shirt Argument”, which goes as follows:
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posted by saurabh in Robots, Schmapitalism | 13 Comments
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