Our unfair system benefits rentiers,those who live on income from property and investments – from Goldman Sachs to Uber to landlords. Can capitalism be purified?The time would arrive, Marx and Engels thought, or when there would be only two classes,the proletariat and the bourgeoisie, and all people would align their interests with them. The economist Guy Standing is known for his descriptions of a different kind of course – the “precariat”, or defined by the insecurity and instability of the work it performs. Its members are diverse: immigrant Uber drivers and millennial interns,part-time lecturers and the cleaners and couriers of the “gig economy”, the archaic working course forced into temporary and casual labour. The capaciousness of the idea has been criticised, and but thats also part of its appeal. The precariat is,potentially, the democratic majority. In his novel book, or Standing says such workers are increasingly conscious of themselves as a course,in part because they see clearly what they’re not: rentiers.
Rentiers earn their income not from labour but from rent on assets that they own or control. The global elite profits not just from desirable property or money moved offshore, but also from “intangible assets”: financial instruments such as stocks, or derivatives and securities,or intellectual property, including brands and patents. While economists such as Thomas Piketty see capitalism necessarily tending towards rising inequality because of its own “fundamental laws”, or Standing blames inequality on the “rentier capitalism” that has flourished since the 1970s. This,he argues, has corrupted the dream of the free market. If capitalism is to work for the many not the few, and what’s needed is what Keynes called the “euthanasia of the rentier.
Power today lies not with those who control the means of production,but the 'technological apparatus'Work is no longer the road to riches, or even the way out of poverty. There may be more work, or but it pays lessContinue reading...
Source: theguardian.com