Tragedy at Morecambe

“Mine workers get trapped underground even in advanced capitalist countries and many workers in the oil and chemical industries run a greatly increased risk of death or injury. And many people who have worked with asbestos now face a slow, lingering death.”

I’m not sure I understand why these risks to the poor are endemic only to capitalism.

BTW, aren’t the honey collecters self-employed.

Also it seems to me that the greed of entrepreneurs can just as easily lead to such risk-taking. You do see Muslim entreprenurs (e.g. shop-keepers) operating in sensitive Hindu-dominated areas (and vice-versa) in India.

In fact, in the recent Gujarat pogrom-like anti-muslim carnage Muslim entrepreneurs were big targets.

I ask in good faith, of course.

Also, in India, middle class (and rich) Muslims households in many parts of India (most certainly in my city, Bombay) are forced to take just as much risk in living in areas dominated by Hindus.

I think it would be mistake to treat it as a class-based risk. I can still remember the utter fear in our hearts as gangs came to burn down or lynch middle class Muslim/Hindu households in areas where I lived during the riots in Bombay ten years ago.

In fact this is leading to segregation in even middle class households in Bombay — Hindu houses are VERY VERY reluctant to have Muslim neighbours and vice versa. Not necessarily out of prejudice, but out of the fear that they would be caught in an attack on their neighbours.

It’s really scary.

First Bertram refers to these tragedies as “a normal and predictable consequence of capitalism”. But his only policy prescription is “different social conditions (suppose a univeral basic income scheme or some such)”, which would be completely compatible with capitalism. (See Chapter 12 of that wacko leftist book Capitalism & Freedom.)

I think it’s also simplistic to say that such (uncompensated) risks are a predictable consequence of capitalism.

I’m not entirely familiar with the research in this area, so I certainly could be wrong, but I think in the US, for example, occupations where workers consider themselves to be at higher risk tend to be higher paid than others, after accounting for education, race, experience, unionisation and other factors.

Steven Rhodes makes the point in his excellent ‘The Economist’s Point of View’:

“Because businessmen must pay workers in risky jobs more than those in safe ones, they have a financial interest in making safety improvements where this can be at reasonable cost… Viscusi (Employment Hazards: An Investigation of Market Performance, Harvard UP, 1979, pp.206-207) calculate that the total amount that US firms pay workers in risk premiums is $70 billion a year, which is about 3000 times as much as business pays in OSHA penalities…” (p.228)

We’ve moved out of flamewar material, but within the rose-bush metaphor I still disagree with you. I would call the danger of or potential for straggly shapeless rose-bushes a normal and predictable consequence and an “enduring feature” of rose-bush development, but I wouldn’t go so far as to say it your way.

I also disagree with the metaphor itself, because in no way do straggly shapeless rose-bushes weigh on public policy, except when they are used to imprison rival heads of state.

“in the US, for example, occupations where workers consider themselves to be at higher risk tend to be higher paid than others, after accounting for education, race, experience, unionisation and other factors.”

I don’t know much about this either. But those other factors do play a large role. Because one way the employing class deals with this whole issue (and it says so explicitly but somewhat indirectly, if that’s not an oxymoron) is precisely by immigration. That is essentially what immigration is for, at least in their view. High levels of immigration are essential so that someone will do “all those jobs Americans won’t do.” That’s a very popular phrase here (and I think in Europe too) – and it’s a very sly phrase, in a way. The people who say it don’t elaborate (and the people they say it to all too seldom ask them to). “Why won’t Americans do those jobs?” people ought to ask but hardly ever seem to remember to. Why? Because they’re badly paid, with long hours, in nasty conditions, and lead nowhere – and because they are dangerous. Meat-packing, for example. Chicken factories are staffed largely by immigrants because the work is not only nasty and unpleasant, it’s damn dangerous (Eric Schlosser’s Fast Food Nation is good on this). Without a huge supply of immigrants (mostly with few skills and little education) – a reserve army of labor, in short – the employing class would indeed have to pay much better to get people to do work like that, and they would also have to do a much much better job of observing safety regulations – slow down the line, do more inspections, etc. So what they mean when they say Americans “won’t” do such jobs, is that Americans won’t (if they can possibly help it, but the Welfare “Reform” Act makes it a lot harder for them to help it now, which was and is one of the main reasons for it, though you had to really hunt in order to find anyone admitting that) unless you pay them well.

Farm work is another classic example. Horrible work, and dangerous – exposure to pesticides, stoop labor, machinery, etc.

Construction is another. Better paid than the other two – there the higher pay for dangerous work thing may be more applicable – but I think (I’m not at all sure, but I think I’ve read this somewhere) wages are being forced down in the construction industry precisely by increased use of immigrant labor.

Cockle picking and the like aren’t an invention of capitalism. And only with the further progress of capitalism are such risky jobs likely to become redundant.

Do you mean, people will stop eating cockles, or they’ll be harvested by robots?

As for your gibe about “the uselessness of a society formerly called ‘communist’,” that’s too silly to discept.

Also, this needs to be verified, but if what Rhodes (who BTW, being a pol scientist, isn’t uncritical of the ‘economist’s view of the world’) says is true still, the result would hold for immigrants in the US as well — of the jobs they do in the US, the riskier ones may still be higher paying.

Let’s be honest, the reason that the British press is now interested in this is because of the strange nexus between immigration and extreme poverty. If these cocklers had been in China, nobody in the UK would have noticed.

The fact is that many people all across the world, under all sorts of political systems, have occupations that are dangerous/lousy to our liberal/rich preconceptions.

And the fact that these poor cocklers were immigrants is the most strong evidence possible that ‘capitalist’ economies have gone further than any other set of economies in making such risky jobs redundant. That is, there are almost no Britons who would be willing to take such jobs.

By the way, it might be better to substitute ‘free market economies’ for the term ‘capitalist economies’ since it is a rather better description. And no use of charming archaisms like ‘discept’ will disguise the fact that communist societies turned out to be entirely useless.

Andrew,

“[…]there still might be people who assumed such risks, but it would be a lot harder and more expensive to get them to do so.

So it’s okay as long as they’re paid enough?”

There is no way to be free of all risks, the only question we may address is to make the probability of a mishap indifferent to the previous wealth of any individual. Since the workers have less control on their condition of work than their employers, the fact that these would have to pay more for riskier works, is an incentive to reduce the risks. Miners were amongst the firsts to create unions because of the risks they had to confront, do not forget that in a not so far past, even 10 years old children had to work there in some places, because there were no other work available.

Chirag,

“[…]
And surely capitalism just as much provides opportunites for people to escape from poverty and risky conditions.”

As long as the most common way to escape from poverty and risky conditions are death and lottery, I reckon they are not very good opportunities.

DSW

Quoting a 1979 book by Kip Viscusi supports the original point rather than diminishing it. What successful capitalists have managed to do in the ensuing 25 years is to avoid paying most of their previous risk premia by moving jobs to places where workers either don’t have the organization to force the payment of higher wages for bad jobs, or are so grindingly poor that (given the asymmetrical information available to them) they would rather take a risk of death or injury to feed their families than sit safely and starve.

It’s not capitalism per se that does this, or even “free-market” capitalism, but rather capitalism that is actively supported by (purchased) governments in causing excess deaths.

Right, sorry, Chris. I think I read in an implication.

“What successful capitalists have managed to do in the ensuing 25 years is to avoid paying most of their previous risk premia by moving jobs to places where workers either don’t have the organization to force the payment of higher wages for bad jobs, or are so grindingly poor that (given the asymmetrical information available to them) they would rather take a risk of death or injury to feed their families than sit safely and starve.”

Exactly. And they often get patted on the head for doing it (or pat themselves on the head, or both). In short there’s a lot of shifty rhetoric in play about this whole issue. I think if it were more often talked about in a more honest way – well at least we could judge whether that’s really a fair or just or desirable way of doing things.

Risk is not absolute but relative? In all cases? Would the cockle pickers not have drowned had they been English and Oxbridge-educated? Does the collapsing mine crush the prole but leave the toff unscathed (assuming both are at the coal face, obviously)?

Or are you just restating the point. The middle classes are better insulated – yes but that’s the point. Isn’t it?

W Kiernan,

Robots, something nicer than cockles, artificial cockles, cockle plants – who knows? Two hundred years ago, large numbers of people suffered from the effects of inhaling coal dust. Now a probably equivalent number of people suffer RSI.

I don’t see why calling a spade a spade is silly. AFAIK most of those workers were from the Chinese mainland. China’s still a mess, still far too socialist (even from a social democrat point of view), still a place worth getting out of, for far too many people.

If you want to say these people are dying (ultimately) _because_ of the introduction of capitalism into China – you might want to think a bit before you say that. Do you mean to imply that China’s going to get poorer as it gets more capitalist, more poor people? Do you want to bet on that? OTOH, while China was _more_ “communist”, don’t you think a considerably larger number of people were dying? I mean, at least it’s _possible_ to get out now!

Forgive the naivete of this question, but how is poverty “a consequence of the normal operation of capitalism”? Chris argues that capitalism “creates great poverty,” which in turn presumes that there is a pre-poverty state that capitalism transforms. Where is the evidence for this? Have there ever been any non-capitalist socities in which the vast majority of people were not poor?

It won’t do to answer this question by pointing to the enormous wealth that capitalism generates for those at the top, or invoking the question of exploitation. To say capitalism “creates poverty” means that it makes things worse, in absolute terms, for poor people, who would be better off had capitalism never existed.

I’m also baffled by the assertion that in a non-capitalist society mineworkers would be paid more for their labor than other workers. Certainly one of the defining characteristics of most socialist societies has been relatively equal pay across fields of labor. And pace Ophelia, I have a very hard time believing Cuba or Tanzania ever paid its farmworkers hazard pay.

I also don’t understand Chris’ point about Sweden. If “not all capitalisms” are red in tooth and claw, then we can’t say that what happened to the cocklers was a “normal and predictable consequence of capitalism.” It’s what happened under a particular variant of capitalism, and in fact I think it probably has a great deal to do with “coercion and abuse.” It also has to do with the still-desperate condition of rural China, which is in no small part the result of thirty years of complete economic destruction wreaked by Mao’s policies.

Chris, I don’t think that proletarianization — which I’ll accept as a term for the sake of argument — is the same as “creating poverty,” which is the claim you made about capitalism. “Creating poverty” clearly means people were not poor but now are. And even if you set aside pre-capitalist societies, surely it’s relevant to look — as many others here have suggested — at the record of modern non-capitalist societies, too. If out of all the forms of social organization that have ever been tried, capitalism creates and distributes wealth most widely and leaves the fewest people poor, it’s surely perverse to accuse it of “creating poverty.”

In any case, when it comes to the consequences of proletarianization, it seems to me the choice you’re framing is actually a choice between poverty but safety on the one hand (I can meet my needs in pre-capitalist society by farming or, in a socialist society, via the state) and relative wealth but danger on the other (I get more money for working in a mine in a capitalist society than I would if I was still tending my field, but it’s a lot more dangerous). People may be worse off in the second case, but I don’t think figuring out whether they are is as easy as you suggest.

Yeah but msg the Ice Man also died! Alone, in the cold, in a storm, of his injuries!

His life was pretty poor nasty brutish and short that night.

And he had a lot of old injuries, too. Plus bad arthritis.

Chris,

First, I want to make sure we are using the same definitions of commonly used terms. By “capitalism” I assume you mean “free market”, which I take to be the sum of all voluntary exchanges. These exchanges happen with the consent of both parties. Sometimes, the consent is reluctant, and sometimes, it is a difficult choice, but nevertheless, no force is used. Nothing happens against the will of either party.

But one thing that needs saying is that such tragedies are a normal and predictable consequence of capitalism and not simply the result of coercion and abuse by a few criminals.

If you are going to make this conclusion, you have to also have evidence that in the absence of the voluntary exchange taking place, the alternative would be better. Clearly, the incident is a tragedy. It is unclear from the article whether or not the workers were held captive against their will, in which case, this would no longer fall under the free market.

However, under the assumption that they chose to work at these jobs, why did they choose to work under such horrible conditions? Clearly, in their own eyes, it was better than the alternative. Perhaps the alternative was the starvation back in China. Maybe they thought that working their jobs would help them save enough money to give their own children a better life. It was their own subjective appraisals of the situation which led them to choose these jobs among the available alternatives.

As an example, this article by Nicholas Kristof from the NY Times (which is now unfortunately a pay link) highlighted the lives of factory workers in Cambodia. Many of the stories and accompanying pictures were heart rending. The standards under which they work are certainly inferior to those in the first world.

Yet, the alternative to working in the factory was working in a trash dump collecting garbage for longer hours, worse pay, and fewer if any benefits. The workers chose to work in the factories because they thought it would improve their lives. Some quotes from that article:

“Nhep Chanda averages 75 cents a day for her efforts. For her, the idea of being exploited in a garment factory — working only six days a week, inside instead of in the broiling sun, for up to $2 a day — is a dream.

“I’d like to work in a factory, but I don’t have any ID card, and you need one to show that you’re old enough,” she said wistfully. […]

…”I want to work in a factory, but I’m in poor health and always feel dizzy,” said Lay Eng, a 23-year-old woman. And no wonder: she has been picking through the filth, seven days a week, for six years.

The free market, i.e., people voluntarily making exchanges, was bringing these people out of poverty. It was raising their standard of living. Hindering these exchanges by raising tariffs and creating a “world-wide minimum wage” would throw them back into the garbage dumps. First world companies would have little reason to hire them instead of first world workers.

Those who consider Marx outmoded and are amazed that anyone should take him seriously (scroll to comments) would also find that Capital volume one attends rather more closely to this enduring feature of capitalism than do more conventional accounts.

The reason Marx is considered outmoded by most people is that the entire concept of exploitation rests on the assumption that individuals do not know what is best for the improvement of their own lives. Any case of “exploitation” of the worker who chooses voluntarily to work in a given set of working conditions is based on the worker’s preference over all other available alternatives. The conditions may not be ideal, and may indeed be tragic, but state intervention is a two-way street. Making the working conditions in the Cambodian factories illegal means putting people out of work if the employer is unable to pay for the “improved” standards. I have no doubt you wish to see a better world for the poor; as do I. But the way to get there is through free exchange, not making jobs illegal.

It is myopic to claim that “such tragedies are a normal and predictable consequence of capitalism” when the alternative is worse.

Wait –

“Sometimes, the consent is reluctant, and sometimes, it is a difficult choice, but nevertheless, no force is used. Nothing happens against the will of either party.”

That’s something that really interests me. I’m always puzzled by the way the pro-unregulated-market people think about coercion. If a choice is reluctant – then it’s against the will of the reluctant person. That’s not to take a position on what follows from that – it’s just to point out that this kind of discussion often seems to leave so many aspects out. If you’re broke and starving and you have ten children and the only job on offer is one that pays less than the minimum wage and is highly dangerous – your decision to take the job is not entirely uncoerced. That is one of the things that welfare provision does, and one of the (semi-secret) reasons the employer class is against it: it makes it possible for people to refuse the really terrible jobs. There are advantages to such a situation, and disadvantages to its opposite. There are also disadvantages the other way. But I think the discussion is clearer if compelled choices are recognized as such. Choices compelled by poverty, no alternative, desperation, are not entirely free choices.

Ice Men Women and Children. They didn’t all freeze to death. We are that. Everything we are came right out of lives just like that. And there are lots of elderly men and women around who have lived 90+ years of nothing at all and are dying slowly and as comfortably as possible, in utter bleak loneliness. An end that makes an arrow in the back look practically benevolent.
Farming as it’s practiced now is open-air manufacturing. Nothing pastoral about it. The fields are dead zones.
These tropes are out of the same duplicitous dustbin as genetic engineering and other Frankensteinian research, no matter how cruel or inhuman, it’s all about the benefit to humanity. My ass. It’s about the wealth of the researchers.
Sure there was discomfort. In some very narrowly defined ways we live better than any royalty ever did. But the finest moments in the richest lives today are not superior to what was, that’s the illusion I’m busting. We’ve brought up the common denominator, so the illusion is we’ve all risen, I’m saying the top didn’t get any higher, and the bottom didn’t rise any.
And there is velocity, inertia and momentum, we’re headed straight for the falls, and what’s up there is likely to be worse, for a lot longer, than it ever was, for the common man.
–
Compelled coercion yes. Yes. Voluntary slavery how about? A permanent peasant class incapable of revolt? It starts with that compromise. The strike-breaker’s wages. Bread and salt tears. Taking advantage of the situation is another one of these moral goodies engendered by code-reverence and rule-worship. If it isn’t specifically illegal well OK. I got ten guys waitin for your job there fella you want it or not?
It all comes back to love. How much and how wide the net. Self-love is a synonym for evil. Enlightened self-interest is just a tepid form of greed.
There’s something here we benefit from directly, the accumulated sacrifices of people who believed, and acted on the belief, in something greater than themselves, something undefinable but real.
What’s taken the credit for that benefit is harnessed selfishness, organized into a complex hierarchy, but it’s still greed, and it won’t work in the long run.

“There is a clear difference between ostracism, shunning, boycott, and avoidance vs aggression.”

Well, that’s just it – I certainly agree that there’s a difference, but not that it’s a clear one. I see it as degrees of coercion or, rather – a better word – necessity. Deinos ananke, as the Greeks called it. You see it as two different things. Continuum versus two separate items. The differences are important, I don’t mean to deny that, but I also think it’s important not to deny the degree of unfreedom there is in necessity.

True about the employer class. I wanted a better term and couldn’t think of one. I needed a term specifically for the people who think about things like immigration and welfare in terms of how they will affect their ability to hire cheap labor. Fair point about the unforeseen consequences – but the motivation to get rid of welfare is there, only it’s hardly ever mentioned publicly, so I think it’s worth pointing out.

But as for the Ice Man…yeah. I would certainly rather live the way I do than the way he did. For one thing, if I’d lived then, I’d have had ten children eight of whom would have died in their first year, and I’d have died giving birth to the tenth. No thanks.

Steve Carr-
The top may seem “so much higher” to you, I think mostly because it’s still beyond your reach, but I guarantee Ted Turner’s a lot more ambivalent about things than you are. My guess is a lot of guys at what you consider the top are a lot more worried about so-called climate change than you are.
Maybe Rupert Murdoch isn’t, but that really only proves my point that much more.
–
Ok, now. Anybody whose myopia (real optometric poor vision) is severe enough to require corrective lenses to be able to function is prosthetic-dependent and doesn’t get to enter the debate about the ancestral good life, because of pre-existing bias.
Now how does it look?
We don’t think of that as a handicap because it’s so common. I’m not going all euthanistic on four-eyed people, what I’m trying to establish is the shift in human characteristics that’s already taken place. It isn’t just myopia, there’s a bunch of attributes that have become vestigial that were once essential, and a bunch that were marginal at best, that have become so common they’re taken as fundamental human qualities, or inconsequential where they were once debilitating.
The real point is we’ve lost our resilience, and we’re exterminating the most resilient people left, by assimilation and habitat destruction. One of the primary lies that made that possible was the idea that all human beings are essentially the same. We’re not.
Thus myopia, for the sake of argument.

As far as not worrying about your children dying before you do – you’re obviously not an urban black mother.
–
Ophelia-
Ten kids born to salvage two is a valid point for rejecting something, but I’m not so sure the world I’m talking about necessitates that.
The scam is we can’t have any particular aspect of modern living without taking all of it. You get this argument, or used to, around the automobile. “Oh you can’t go back to the horse and buggy.”
Wendell Berry made an interesting point about that, saying that progress in the refinement of tack, the equipment of horse-drawn farming, basically stopped dead with the advent of the motor-driven tractor.
The idea being that we’ll never know what progress would have come from that. Look at the bicycle.
We’ll never know what the combined strengths of traditional medicines and honest science would have produced. We’ll never know what a culture that allowed the co-existence of such radically different ways of being as existed before colonization and its malicious and psychotic destruction might have become.
You think perhaps that’s a harsh way to describe the inevitable rise of European dominance, because you’ve been lied to your whole life about what happened; you want nasty and brutish, try life in the Americas under the Spainish boot, try walking from the Carolinas to Oklahoma with only what you can carry and your elders and your young and your invalids dropping by the way.
Just so, you’ve been programmed to think of all those millenia of pre-civilized existence as nasty brutish and short. To a 19th century Englishman with his head up his ass everything looked pretty dark and ugly. Your view of the world comes directly out of that view of the world.
The dry and humorless accusations of euro-centric bias were and are valid, as far as they go.
Your view of the world as it is, and as it was especially, is the direct result of the intentionally deceptive instruction you received from the moment you could comprehend adult speech, with rare exception. The same chain of hypocritical smugness about the peculiar institution of slavery, more fundamentally about the essential inferiority of blacks, held out for centuries until it was finally broken. The greatest body count on American soil, that was recorded accurately anyway, was a direct result of that insane and groundless “superiority”. Certainly the lifestyle of privileged whites was threatened by an insistence on the rights of all human beings. Defense of comfort may not be the highest moral ground available.

This world has been re-shaped to suit a particular kind of human living, and over time that has become an exclusive way, the only viable way, of living. There are still enough individuals participating to make it seem like the great melting pot it’s so often claimed to be.
But there are obviously not going to be people among us who can’t adapt to hurtling down roads at 80 miles an hour wrapped in a ton of steel.
Even if those same sensitive maladapts were capable of running for miles through thick jungle. The human equivalent of the mountain gorilla and the grizzly bear, a throwback, a joke. Neanderthals.
Those people back there, who were us, who lived close to the real world, adapting rather than controlling, they lived lives that were much harder than ours in many ways. But they lived that way for a long time. A really long time. We’ve only been living like this for a little over a century really, depending on how you measure “this”, but we’re dangerously committed to it.
What were helpful additions have become essentials, addictions, things we can’t live without.
There’s a case to be made that the things we can’t live without are killing us, in ways we can barely see.

“Aside from various rhetorical formulations” is quite nice. But I’m not sure that Marx’s problem with capitalism was really that it restricted workers’ choices. In the Manifesto, at least, he’s rather explicit: “The modern laborer, on the contrary, instead of rising with the process of industry, sinks deeper and deeper below the conditions of existence of his own class. He becomes a pauper, and pauperism develops more rapidly than population and wealth.”

This is quite clear. It’s 1848, Marx is convinced that capitalism is making and will continue to make (at an even faster pace) things worse, in absolute terms, for workers. There is no “thank God for capitalism!” from Marx in 1848. He wants communism — of his conception, not Lenin’s, obviously — and he wants it now. And he has little doubt that things will be better, materially, for the vast majority of people if communism comes into effect.

This was wrong. It was so wrong, in fact, that we can hardly imagine how different — and how much worse for the vast majority of people, period — the world would be today had Marx gotten what he wanted in 1848. And in the simplest sense, that’s why Marx is outmoded, because he did not understand the most important fact about the economic system he studied so assiduously: it would generate more wealth, and distribute it more widely, than any other in the history of the world (including the system Marx himself believed held the answer to humanity’s ills). It’s totally understandable and fair to attack libertarians for their naive ideas of freedom and their neglect of human embeddedness. But on the big question, they’re a lot closer to right than Marx was.

And yes, I know Marx revised his position on the “iron law of wages.” But at the end of Capital, Vol. I, he wrote, “In proportion as capital accumulates [which he saw as the inevitable result of the system’s functioning] the condition of the worker, be his wages high or low, necessarily grows worse . . . Poverty grows as the accumulation of capital grows.” Still wrong.

A systemic socialist alternative to capitalism is off the agenda.

I’d be truly, sincerely curious to hear what you have in mind.

I mean, you’re a Marxist, so I assume you mean some sort of Marxist state. But when pressed for specifics, you go all squishy. (Talking about past posts here, though the present one is following the same pattern.)

You did mention Sweden; but Sweden is a capitalist state with a free market economy. It just has the safety net set rather higher than most other capitalist states. This has costs (as the Swedes themselves will readily admit); furthermore, it may not scale up very well. (I’m very fond of Singapore, and think it has much to teach the world; but I also acknowledge that the world does not consist of small city-states of a few million people each.)

Still, Sweden is a functioning modern country, so I’d be perfectly willing to discuss the pros and cons of the Swedish model with you. And if you’re pleading for a safer, more humanist form of capitalism in the Anglo-Saxon countries, then we can definitely find some common ground.

But that’s not what you’re on about. You’re using the death of the cockle collectors to make a point about the wickedness of capitalism — fine; but you’re not seriously proposing any alternative. You cite Sweden; that’s relevant to a discussion of capitalism, but it’s almost entirely irrelevant to a discussion of Marxism.

Do you really think that a Marxist state would result in the end of poverty? If so, how? I’m sincerely curious.

Doug M.

I doubt the poorest in Sweden face life-threateningly risky choices quite so starkly as the poor in some of the countries with a more anglo-Saxon model of capitalism.

…you might want to google up the Gothenburg disco fire.

63 dead, almost all of them young, foreign, and either un-, under- or illegally employed.

Doug M.

The four young men who were convicted seem to have started the fire out of pique after an argument with the bouncer. The one who confessed claimed that they just wanted to “make some smoke and scare people”. The initial fire was small; it was the sort of silly incident that occurs at discos around the world every weekend.

However, the fire got out of control so quickly — and proved so lethal — because the disco was grossly overcrowded. This, in turn, was because immigrant kids weren’t welcome at any of the other discos in Gothenburg. (Note that the problem was one of immigrants generally, not Macedonians in particular; the victims were a cross-section of recent immigration to Sweden, with former Yugoslavs, Turks, Iranians and Gypsies all well represented.)

And, of course, it was the cheapest show in town.

I’ll concede in advance that being forced to pick a cheap, dangerous disco for your Halloween party is not the same thing as being forced to work in a cheap, dangerous job. OTOH, dead is dead, and the Gothenburg fire didn’t take place at an upper-middle-class disco charging native Swedish kids $30 a pop.

Doug M.

No, I’m not. I once was, a long time ago. But I take it I’m allowed not to be a Marxist and also to think that Marx has a great deal of interest and value to teach us.

“Allowed”? It’s OK by me, Chris. I do think it leads you into some potentially embarrassing situations — intellecutally embarrassing, that is — but you’re a big boy and can take care of yourself.

One thing, though. I’ve noticed more than once that you express a certain snarkiness towards entrepreneurs, Cf. “the image of the heroic risk-taking entrepreneur, who typically risks a great deal less than any of these workers do.”

My wife and I have both been entrepreneurs, in the strict sense of being self-employed. No, we neither of us had to place ourselves at physical risk — true enough. There’s nothing in our experience remotely comparable to the Morehouse cocklers. Nevertheless, the implicit sneer in this sort of comment is annoying.

“The comfortable tenured academic, who typically risks a great deal less than any of these workers do.” What think you?

Doug M.

But one thing that needs saying is that such tragedies are a normal and predictable consequence of capitalism and not simply the result of coercion and abuse by a few criminals.

Socialism pushed these people onto the beaches at Morecambe, Chris, to be drowned by the tide, not capitalism.

These people were here in Britain to escape the Nirvana of socialist China, in common with most asylum seekers escaping their own home countries’ brands of poverty-inducing socialism, and they were driven to this extreme way of earning a living due to socialist David Blunkett’s policy of preventing them from working legally. If people are forced into such corners, because of the forces of socialism, they’re always going to be at very great risk in their bid for personal survival, and they’re always going to be forced onto the very fringes of existence, and quite possibly into the clutches of such tragedies.

But what were their alternatives to being on that beach? Being back in the happy safe motherland of socialist China or being in a Blunkett’s socialist Gulag awaiting deportation back to the happy safe motherland of socialist China.

I think it speaks volumes that given the three choices, they chose the one they did, to avoid the other two. It wasn’t state control that they were seeking. It was state control they were willing to risk so much, to avoid.

I must also ask, Chris, that given you think capitalism is so dangerous, why do you think it is that asylum seekers keep flocking towards it so much, in the form of desired immigration into the US, Canada, the UK, and Australia, the world’s most capitalist countries? Are all these people stupid masochists? Or do they see that capitalism offers them and their families a far better future than the socialist hell-holes they’re usually escaping from?

Aside from various rhetorical formulations, Marx’s view is that, unlike, say, feudalism, capitalism does depend upon voluntary exchange and that people do generally choose in (at least their) immediate interests.

No, it is under socialism where people generally choose actions in their immediate interest. Given the particular level of socialism a particular country is suffering from, there is often little point doing anything else.

Capitalism, as its very name implies, is all about the foregoing of immediate consumption of resources, and the retention of these, in the form of capital, for investment, to gain remote benefits in the distant future. The more capital you do not consume immediately, the more you can invest, and the more you can invest, the greater the benefits you will have in the future.

Socialism, on the other hand, drives totally against this. For what is the point saving anything? For if you acquire too much by saving, the state will step in and take it from you, and cut you off from any benefits you may have been receiving. Indeed, under socialism it is not even a neutral choice. For you are best off, personally, if you do the least amount of work you can get away with, or be seen to be doing by the tax authorities, and immediately consume everything that comes your way, in order to continue being at least nominally poor, except for any black market cash, in order to keep receiving state benefits taken from those stupid enough to work, save, and invest, in the full view of the socialist tax authorities.

Capitalism is about saving capital to have a better future, Chris. Socialism is all about living off the back of society, right now.

The wealthy are leaving America.

http://www.actionamerica.org/taxecon/ticktick.html

This is what happens when you have a beggar the rich policy. Money and the jobs the money provides leaves the country.

Marx had it right. The only way to improve the lives of the poor is capital accumulation. The best method (and Marx said it would hurt) of capital accumulation is capitalism. Marx’s prescription was what to do after capitalism no longer produced profits (improvements in the production process). In modern terms what Marx wrote was science fiction. Which is why Marx said he was no Marxist.