On Dr Ellie and the Capitalist Ethos.

Remember me mentioning Dr Ellie Anderson recently? She’s the philosophy professor who gives short lectures on YouTube, taking some part of a well known philosopher’s ideas and giving a potted – and brilliantly expressed – explanation of it for us dummies. (Everything about that woman is so bloody scrummy, you know, but that’s beside the point.)

The point is that one of the ones I watched recently concerned Karl Marx’s views on the conflict between capital and labour, and she ended on a view which I assume was her own, rather than what Marx said.

She pointed out that Capitalism, as we understand the term today, is a fairly recent system which had its genesis in the Industrial Revolution. And she went on to say that it will one day fail and pass away naturally, as economic systems usually do, and will be replaced by something more inclusive and less divisive. (She hinted, though didn’t directly state, that it will be a more refined version of what we currently call Communism.)

This had me thinking about the current state of near-panic over the recent insane rise in fuel bills. Very many people are genuinely worried about how they’re going to balance the essential requirements of keeping warm and eating sufficient to stay healthy this winter. (And keeping the children clothed and fed, and dealing with Christmas, and avoiding unmanageable debt, and handling the damned advertisers who keep on telling them that they must spend, spend and spend some more in order to both belong to modern culture and keep up with its requirements.)

And of course, this is a bi-product of a fundamental principle of Capitalism – that if you produce something, you are incontrovertibly entitled to charge as much as you can get for it in order to maximise profit. This is all very well for luxuries, but what about the essentials? (This could now go into the question of mixed economy vs free market economy, Mrs Thatcher’s big mistake, and the success of the Nordic nations in keeping their people relatively content. But let’s move on.)

I realised that many people are now becoming aware of the fact that while they struggle, the companies behind the price rises – those who control the wholesale prices – are celebrating the making of record profits and being able to pay their (mostly already wealthy) shareholders lots of money which they don’t particularly need.

So, I gather there’s a new protest movement rising in the UK which styles itself: Enough is Enough. The fundamental thrust of their argument is that the system is broken and needs changing. The people, it seems, are becoming restive. So is this the beginning of Dr Ellie being right?