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Michael Wayne Plant

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Posted on December 8, 2013

Current stage of British Capitalism

AuthorPostedbyMichael Wayne Plant

Capitalism where is it at now? What is it doing for you lately? When I read the newspapers, I feel that I live in a parallel universe to what I see when I am walking the streets of London or when I am at work talking to students about their experiences of life as it is being lived in Osborne and Cameron’s Britain in late 2013. I have been volunteering at Whitechapel Mission now for a few months and for some time now I have been aware that we read in the newspapers is not what is happening on the group in peoples lives. It is tougher out their than ever before. As a teacher I am now getting 14 percent less pay for labour than I was when I started as pay have not kept up with inflation and this is typical for all of us getting a wage. Wage restraint has been created by the shrinking of the state and the effects of the recession that we have lived through it has been tough but we got though it say the Tories yet for most of use things are not getting better. The state has been captured by money interests the elites who own the ability to control the levers of power. It is time to rethink what it means to be a citizen and consumer in our societies. Do you want to be a passive consumer or an active citizen someone who has a say in how our country is being run. Yet for 99% of us we feel that what capitalism is offering us in not a better future but one where we have to fight just to stay in the same place. To get ahead is a long slog and it is not certain that we will all be able to make that. What happens when the inevitable health problem arrises or the structural problem that courses your job to disappear rears its head and says you are fired and there is not enough work for you anymore. But you are compelled to take any job because you have no choice. Any job that invariably means you are being paid less and maybe even doing more hours or deeply unsocial hours yet to stand still in our capitalism consumer society. Then how are you going to feel. The prices of houses keep going up but the ladder to get up onto the property market just does not get to your deposit that you have and the repayments because of the property boom that is being actively stocked is busy pushing price beyond your ability to pay for the mortgage especially if you live in London.  When I read some one like Will Hutton it does create a scary picture which also can if we are not careful render us unable to resist the  impulse to do nothing in the face of the Tory onslaught onto the state the we are experiencing. It is time that we faugh track and said enough! Stop! will will not let this stand you will go and we will find a new way of thinking about our social and economic world that does not mean the belittling of people, we will find a way to enable everyone to reach their potential and it will be from a communitarian perspective one that values everyone for each that they can contribute to the system that we live within and choose to create. Not the mean spirited version of capitalism that is begin offered by Osbourne and Cameron. We are very much in danger of creating a society that resembles the one portrayed in this article by David Simon (who wrote The Wire) on the current state of American Capitalism.

 

0 Posted in Economics, PoliticsTagged Capitalism, Osbourne and Cameron

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