Word: k
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...heart of The Capitalist Manifesto is that automation will make the machine the superslave of man. Just as in the Greek state the slave-owning few were freed from toil to pursue the duties of citizenship and the work of civilization, so all men could be similarly freed (argue K. & A.) in a future society where machines are slaves. In such a society, men could shun the "subsistence work" and "drudgery" involved in the production of "goods of the body" and-apart from the necessary tasks of management-turn to the arts and sciences, religion, education and all the other...
Marx knew capitalism at its 19th century worst, decided it could never reform, and remanded it to the custody of the state. Result: tyranny. Marx's error, say K. & A., was his failure to see that the culprit was not the institution of private property itself, but undue concentration of capital in a few hands. The Kelso-Adler answer: decentralize capital, make everybody a "citizen-capitalist...
Creeping Socialism. Since capital "owned by about 5 percent of the households, [in the U.S. economy] produces 90 percent of the wealth," the U.S. has yet to apply the full logic of K. & A.'s citizen-capitalism. Instead of broadening the base of capitalism, they argue, the U.S. merely redistributes earnings through an elaborate, makeshift system including the steeply graduated income tax, arbitrarily fixed high wages, surplus-producing subsidies, featherbedding, Keynesian deficit financing, etc. Through such "creeping socialism," labor's share of the wealth produced has increased from an estimated...
Their reasoning: increased productivity is not due primarily to labor but to capital, i.e., improved machines and methods; relative to the whole economy, labor's contribution has actually diminished. The basic point is easier to accept than the statistics K. & A. attach to it: they flatly claim that workers in the U.S. account for less than 10% of the wealth produced, while capital instruments account for more than 90%. To K. & A., this means expropriation of capital as unjust in its way as the exploitation of labor was in "primitive" 19th century capitalism...
...Robin Hood Fallacy. How to get away from this situation, which might be called the Robin Hood fallacy? K. & A.'s solution does not lie in cutting up larger slices of an ever-larger "economic pie." Instead, "the task of a truly capitalistic society is to broaden the ownership of the pie-making machinery and to build a vast number of new pie-making machines that will be owned by people who do not now own such machines...