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Keywords: Capitalism

  • AUSTRALIA

    Economic correctness gone mad

    • John Falzon
    • 13 November 2019
    30 Comments

    It's gone too far. The minute you voice even the smallest doubt about the Current Way of Things you get hammered. If, for example, you ask why large multinationals should profit from aged care, the guardians of Economic Correctness look at you funny. Either they don't get it, or they do and they cast you as an enemy of democracy.

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  • ECONOMICS

    Ways out of the capitalist rabbit hole

    • David James
    • 21 October 2019
    5 Comments

    Recognising that financial systems are a human creation rather than natural systems governed by 'capital flows' would be an important step to conceiving a more robust and equitable system. To ask what kind of society we want and only then work out what we want money to do for us is to put the horse back in front of the cart.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Reframing aspiration as a collective force

    • John Falzon
    • 26 September 2019
    13 Comments

    We're taught to think that aspiration means what you do alone, what sets you apart. As such it is a concept that is both lauded and loaded. Aspiration, neoliberal style, is a secular version of the gospel of prosperity so loved by the prime minister. God, or the Market, smiles on those who aspire to greater things.

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  • ECONOMICS

    Capitalism isn’t dead, it just smells funny

    • David James
    • 24 September 2019
    9 Comments

    It is easy to blame the financial sector — and the governments that were supposed to oversee the financial system but instead just washed their hands of it — for creating this global debt debauch. They certainly bear much of the responsibility. But in many ways the financial misbehaviour is as much symptom as cause.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Conscientious capitalists

    • Gillian Bouras
    • 24 September 2019
    6 Comments

    Raised by Politically Pink Parents, I was in my youth rather wary and suspicious of capitalism and capitalists. Eventually I realised that the only thing wrong with money is that not everyone has enough of it. We hear too much about arch-capitalists like the Trumps and the Koch brothers.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Aboriginal women face triple jeopardy

    • Katelyn Jones
    • 19 July 2019
    6 Comments

    Intersectionality describes the experience of overlapping oppression faced by black women. Criminologist Chris Cuneen discusses the double jeopardy faced by Indigenous women in Australia who live under both colonialism and the patriarchy. Throw in capitalism and you get a sometimes-lethal triple threat.

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  • ENVIRONMENT

    The Darling's dead fish of late capitalism

    • Cristy Clark
    • 17 January 2019
    13 Comments

    A key benefit asserted to justify treating water as an economic good is that the market will encourage 'high-value' water use to be prioritised. But, as the fish of the Darling River and the people of Walgett are experiencing, the problem with commodifying water is its social and environment values are not naturally reflected in the market.

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  • ECONOMICS

    The true lesson of capitalism

    • David James
    • 15 January 2019
    2 Comments

    One of the most basic distinctions in finance, with which any stockbroker or fund manager is familiar, is that between equity and debt. As the global economy teeters on the edge of a debt and banking crisis, with global debt more than 300 per cent of global GDP, the merits of equity is something that needs to be better understood.

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  • INTERNATIONAL

    The implications of loneliness

    • Tim Robertson
    • 19 November 2018
    14 Comments

    Loneliness is framed in a quintessentially liberal way: as a health-related issue affecting individuals. But loneliness is a by-product of the liberal social order; by elevating the market above all else and reducing notions of freedom to individual rights, notions of value are now boiled down to crude forms of economic reductionism.

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  • INTERNATIONAL

    Karl Marx would find no home in modern China

    • Mark Hearn
    • 21 May 2018
    15 Comments

    On recent the bicentenary of Marx's birth, Chinese President Xi Jinping declared that the Communist Party 'has combined the fundamental principles of Marxism with the reality of China's reform and opening up'. In reality China's economic system bears no resemblance to the revolutionary overthrow of capitalism advocated by Marx.

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  • INTERNATIONAL

    What comes next for surveillance capitalism?

    • Lizzie O'Shea
    • 16 April 2018
    3 Comments

    Whether Facebook fails or succeeds beyond the Cambridge Analytica scandal is somewhat beside the point - we are finally starting to have discussions about the desirability of their business model. Because of course, Facebook is not the only company that strip mines data with almost sociopathic disinterest.

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  • MEDIA

    There is no such thing as capitalism

    • David James
    • 27 October 2017
    14 Comments

    In literary studies, one of the most important requirements is the need to define one's terms accurately. It has always come as a shock to me that economics is almost completely devoid of such precision. Much of the terminology of the 'discipline' of economics is either nonsense, or thinly disguised tautologies.

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