Here competition rages in direct proportion to the number, and in inverse proportion to the magnitudes, of the antagonistic capitals [enterprises--RJG]. It always ends in the ruin of many small capitalists, whose capitals [enterprises--RJG] partly pass into the hands of their conquerors, partly vanish. Apart from this, with capitalist production an altogether new force comes into play--the credit system, which in its first stages furtively creeps in as the humble assistant of accumulation, drawing into the hands of individual or associated capitalists, by invisible threads, the money resources which lie scattered, over the surface of society, in larger or smaller amounts; but it soon becomes a new and terrible weapon in the battle of competition and is finally transformed into an enormous social mechanism for the centralisation of capitals [enterprises--RJG]."
Paul Craig Roberts is absolutely correct. If Karl Marx were alive today, he would be a leading candidate for the "Nobel" Prize in Economics. (See Yasha Levine's October 12, 2012 AlterNet article, " There is No Nobel Prize in Economics ," for more on what the "Nobel" Prize in Economics really is.)
George Bernard Shaw thought--like Marx--that economic equality alone would resolve the many problems of modern society. He wrote about his view in The Intelligent Woman's Guide to Socialism and Capitalism, (chapter 22; 1928):
"Between persons of equal income there is no social distinction except the distinction of merit. Money is nothing: character, conduct, and capacity are everything. " There would be great people and ordinary people and little people, but the great would always be those who had done great things, and never the idiots whose mothers had spoiled them and whose fathers had left them a hundred thousand a year; and the little would be persons of small minds and mean characters, and not poor persons who had never had a chance. That is why idiots are always in favour of inequality of income (their only chance of eminence), and the really great in favour of equality."
But I think that French writer and mystic Simone Weil got it right; that real equality is more than money or position: there will always be those who want to make money as a way of keeping score, and will try and make money important to us, because it is important to them.
"Equality is the public recognition, effectively expressed in institutions and manners, of the principle that an equal degree of attention is due to the needs of all human beings."
Simone Weil ; "Draft for a Statement of Human Obligations" (published in Selected Essays , edited by Richard Rees, 1962).
And that may be a far more difficult type of equality to achieve than any economic equality imagined by Karl Marx or George Bernard Shaw.
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