Miguel Afonso Caetano"Do we really live in the best and only possible economic reality? During the economic boom of the post–World War II period, a golden age of capitalism, this perspective might have seemed vaguely plausible, at least for those living in Europe and the United States. However, in the current moment, when the majority of the global population suffers from profound economic and social injustices and the planet is on the brink of ecological collapse, this pseudoscientific best-of-all-possible-worlds idea can’t be right. There is a more powerful, humane approach to understanding society.
We must redemocratize the economy so that citizens can reclaim the most important choices that regulate the very foundations of their lives. That is a better way forward than anything capitalism has or can offer. What is the first step in this direction? It is a radical change of perspective. There is nothing more political than the lens through which we view the world. Only if we learn to look at the world differently can we act differently.
My fundamental intuition is that there are no economic problems that are not inevitably also political problems; contrary to what technocrats typically suggest, our economy is neither a force of nature nor an external object that we can manipulate as if it were a machine. On the contrary, the economy is us: flesh-and-blood people. This means that “capital” as a “commodity,” as money to invest, as wealth expressed in gross domestic product, exists thanks to specific social relations, and in particular thanks to the fact that most people have no alternative but to sell their ability to work for a wage and inevitably be paid less than the value they produce. This is the capital order, the backbone to our society that we do not criticize or even discuss. It is only through the lens of class that we can escape this trap..."
https://jacobin.com/2026/01/economics-austerity-inflation-class-capitalism
#Economics #Austerity #PoliticalEconomy #Capitalism #Inflation #ClassWarfare
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