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    10/08/2024
    The People of the Abyss cover

    The People of the Abyss

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    Chapter: 27 | Listen: 5

    Jack London lived for a time within the grim and grimy world of the East End of London, where half a million people scraped together hardly enough on which to survive. Even if they were able to work, they were paid only enough to allow them a pitiful existence. He grew to know and empathise with these forgotten (or ignored) people as he spoke with them and tasted the workhouse, life on the streets, … and the food, which was cheap, barely nutritious, and foul. He writes about his experiences in a fluid and narrative style, making it very clear what he thinks of the social structures which created the Abyss, and of the millionaires who live high on the labours of a people forced to live in squalor. “… The food this managing class eats, the wine it drinks, … the fine clothes it wears, are challenged by eight million mouths which have never had enough to fill them, and by twice eight million bodies which have never been sufficiently clothed and housed.”     [chương_files]  

    10/08/2024
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    The Unsolved Riddle of Social Justice

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    Chapter: 7 | Listen:

    This lengthy political essay by noted Canadian humourist Stephen Leacock was written while he was professor of political economy at McGill University. He argues for a middle ground between individualism/capitalism and pure socialism. Listeners in the early 21st century may find this 90-year old essay oddly topical.     [chương_files]  

    10/08/2024
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    Wage-Labour and Capital

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    Chapter: 10 | Listen: 3

    Orignally written as a series of newspaper articles in 1847, Wage-Labour and Capital was intended to give a short overview, for popular consumption, of Marx’s central threories regarding the economic relationships between workers and capitalists. These theories outlined include the Marxian form of the Labour Theory of Value, which distinguishes “labour” from “labour-power”, and the Theory of Concentration of Capital, which states that capitalism tends towards the creation of monopolies and the disenfranchisement of the middle and working classes. The Theory of Alienation, which describes a dehumanising effect of capitalist production, in which an immediate social signifcance of labour to the worker is absent, is also touched upon. These theories were later elaborated in Volume 1 of Capital, published in 1867. This edition of Wage-Labour and Capital, published in 1891, was edited and translated by Friedrich Engels, and remains one of the most widely read of Marx’s works. (Description by Carl Manchester).     [chương_files]  

    10/08/2024
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    Vices Are Not Crimes

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    Chapter: 3 | Listen: 1

    Lysander Spooner was an American individualist anarchist, entrepreneur, political philosopher, abolitionist, supporter of the labour movement, and legal theorist of the nineteenth century. Here he gives his views on the role of Governments in the private lives of their citizens     [chương_files]  

    10/08/2024
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    The Soul of Man

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    Chapter: 6 | Listen: 2

    “(T)he past is what man should not have been. The present is what man ought not to be. The future is what artists are.” Published originally as “The Soul of Man Under Socialism,” this is not so much a work of sober political analysis; rather it can be summed up as a rhapsodic manifesto on behalf of the Individual. Socialism having deployed technology to liberate the whole of humanity from soul-destroying labour, the State obligingly withers away to allow the free development of a joyful, anarchic hedonism… “Is this Utopian? A map of the world that does not include Utopia is not worth even glancing at, for it leaves out the one country at which Humanity is always landing.” Far from abandoning the epigram in favour of the slogan, Wilde wittily assails several of his favourite targets: the misguided purveyors of philanthropy; life-denying ascetics of various kinds; the army of the half-educated who constitute themselves the enemies of Art – and those venal popular journalists who cater to them… “Behind the barricade there may be much that is noble and heroic. But what is there behind the leading-article but prejudice, stupidity, cant, and twaddle?” (Introduction by Martin Geeson)     [chương_files]  

    10/08/2024
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    Principles of Economics

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    Chapter: 6 | Listen:

    “The most valuable of all capital is that invested in human beings.” An uncannily prophetic quote from an 1890 book, Principles of Economics by Alfred Marshall presents an idea that has been accepted by major corporations and governments all over the world today. People’s understanding of market behavior and how industries operate has its roots in the work done by European economists more than a century ago. Little has changed in terms of principles, though the effects of globalization and technology resulted an unmistakable impact on how business is done today. Alfred Marshall was a thought leader. He presented path breaking concepts like the principle of diminishing returns: the assumption that companies or products who taste early success in markets soon fall prey to their own limitations, thus leading to a quantifiable and predictable equilibrium of market share and pricing. He was a prize winning mathematician at Cambridge and a brilliant physics student. However a nervous breakdown while at college compelled him to shift to the study of philosophy where he was deeply attracted by the concepts of Utilitarianism as propounded by Henry Sidgwick, a famous teacher and founder of Newnham College. Marshall went on to describe Sidgwick as his “spiritual mother and father.” One of Sidgwick’s guiding principles was that no person should act so as to destroy his own happiness, a form of “ethical hedonism.” Marshall began writing Principles of Economics in 1881, part of a two volume treatise. However, it took him nearly ten years to complete […]

    10/08/2024
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    The Slavery of Our Times

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    Chapter: 18 | Listen: 1

    This little book shows, in a short, clear, and systematic manner, how the principle of Non-Resistance, about which Tolstoy has written so much, is related to economic and political life.     [chương_files]  

    10/08/2024
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    Macht oder ökonomisches Gesetz?

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    Chapter: 7 | Listen: 1

    Macht oder ökonomisches Gesetz? by Eugen von Böhm-Bawerk (1851 – 1914). Böhm-Bawerk, Mitbegründer der Österreichischen Schule der Nationalökonomie, erörtert, ob ökonomische Gesetze auch für den Staat gelten. (Zusammenfassung von redaer) Böhm-Bawerk, Macht oder ökonomisches Gesetz? Zeitschrift für Volkswirtschaft, Sozialpolitik und Verwaltung, Bd. XXIII (S.205–271)     [chương_files]  

    10/08/2024
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    The Communist Manifesto

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    Chapter: 3 | Listen:

    The Communist Manifesto was conceived as an outline of the basic beliefs of the Communist movement. The authors believed that the European Powers were universally afraid of the nascent movement, and were condemning as “communist,” people or activities that did not actually conform to what the Communists believed. This Manifesto, then, became a manual for their beliefs. In it we find Marx and Engel’s rehearsal of the idea that Capital has stolen away the work of the artisan and peasant by building up factories to produce goods cheaply. The efficiency of Capital depends, then, on the wage laborers who staff the factories and how little they will accept in order to have work. This concentrates power and money in a Bourgeois class that profits from the disunity of workers (Proletarians), who only receive a subsistence wage. If workers unite in a class struggle against the bourgeois, using riot and strikes as weapons, they will eventually overthrow the bourgeois and replace them as a ruling class. Communists further believe in and lay out a system of reforms to transform into a classless, stateless society, thus distinguishing themselves from various flavors of Socialism, which would be content to have workers remain the ruling class after the revolution. The Manifesto caused a huge amount of discussion for its support for a forcible overthrow of the existing politics and society.     [chương_files]