Friday, August 11, 2023

What can we learn from John Rawls’s critique of capitalism? | Aeon Essays — Colin Bradley

Marx called the liberalism of the US and UK "bourgeois liberalism," that is, the freedom of capital (the ownership class). to exploit labor (workers) and land (the environment). 

The attempt John Rawls made to answer Marx from the vantage of Anglo-American liberalism was not successful. Liberalism as freedom and equality of persons is inherently incompatible with capitalism as private ownership and control of the means of production. Neither is it compatible with distribution through markets that are determined institutionally (legally) by the ownership class.

While the article does not overcome the problem that Rawls proposes, like Marx before him, it does articulate the position of Rawls on this issue, which is now coming to a head socially, politically, and economically in the world owing to neoliberal globalization, and particularly in the US and UK as bulwarks of Anglo-American liberalism.

Aeon
What can we learn from John Rawls’s critique of capitalism? | Aeon Essays
Colin Bradley

See also

Zero Hedge
Jonah Goldberg Tells CNN: Small Donors 'One Of The Biggest Problems For Democracy'
Tyler Durden

1 comment:

NeilW said...

It's sort of funny that these political theorists who call themselves liberal haven't worked out the obvious answer.

People need the option of a guaranteed job.

You'd think academics, sitting on their funded tenures doing nothing of very much use, would get that.