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The blame game
After their long summer recess, MP’s returned to Parliament on Monday, following a tumultuous few weeks of quite dramatic events. We had the largest civil insurrection seen on mainland Britain for 30 years, we saw the civil war in Libya lurch towards some kind of conclusion, and on top of this, the spectre of a world-wide double dip recession occurring seems more and more inevitable with every passing day. Blimey, the Chancellor George Osborne has admitted this week that he may need to revise growth forecasts, even if he’s not intending to change his fiscal plans for debt reduction.
So what was the hot topic that the Prime Minister, David Cameron, chose to speak about to the Mail on Sunday, teeing up the burning issue that parliamentarians would urgently need to grapple with on their return? Introducing greater responsibility for the bankers who caused the financial crisis? Investigating allegations of MI6 involvement in rendition and torture in Gaddafi’s Libya. Reparation for those citizens and businesses who lost property in the English riots? Or, maybe even picking up on Lord Chancellor Kenneth Clarke’s stated need for improved rehabilitation of offenders, if such scenes are to be avoided in the future (ignoring Mr Clarke’s distasteful use of the term “feral underclass”).
Unfortunately, it was none of those things. Instead, Mr Cameron spoke about plans to remove child benefit from parents whose children repeatedly play truant, as well as the need to ramp up the conditions imposed upon jobseeker’s claiming benefits.
New blog post from Terry, Lasa CEO, read more at The blame game
On the topic of blame the single largest contributing factor to the current crisis is being ignored.
Fortunately no less a publication than the Harvard Business Review have taken up the challenge of assessing the root causes of the current crisis; addressing both macro-economic and social issues. I know people will see Marx in the link and run a mile but this article is written by a capitalist for capitalists and is really rather good.
I’ve never made any secret of the fact that I am an orthodox Marxist in the exact sense of adopting a Marxist critique of capitalism. That is not to automatically assume that I am a Marxist in the sense of accepting Marxist prescriptions of how to organize the future and the two can be separated as the writer of this article suggests.
I was a communist before I read Marx and, politically, Marx is one influence among many. I originally came at Marx from a philosophy background via Hegel, and interestingly, the concept of alienation was first systematized by Hegel. To understand Marx one first has to read Hegel. An informative article for those with only a passing familiarity with Marx.
Edited by me to change “him” to “Hegel” at the end of the last sentence, for the avoidance of doubt.
[ Edited: 9 Sep 2011 at 02:43 pm by nevip ]