Even though White Collar Crime costs more to the economy than street crime, White Collar Criminals are still less likely to get punished. According to Tombs and Whyte, this is partly because the government invests fewer resources into investigating fraud and health and safety crimes the types of crime Corporations are most likely to be guilty of than it does into working class street crime.
Evidence of Elite Control over the mainstream Media. In his film,. Evidence of Elite Control of the Education system. Evidence for elite control of the education system lies in the fact that if you are wealthy, you can buy your children a private education, which gives them a much greater chance of getting into a top university and high getting a highly paid, prestigious job.
People from upper middle class, public school backgrounds dominate every economic sector except those — such as sport and hard science — in which only raw ability counts. Through networking, confidence, unpaid internships, most importantly through our attendance at the top universities, we run the media, politics, the civil service, the arts, the City, law, medicine, big business, the armed forces, even, in many cases, the protest movements challenging these powers.
Hegemonic control occurs when the intellectual and moral leadership provided by the dominant class provides the fundamental outlook for the whole of society. Agenda Setting has removed it and so we do not even consider it.
Click here for a post a broadly Marxist analysis of how the BBC covered the recent student protests against tuition fees of December in a limited fashion. Successful companies today spend billions on advertising campaigns to convince us that we need the products that they make. Worse that ideological control — More generally, numerous Sociologists such as Richard Wilkinson and David Garland point out that the more unequal a country, and the more a country has adopted neo-liberal policies — the higher the prison population.
Alienation and Commodity Fetishism. From a Marxist point of view this is incredibly shallow — Marx believed that we are only fully human when we are fully engaged with the political and economic processes of our society. From the Marxist point of view, Capitalism just encourages us to be childlike and define ourselves through our styles and our hobbies and to forget about politics and economics.
In the truest sense we are alienated from our productive base while our identities become more and more dependent on material goods. Tomorrow the contagion will spread to Portugal and Spain. But Britain and Italy are not far behind. And France, Germany and Austria will follow them inexorably on the downward path.
The bourgeois economists and politicians, and above all, the reformists, are desperately seeking some sort of revival to get out of this crisis. They look to the recovery of the business cycle as salvation. The leaders of the working class, the trade union leaders and the Social Democratic leaders, believe that this crisis is something temporary. They imagine it can be solved by making some adjustments to the existing system, that all that is needed is more control and regulation, and that we can return to the previous conditions.
But this crisis is not a normal crisis, it is not temporary. It marks a fundamental turning point in the process, the point at which capitalism has reached a historical dead end. The best that can be expected is a weak recovery, accompanied by high unemployment and a long period of austerity, cuts and falling living standards. Marxism is in the first place a philosophy and a world outlook. In the philosophical writings of Marx and Engels we do not find a closed philosophical system, but a series of brilliant insights and pointers, which, if they were developed, would provide a valuable addition to the methodological armory of science.
Nowhere is the crisis of bourgeois ideology clearer than in the realm of philosophy. In its early stages, when the bourgeoisie stood for progress, it was capable of producing great thinkers: Hobbes and Locke, Kant and Hegel. But in the epoch of its senile decay, the bourgeoisie is incapable of producing great ideas. In fact, it is not capable of producing any ideas at all. Since the modern bourgeoisie is incapable of bold generalizations it denies the very concept of ideology.
In its obsession to combat Marxism, it has dragged philosophy back to the worst period of its old, outworn and sterile past. Dialectical materialism is a dynamic view of understanding the workings of nature, society and thought. Far from being an outmoded idea of the 19th century, it is a strikingly modern view of nature and society. Dialectics does away with the fixed, rigid, lifeless way of looking at things that was characteristic of the old mechanical school of classical physics.
It shows that under certain circumstances things can turn into their opposite. The dialectical notion that gradual accumulation of small changes can at a critical point become transformed into a gigantic leap has received a striking confirmation in modern chaos theory and its derivatives. Chaos theory has put an end to the kind of narrow mechanical reductive determinism that dominated science for over a hundred years.
Marxist dialectics is a 19th century expression of what chaos theory now expresses mathematically: the interrelatedness of things, the organic nature of relations between entities.
The study of phase transitions constitutes one of the most important areas of contemporary physics. There are an infinite number of examples of the same phenomenon. The transformation of quantity into quality is a universal law. In his book Ubiquity Mark Buchanan shows this in phenomena as diverse as heart attacks, avalanches, forest fires, the rise and fall of animal populations, stock exchange crises, wars, and even changes in fashion and schools of art.
Even more astonishing, these events can be expressed as a mathematical formula known as a power law. These remarkable discoveries were anticipated long ago by Marx and Engels, who put the dialectical philosophy of Hegel on a rational that is, materialist basis.
Like volcano eruptions and earthquakes, revolutions are the result of a slow accumulation of contradictions over a long period. The process eventually reaches a critical point at which a sudden leap occurs.
Every social system believes that it represents the only possible form of existence for human beings. That its institutions, its religion, its morality are the last word that can be spoken.
That is what the cannibals, the Egyptian priests, Marie Antoinette and Tsar Nicolas all fervently believed. The irony is scarcely wasted on leading Marxist thinkers. That hope, perhaps, explains another improbable truth of our economically catastrophic times — the revival in interest in Marx and Marxist thought. Sales of Das Kapital, Marx's masterpiece of political economy, have soared ever since , as have those of The Communist Manifesto and the Grundrisse or, to give it its English title, Outlines of the Critique of Political Economy.
Their sales rose as British workers bailed out the banks to keep the degraded system going and the snouts of the rich firmly in their troughs while the rest of us struggle in debt, job insecurity or worse. There's even a Chinese theatre director called He Nian who capitalised on Das Kapital's renaissance to create an all-singing, all-dancing musical. And in perhaps the most lovely reversal of the luxuriantly bearded revolutionary theorist's fortunes, Karl Marx was recently chosen from a list of 10 contenders to appear on a new issue of MasterCard by customers of German bank Sparkasse in Chemnitz.
Clearly, more than two decades after the fall of the Berlin Wall, the former East Germany hasn't airbrushed its Marxist past. Karl Marx may be dead and buried in Highgate cemetery, but he's alive and well among credit-hungry Germans. Would Marx have appreciated the irony of his image being deployed on a card to get Germans deeper in debt? You'd think. Later this week in London, several thousand people will attend Marxism , a five-day festival organised by the Socialist Workers' Party.
It's an annual event, but what strikes organiser Joseph Choonara is how, in recent years, many more of its attendees are young. There has been a glut of books trumpeting Marxism's relevance. French Maoist philosopher Alain Badiou published a little red book called The Communist Hypothesis with a red star on the cover very Mao, very now in which he rallied the faithful to usher in the third era of the communist idea the previous two having gone from the establishment of the French Republic in to the massacre of the Paris communards in , and from to the collapse of Mao's Cultural Revolution in Isn't this all a delusion?
Aren't Marx's venerable ideas as useful to us as the hand loom would be to shoring up Apple's reputation for innovation?
Isn't the dream of socialist revolution and communist society an irrelevance in ? But we must not reverse the idea of historical necessity and conclude that the current situation is eternal. The gravediggers are still here, in the form of workers in precarious conditions like the over-exploited workers of factories in the far east.
And today's popular movements — Greece or elsewhere — also indicate that there's a new will not to let our governments and our bankers inflict their crisis on the people. That, at least, is the perspective of a seventysomething Marxist professor. And it is still struggling to extricate itself from the abyss.
Every one of the confident predictions of Fukuyama has been falsified by events. Before the collapse of the bourgeois economists boasted that there would be no more boom and slump, that the cycle had been abolished. Actually, there is nothing new about this idea.
Marx demolished that nonsense over a century ago. Today not one stone upon another remains of the old illusions. The bourgeoisie and its strategists are in a state of the deepest depression. They could have been written yesterday. It is becoming increasingly clear that capitalism has exhausted its progressive potential.
Instead of developing industry, science and technology, it is steadily undermining them. Nobody any more believes the constant assurances that we are on the verge of an economic recovery. The productive forces stagnate or decline, factories are closed as if they were matchboxes, and millions are thrown out of work.
All these are symptoms that show that the development of the productive forces on a world scale has gone beyond the narrow limits of private property and the nation state. That is the most fundamental reason for the present crisis, which has exposed the bankruptcy of capitalism in the most literal sense of the word. Everywhere the symptoms of crisis are manifesting themselves, economically, socially and politically. The huge Chinese economy, which played an important role in boosting world trade and economic growth, is slowing sharply, while Japan is stagnant.
The so-called emerging economies are all in crisis to one extent or another. The USA is passing through a social and political crisis that has no precedent in modern times. On the other side of the Atlantic European capitalism is in a critical state. The plight of Greece provides graphic confirmation of the diseased state of European capitalism.
But Portugal and Spain are not much better. And France and Italy are not far behind them. Following its decision to withdraw from the EU, Britain, which used to be seen as one of the most stable countries in Europe has entered a downward spiral of economic crisis, a falling pound and chronic political instability. The bourgeois economists and politicians, and, above all, all the reformists, are desperately seeking signs of revival to get out of this crisis.
They look to the recovery of the business cycle as salvation. The leaders of the working class, the trade union leaders and the Social Democratic leaders believe that this crisis is something temporary.
They imagine it can be solved by making some adjustments to the existing system, that all that is needed is more control and regulation, and that we can return to the previous conditions.
But this crisis is not a normal crisis, it is not temporary. It marks a fundamental turning point in the process, the point at which capitalism has reached a historical dead end. The best that can be expected is a weak recovery, accompanied by high unemployment and a long period of austerity, cuts and falling living standards.
Marxism is in the first place a philosophy and a world outlook. In the philosophical writings of Marx and Engels we do not find a closed philosophical system, but a series of brilliant insights and pointers, which, if they were developed, would provide a valuable addition to the methodological armoury of science.
Nowhere is the crisis of bourgeois ideology clearer than in the realm of philosophy. In its early stages, when the bourgeoisie stood for progress, it was capable of producing great thinkers: Hobbes and Locke, Kant and Hegel. But in the epoch of its senile decay, the bourgeoisie is incapable of producing great ideas. In fact, it is not capable of producing any new ideas at all. Since the modern bourgeoisie is incapable of bold generalisations, it denies the very concept of ideology.
They deny the concept of progress simply because under capitalism no further progress is possible. In its obsession to combat Marxism, it has dragged philosophy back to the worst period of its old, outworn and sterile past. Dialectical materialism is a dynamic view of understanding the workings of nature, society and thought. Far from being an outmoded idea of the 19th century, it is a strikingly modern view of nature and society.
Dialectics does away with the fixed, rigid, lifeless way of looking at things that was characteristic of the old mechanical school of classical physics. It shows that under certain circumstances things can turn into their opposite. The dialectical notion that gradual accumulation of small changes can at a critical point become transformed into a gigantic leap received a striking confirmation in modern chaos theory and its derivatives.
Chaos theory put an end to the kind of narrow mechanical reductive determinism that dominated science for over a hundred years. Already in the 19th century Marxist dialectics was an anticipation of what chaos theory now expresses mathematically: the inter-relatedness of things, the organic nature of relations between different entities and processes.
The study of phase transitions constitutes one of the most important areas of contemporary physics. There are an infinite number of examples of the same phenomenon.
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