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| Tomgram: Ann Jones, Our Veblen Moment |
By Ann Jones 2019-04-17
Veblen observed a world in which that leisure class, looking down its collective nose at the laboring masses, was all around him, but ... His anthropological studies revealed earlier cooperative, peaceable cultures that had supported no such idle class at all. In them, men and women had labored together, motivated by an instinctive pride in workmanship, a natural desire to emulate the best workers, 。。。Veblen zoomed in for a close up of America’s most influential man: “the Business Man.” To Veblen, he was “the Predator” personified: the man who invests in industry, any industry, simply to extract profits from it. Veblen saw that such predators created nothing, produced nothing, and did nothing of economic significance but seize profits.... Later in life, Veblen, the evolutionary, felt sure that the American capitalist system, as it was, could not last. He thought it would eventually fall apart....To the end, Veblen had hoped that one day the Predators would be driven from the marketplace and the workers would find their way to socialism. Yet a century ago, it seemed to him more likely that a Gilded Business Man would arise to become a kind of primitive Warlord and Dictator and the triumph in America of a system we would eventually recognize and call by its modern name: fascism. |
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