Guy Standing’s The Corruption of Capitalism: Why Rentiers Thrive and Work Does Not Pay is now available in its third edition, which encompasses debates around the pandemic slump and Brexit. You can read a description of the book below and order a copy here.
There is a lie at the heart of global capitalism. Politicians, financiers and global bureaucrats claim to believe in free competitive markets, but have constructed the most unfree market system ever.
It is corrupt because income is channelled to the owners of property – financial, physical and intellectual – at the expense of society.
The classic book reveals how global capitalism is rigged in favour of rentiers to the detriment of the precariat and others, an inequity that has been made starker by the advent of coronavirus. A plutocracy and elite enriches itself, not through production of goods and services, but through ownership of assets and the privatisation of public services. Meanwhile, wages stagnate as labour markets are transformed by outsourcing, automation and the on-demand economy, generating more rental income while expanding the precariat.
Guy Standing also has a new article, “Why we should support the vaccine waiver,” in the Progressive Economy Forum–available here. In the article, Standing argues that “the global patent system needs to be dismantled in its entirety,” using the current debates about intellectual property rights and the COVID-19 vaccine as an illustrative example.
