ALB wrote:The Occupy movement
I may have been a little harsh as the audience of 100 or more at the meeting applauded those panellists who said they were “anti-capitalist” and critcised and even heckled those wouldn’t. So the spirit of anti-capitalism, however vague, still seems to be abroad amongst many occupiers. The organiser had just set out to invite a panel of speakers suggested by members of the Occupation’s Economics Working Group and which he thought would be interesting without endorsing their views.Hopefully, the non-anti-capitalist performance of such speakers as Robin Smith, Ben Dyson and Fred Harrison will have discredited their views. Of course even those who did declare themselves “anti-capitalist” weren’t in our sense, but it’s still good that capitalism should be a dirty word and we’ll get a better hearing from those who think it is than from those who don’t.I have to say, though, that interesting as the meeting was it could have taken place a 100-150 years ago, with speakers advocating interest-free banking (Proudhon), to tax away ground rent (JS Mill and Henry George), and co-operative societies (Robert Owen). Which are even less the way out today than they were then.