Archive for the ‘RESISTANCE IS FUTILE!’ Category
Mission Accomplished
During the Cold War, the peoples of the East were wretchedly groaning under the yoke of the Communist Party, instead of, as they ought to have been, wretchedly groaning under the yoke of Western corporations. In the Yeltsin era, however, Western goals were finally achieved. It was a fair exchange: Western companies invested in the […]
In: RESISTANCE IS FUTILE!, The Age Of Enron-cence
Come Back Gosplan, All Is Forgiven
How could we ever have seen fit to assert that the Soviet Union was economically backwards, when in fact it was devoted for decades to something that Western countries have only recently learned to espouse – namely running both productive enterprises and government administration by means of elaborately quantified managerial performance criteria? The United Kingdom, […]
In: RESISTANCE IS FUTILE!, The Age Of Enron-cence
Engineers Versus Commissars
The other day I met a consulting engineer on a train in Austria. I tried out my theory on him, that the reason nothing seems to work these days is that, whereas engineers used to make things work, nowadays business graduates reassign blame for their not working – after they have finished spoiling the ship […]
In: RESISTANCE IS FUTILE!, The Age Of Enron-cence
Hand Over Your Inventions!
The World Empire advances by means more subtle than military conquest and even economic domination alone. As the pace of American scientific innovation slows, because of xenophobia plus pressure from the know-nothings and theocrats, the necessary technical data must be acquired in other ways, such as distortion of the patent system. Many people are complaining […]
In: RESISTANCE IS FUTILE!, The Age Of Enron-cence
The Lays Of Ancient Profit
Many people, and probably most Americans, assume that the notion of a labour collective wherein all workers, however humble, are entitled to a share of the proceeds of the enterprise, is some kind of new-fangled Communist subversion. Prior to this, they imagine, the sole economic model was that the enterprise had one owner, who took […]
In: RESISTANCE IS FUTILE!, The Age Of Enron-cence
Nyah Nyah Nyah, You Can’t Get ME-hee!
It is perfectly possible to be in favour of the free market while being hostile to the joint-stock corporation as the legal framework for the participants in that free market. Of course it suits certain interests to pretend that this is the same thing, as if the only alternative to a critique of corporate forms […]
In: RESISTANCE IS FUTILE!, The Age Of Enron-cence
Fact Catches Up With Fiction
The Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) allows companies to sue states that threaten “expected future profit”. Now, once you introduce the principle of a right to expected future profits, the logical next step is to enshrine that right in statute law. After that, companies would be able to sue individuals who threatened their future […]
In: RESISTANCE IS FUTILE!, The Age Of Enron-cence
The Light-Bulb
My father was a headmaster, and his school had a caretaker (janitor to Americans), called Mr. Thomas. He was a permanent employee, and as much a part of the school as the teachers, perhaps better-respected. Some of those were goof-offs, but Mr. Thomas was as faithful and dedicated as a warrior-monk. If a light-bulb went, […]
In: RESISTANCE IS FUTILE!, The Age Of Enron-cence
It Couldn’t Happen Here
The man who led the Chernobyl clean-up operation told me that the disaster was the single biggest cause of the collapse of the Soviet Union. Let us hope that we never have occasion to discover whether a similar-scale disaster in the West would have a corresponding effect on political structures. There is no reason to […]
In: RESISTANCE IS FUTILE!, The Age Of Enron-cence
A History Of Our Times In One Paragraph
In the beginning was 19th-century laissez-faire capitalism. And the people flocked to the industrial cities to feed the maw of the factories, and were wretched, and listened to revolutionaries and anarchists. The less wise among their rulers said, “Let us crush this stiff-necked people by force of arms.” But the wiser rulers said, “No, let […]
In: RESISTANCE IS FUTILE!, The Age Of Enron-cence
