Labouring under fallacies.

 

British people labour under a lot of fallacies and one of the biggest ones, is that Britain has always had a capitalist system. You will hardly ever hear the words capitalist or capitalism ever used in mainstream political discourse in Britain.  

Feudalism and capitalism are not the same thing, take my word for it. They are distinct economic and social systems with fundamental differences in property ownership, labour, and social mobility. England had a feudalistic system for far longer than it has ever been a capitalist system. 

If you understand anything about English history, you would know that religion and traditional virtue condemned both money lending and those that coveted money for its own sake. Shakespeare's father was prosecuted for lending money. Buying cheap to sell dear or artificially trying to raise prices, was totally condemned. To a man like the 17th century' ‘Digger,' Gerrard Winstanley, working for wages was totally demeaning. Before the Normans introduced feudalism to England, the country was an Anglo Saxon "Heptarchy' of shifting kingdoms run by warrior kings who ruled a country of peasant subsistence farmers. 

I recently watched the former stand-up comedian Konstantin Kisin, talking about what he called "productive" and "unproductive" people in society. He might give the appearance of being an intellectual, but I thought he was talking out of his arse. Why does he think that only wealthy people are productive? He does so because he's a proselytizer of a pro-capitalist ideology. What generates wealth is people's productive labour? There would be no Jeff Bezos without Amazon workers and Bezos couldn't have devoted his time to building a company, if we didn't have a social division of labour. 

Instead of listening to a clown like Kissin, people should try reading 'Religion and the Rise of Capitalism' by R.H. Tawney or Chapter 27 of Das Kapital by Karl Marx, which is entitled "The Expropriation of the Agricultural Population from the Land".