Vijay Prashad: Questioning the Underlying Structures of Property and Power is “Off the Table”

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Dandelion Salad

TheRealNews on Aug 8, 2013

In part two of Reality Asserts Itself, Paul Jay and Vijay Prashad discuss the limits imposed on questioning the roots of inequality and how those who own the majority of property set the terms for everyone else.

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The Real News Network
Aug. 8, 2013

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I’ll give you a simple example. Right now, American workers have to bid up their wages so that American workers are much more expensive than workers in many parts of the world. You know, that is why corporations prefer to source their labor from outside the United States. There is no necessary reason for American labor to be this expensive. One of the reasons American labor is so expensive is that everything is privatized, you know, that I am responsible for insurance for transportation, for health care, for my children’s, you know, everything. So because everything is privatized, the bill is with me. So I have to bid up my wages. But imagine–.

JAY: If you can,–

PRASHAD: If you can. Exactly.

JAY: –’cause wages aren’t going very far.

PRASHAD: Exactly. Wages are not going–. So you put a lot of pressure on individual households to deal with the basic facts of life. If on the other hand we had excellent public transportation, decent health care, good schooling, you know, decent schooling, if these things were provided by the state, if there were some socialization of these things, then we would not need to bid up, you know, or put pressure on wages in order to survive. We could put pressure on wages because we want to have an imagination, we want to have more leisure, you know, we want to enjoy our lives, not just for survival. And that was a major advance in the Soviet Union.

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via Transcript

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