Unequal Representations.

I'm not a professional statistician. In a previous life, as an undergraduate, I did study some statistics but that was a long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away. Since then, I've kept well clear from statistics. Readers should keep that in mind.

Whatever my limitations and foibles, however, I'm a curious bloke and the data set below (scroll to the very bottom) caught my attention when I found it. Have a look at it.

Happy Anniversary, Capitalism.

(source)

Thirty years ago, those were the news. At the time, a still young Ian Verrender was working at the then vibrant The Sydney Morning Herald. These are his memories.

That greatest of all Australian politicians, great intellectual nemesis of Marxism and high-school dropout remembers the crash: "Skid-marks on the pathway of progress"

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Toyota closed operations earlier this month and today should be Holden's last. New memories of capitalism in the making. More skid marks on the pathway of progress.

Employment Matters.

(source)

Whether a capitalist or a worker, under capitalism one's livelihood depends ultimately on one's income and for the vast majority of us  -- regardless of gender, sexual orientation, race, ethnic origin, religion, age, place of birth or residence, education -- having to rely on work, income in essence comes directly or indirectly from employment. It's been like this since capitalism started, it remains so now.

This is Why the Identitarian Left Sucks.

David Ruccio has been fighting an uphill battle for a while: why Americans (or Australians, for that matter) seem incapable of calling the working class, working class?

In 2011:

"Here in the land of high unemployment and increasing poverty [aka US of A], we refuse to call things by their correct names."

In 2016:

"Well, it seems, Americans are still struggling with the notion of the working-class (and of class more generally)."

He presented this chart (taken from a report from the Economic Policy Institute) as part of his argument for the usefulness of "working class" as analytical category:

That is a good chart, I think.