Book contents
- Hijacked
- Hijacked
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Preface
- 1 The Dual Nature of the Protestant Work Ethic and the Birth of Utilitarianism
- 2 Locke and the Progressive Work Ethic
- 3 How Conservatives Hijacked the Work Ethic and Turned It Against Workers
- 4 Welfare Reform, Famine, and the Ideology of the Conservative Work Ethic
- 5 The Progressive Work Ethic (1): Smith, Ricardo, and Ricardian Socialists
- 6 The Progressive Work Ethic (2): J. S. Mill
- 7 The Progressive Work Ethic (3): Marx
- 8 Social Democracy as the Culmination of the Progressive Work Ethic
- 9 Hijacked Again: Neoliberalism as the Return of the Conservative Work Ethic
- 10 Conclusion: What Should the Work Ethic Mean for Us Today?
- Acknowledgments
- Major Works Cited
- Notes
- Index
- The Seeley Lectures
9 - Hijacked Again: Neoliberalism as the Return of the Conservative Work Ethic
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 21 September 2023
- Hijacked
- Hijacked
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Preface
- 1 The Dual Nature of the Protestant Work Ethic and the Birth of Utilitarianism
- 2 Locke and the Progressive Work Ethic
- 3 How Conservatives Hijacked the Work Ethic and Turned It Against Workers
- 4 Welfare Reform, Famine, and the Ideology of the Conservative Work Ethic
- 5 The Progressive Work Ethic (1): Smith, Ricardo, and Ricardian Socialists
- 6 The Progressive Work Ethic (2): J. S. Mill
- 7 The Progressive Work Ethic (3): Marx
- 8 Social Democracy as the Culmination of the Progressive Work Ethic
- 9 Hijacked Again: Neoliberalism as the Return of the Conservative Work Ethic
- 10 Conclusion: What Should the Work Ethic Mean for Us Today?
- Acknowledgments
- Major Works Cited
- Notes
- Index
- The Seeley Lectures
Summary
In Chapter 3, I argued that in late eighteenth-century Britain, lazy and predatory capital owners – the original targets of Puritan critique – hijacked the work ethic and turned it against workers. These were the great landlords, rentiers, crony capitalists (including the shareholders and managers of the piratical East India Company, colonial slaveholders, and other state-sponsored imperialist ventures), schemers, and monopolists. These were people who got rich not from hard work, saving, and prudent investment in the real economy, but from merely passive ownership of property, state favoritism, market manipulation, financial speculation, and oppression of the less advantaged, especially of workers, tenants, and needy borrowers. One measure of its economic effects is the gap between productivity growth and wage growth. During Engels’s Pause, from the turn of the nineteenth century to mid-century, British wages stagnated even as productivity galloped ahead.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- HijackedHow Neoliberalism Turned the Work Ethic against Workers and How Workers Can Take It Back, pp. 254 - 283Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2023