United States | News & Politics

Okay then. What solution do even the most egalitarian or radical progressives/liberals have to solve capitalism's contradictions and crises, with capitalism's inherent unequal division of private property, leading to rising inequality and homelessness, being one of them? Because everything I've heard from just sounds like they are talking around the problem and avoiding the elephant in the room, the capitalistic system. In fact, many progressives when talking about issues such as homelessness, do not challenge the notion of private property and accept the inequality inherent to such a system, and then explain it away through bogus reasoning.

The contemporary version of bourgeois emancipating reason, egalitarian liberalism, made fashionable by an insistent media popularization, provides nothing new because it remains prisoner of the liberty, equality, and property triplet. Challenged by the conflict between liberty and equality, which the unequal division of property necessarily implies, so-called egalitarian liberalism is only very moderately egalitarian. Inequality is accepted and legitimized by a feat of acrobatics, which borrows its pseudo concept of "endowments" from popular economics. Egalitarian liberalism offers a highly platitudinous observation: individuals (society being the sum of individuals) are endowed with diverse standings in life (some are powerful heads of enterprise, others have nothing). These unequal endowments, nevertheless, remain legitimate as long as they are the product, inherited obviously, of the work and the savings of ancestors. So one is asked to go back in history to the mythical day of the original social contract made between equals, who later became unequal because they really desired it, as evidenced by the inequality of the sacrifices to which they consented. I do not think that this way of avoiding the questions of the specificity of capitalism even deserves to be considered elegant.

• Samir Amin, Eurocentrism