Photo: REUTERS

By Amitava Kar
Jan 31 2019 (IPS-Partners)

(The Daily Star, Bangladesh) – The book “Why Women Have Better Sex Under Socialism” (2018)—as provocative as it sounds— has nothing to do with women’s carnal pleasures. In it, Professor Kristen Ghodsee of the University of Pennsylvania argues that implementing socialist concepts would make women’s lives more independent and fulfilling. That such an idea is put forth by an Ivy League academic from the United States of America, and not by a bleeding-heart leftist from Cuba, is striking. But not surprising.

With the fall of the Berlin Wall and the dissolution of the Soviet Union, the word “socialism” may have landed in the wastebasket of history but is still available for recycling. Socialism is becoming increasingly appealing to young people around the world who value universal health care, strong unions, affordable college, banking regulation and living wages. Some make the case that it would benefit women especially.

Professor Ghodsee insists that the free market is failing most women in many ways. Women are paid less. They are financially dependent on better compensated men. They are seen as less valuable or less productive employees because they are consistently having to take time off in order to work around the house. Most of the housework including child care and elder care and care for the infirm generally falls on the shoulders of women, a job that does not pay.

On the other hand, states that notoriously coerced political conformity and a planned economy also enforced policies to emancipate women. Socialist regimes that we usually vilify, like the former East Germany, supported gender equality in all aspects of life. In the socialist countries of the twentieth-century Eastern Europe, they were fully integrating women into the workforce, which allowed them to achieve economic freedom. Government-funded kindergartens and paid maternity leave were introduced to reduce the economic burden on women.

Life behind the Iron Curtain was not without problems. Many people died under planned economies that led to famines, purges and labour camps. But Professor Ghodsee asks, why not learn from the mistakes and try socialist policies that actually work, like empowering women, a la Scandinavia? Why not try to build a society where profits would be invested back into social services, and human relationships would be ultimately more genuine and satisfying, because people will not look at each other in a transactional way?

Ghodsee opines that the problem with capitalism is that it commodifies everything, including romance. She cites the example of seeking.com, a website that matches young women with wealthy older men, the so-called sugar daddies. The site boasts more than 10 million active users in more than 139 countries. One of the pages on this site suggests being somebody’s sugar baby can reduce your debt, send you to shopping sprees, expensive dinners and exotic vacations. You can get paid for your “time.”

And the free market has not lifted everyone, as promised. We see wage stagnation; we see growing inequality. The contemporary market that we are in has created a lot of risks for young people. Social safety nets have all but disappeared. The top 1 percent now own almost as much wealth as the bottom 90 percent. Which may help explain why about 51 percent Americans between 18 and 29 hold a positive view of socialism.

People are showing interest in an alternative political system that would lead to a more egalitarian and sustainable future. The imbalances of the existing order have fuelled the rise of leftist politicians like Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in the US, Jeremy Corbyn in the UK, Jean-Luc Melenchon in France, Yanis Varoufakis in Greece and Sahra Wagenknecht in Germany. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is the New York Congresswoman who ran on an ultra-progressive platform which includes Medicare for all, guaranteed family leave, abolishing US Immigration and Customs Enforcement, free public college and a 70 percent marginal tax rate for incomes higher than USD 10 million.

In sum, Professor Ghodsee is saying that we can learn from the experiences of Eastern Europe and that we can actually see them functioning in countries like Denmark and Sweden. And so, why not have a conversation about how socialist policies not only impact our economies but also our personal lives? It may come as a surprise to the younger reader that one of the founding principles of Bangladesh was socialism meaning economic and social justice.

Amitava Kar is a member of the editorial team at The Daily Star.

This story was originally published by The Daily Star, Bangladesh

About eight years ago when the financial crisis hit Iceland, a tiny island with a population of 320,000, most Icelanders found themselves in serious financial tribulations. If the US and Europe got drunk on easy money, Iceland was the guy at the party who fell unconscious in the corner. It got so bad that somebody put the country on eBay up for sale. Three of the country’s largest banks, with assets worth 10 times the country’s GDP, fell in the span of three days, the currency collapsed, the stock market fell 95 percent and nearly every business on the island was bankrupt.

It is a frightening case study in reckless financial behaviour. Banks had gone on a decade-long binge of long-term lending. Just like in all financial capitals of the world, men were at the helm of the game of the financial sector in Iceland. “It’s always the same guys,” Halla Tomasdottir, then a director at the chamber of commerce, said to Foreign Policy. “Ninety-nine percent went to the same school, they drive the same cars, they wear the same suits and they have the same attitudes. They got us into this situation — and they had a lot of fun doing it.” Then she criticised the system that focuses “aggressively and indiscriminately” on the short-term maximisation of profits, without any regard for losses that is focused on short-lived market prices and lucrative bonus payments. She called it typical male behaviour and compared it to a “penis competition”.

Many predicted a Greece-like disaster. But Iceland is not Greece. Today it is buzzing – unemployment is at 4 percent and tourism is booming. How did the country emerge from its deep freeze? Who cleaned up the mess left by a group of testosterone-high men?

It was women like Halla Tomasdottir and Kristin Petursdottir, then a bank manager, who in 2007 formed Audur Capital, a financial and Investment Company with the aim of incorporating feminine values into the world of finance. What exactly did they have in mind?

The two women sought to espouse four principles: risk awareness, straight talk, emotional capital, and profit with principles. Investors and clients should be fully informed of the risks involved in investments before stepping in. Clients should have access to both positive and negative aspects and developments in their investments. They also put a lot of faith in emotional capital, asserting that “emotional due diligence is just as valuable as financial due diligence”. And lastly, they called for an expansion of the definition of profit, arguing that financial gain is not the only kind of profit to be made. They called it profit with principles.

After the meltdown, the government hired women like Halla and Kristin to manage banks, change the culture and tidy up the mess. The macho-culture and the irresponsible risk-taking that led to the financial meltdown were no longer going to be tolerated. The risky behaviour of some men which threw the banks and the country over the brink was going to be modified by new women managers who would ensure more conservative and prudent lending.

This led to a cultural revolution that now favours female leaders. European and American researchers are pointing to the importance of gender diversity in leadership in financial institutions. Leading management experts are asking if it is up to women to save capitalism. Gender is no longer a women’s issue, it is very much a business issue. In 2008, the Economist famously introduced the concept of “womenomics” a term for the next economic revolution: that it will be women who save the future of the world economy.

Never before has there been so much focus on the economic importance of women. Michel Ferrary, a Professor at CERAM Business School looked at the correlation between the proportion of women in management and share prices of 40 French companies. He concluded that the more women in management, the fewer the losses. Why? Because “It may be, for example, that men and women have different risk-taking behaviours, with men less, and women more, risk-averse.” Realising the potential of women in business, Norway introduced legislation requiring 40 percent of Norwegian board seats be reserved for women. Today, the country has more female board members than any other country. Spain and Germany are moving in the same direction. Another example of the economic caution of women is the Grameen Bank whose 97 percent women customers paid their debt on time.

But According to Lamia Walker, former associate director of the Centre for Women in Business at the London Business School, it is not about women not wanting to take risks. Instead, she believes men and women reach for different management tools, which helps create more effective organisations. Other experts have said that women are calmer and less aggressive in positioning themselves. A McKinsey study and research by Alice Eagly, an American psychologist, show that women have a more varied management style and use a broader range of management tools than men, which in turn means that companies more easily adapt to new situations. Female managers usually use techniques such as group decisions and mutual inspiration, while men typically point to decision-making on their own and command and control.

I think women have a completely different approach to life. They are more cooperative and bring more people in when important decisions must be made. With them it may take a little longer to make the decision, but the decision is considered thoroughly before being made. When I read that a number of public banks in this country are being weighed down by bad loans, I wonder if there is a lesson to be learnt from Iceland.

“Why can’t a woman be more like a man?” sings Henry Higgins in My Fair Lady.

Considering the performance of Icelandic women, I am asking, “Why can’t a man be more like a woman?”

The writer is a member of Editorial Team at The Daily Star.

This story was originally published by The Daily Star, Bangladesh

A recent report by a UN-affiliated group refuels the long-standing debate over reparations for African-Americans. The group of experts which includes leading human rights lawyers from around the world presented its findings to the UN Human Rights Council recently, showing a link between the present and past injustices against the black people in the United States. The history of slavery in the US justifies reparations, they argued.

A terra-cotta statue of a child slave inside the main house at the Whitney Plantation in Wallace Louisiana. Photo: Reuters

The issue is hardly new. In every Congress since 1989, John Conyers, a Democratic Congressman from Michigan, has introduced a bill that recommends forming a commission to study reparation proposals. H.R. 40 does not require reparations or authorise any payments. It simply calls for ample research into the nature and financial impact of African enslavement as well as the ills inflicted on the blacks during the Jim Crow era. Based on the findings, remedies can be suggested.

But every year, the bill stalls. It’s hard to understand why, though. Polls suggest that racism is on the decline—the young are far less prejudiced than the old. In today’s America, if anyone expresses a racist opinion at work, it will almost certainly end his or her career. Companies caught discriminating are punished by the legal system as well as customers. Obama’s rise to the US president from a junior Senator from Chicago was not based solely on the desire of wide-eyed liberals to purchase racial reconciliation on the cheap. Americans wanted change.

In MLK’s day, interracial love was illegal in many states. Today, more than 15 percent of marriages cross racial lines. Segregation was the law in the South and the custom in the North. Today, all-white neighbourhoods are virtually non-existent and segregation is declining in all metropolitan areas. The median earnings of black and white women with college degrees are about the same.

And yet a humiliating gap has opened up between the promise of the ideals and the reality of the time. According to available data, black median household income fell significantly between 2000 and 2011. The traditional black family has collapsed. In the 60s, many called it a crisis when nearly 25 percent of black children were born out of wedlock. Today it is more than 70 percent (for whites, about 30 percent), and most of these children are being raised by single mothers living alone. Lacking the safety net that a second adult provides, they are hit the hardest by the economic crisis.

Some say blacks themselves are to blame for these dismal figures. Aren’t individuals ultimately responsible for their own fate? If new immigrants can make it big in America, then why can’t they? Answers to these questions tend to fall into two camps. The lingering effects of racism are hard to shake off. Poverty begets poverty. Those who struggle at school are lagging further behind in the workplace. Black schools are underfunded; the criminal-justice system is biased against blacks. If this analysis is correct, the best solution may be more funding for inner-city schools, stricter enforcement of anti-discrimination laws and more training for police officers and judges.

Skin colour is nothing like the barrier it once was in the US. But slavery remains America’s original sin. “An America that asks what it owes its most vulnerable citizens is improved and humane,” writes the indispensable Ta-Nehisi Coates in his 2014 cover story in the Atlantic. “An America that looks away is ignoring not just the sins of the past but the sins of the present and the certain sins of the future.”

Coates does not insist that US Federal Government—and presumably, various state governments—should give money to descendants of slaves. Instead, he just tries to show the hollowness of believing “that a society can spend three-and-a-half centuries attempting to cripple a man, 50 years offering half-hearted aid, and then wonder why he walks with a limp.”

While many whites consider reparations to be too radical, white politicians, judges and ordinary citizens have accepted the principle of reparations for certain past damages. The current worth of all black labour stolen by whites through the means of slavery, Jim Crow, and discrimination, interests included is estimated by some economists in the range of $6 to $24 trillion. Many wonder where the money will come from. Well, did the US government not find more than a trillion dollars to bail out private companies in the Great Depression and trillions for recent unjust and irresponsible military actions?

The US has a moral and constitutional obligation to mend its shameful past.

The writer is a member of the Editorial Team at The Daily Star.

This story was originally published by The Daily Star, Bangladesh

Mayor of London, Sadiq Khan, with his supporters. PHOTO: AFP

By Amitava Kar
May 12 2016 (The Daily Star, Bangladesh)

Sadiq Khan’s strength is that he exemplifies the city he is set to run as its mayor. “I’m a Londoner, I’m European, I’m British, I’m English, I’m of Islamic faith, of Asian origin, of Pakistani heritage, a dad, a husband,” he said in a recent interview with The New York Times. He was born in South London, to immigrants from Pakistan, and grew up in a public-housing project. His father drove a bus, and his mother was a seamstress.

While his Conservative opponent Zac Goldsmith was busy exploiting racial and cultural stereotypes about Muslims through a dog whistle campaign, Sadiq’s campaign focused on bread-and-butter issues like the cost of housing and transportation. In the end, the nasty campaign of Goldsmith hit a solid wall and Londoners told him to get lost. There is a limit to how far bigotry can go to win popular votes. In his acceptance speech, Khan said that he was “proud that London has today chosen hope over fear and unity over division.”

The 45-year-old new mayor has enough credentials for the job. A human rights lawyer by profession, he was elected to Parliament in 2005, appointed Parliamentary Under-Secretary Communities and Local Government in 2008, and Secretary of State for Transport—a cabinet position—in 2009 under Labour Prime Minister, Gordon Brown.

Sadiq has taken a hot seat. To run a city with an acute shortage of affordable homes and a creaking, overcrowded mass transit network is by no means going to be easy. And unlike his counterparts in the US and Europe, the amount of hands-on power that he will enjoy is limited.

He has a lot of great ideas about how to provide more affordable housing to low-income people but any major decision needs the approval of the central government. When he needs extra money above an annual budget of $24.5 billion for more police or an expansion of the city’s railway, he has to ask the Chancellor of the Exchequer, a Conservative who may be reluctant to pay for Labour ideas.

Would he be a successful mayor? Well, strong convictions precede great actions. He has promising plans to improve residents’ skills and speed up the construction of a new underground railway that will run from London’s south-west to its north-east. Most excitingly, he wants to expand the power and scope of mayoralty—puny in comparison with its New York equivalent—pledging to lobby for new tax-raising abilities.

His pro-business programme is also interesting. It seems to be more about what firms can do for the city – things like building infrastructure and houses, raising wages and giving policy advice -than what the mayor can do for firms. And the best thing going for him, by all accounts, is that he is an efficient and likeable manager, aware of his weaknesses and open to new ideas.

Sadiq’s victory sends a powerful message to bigots everywhere. That religious prejudice might be real but it is ultimately a losing proposition. That the kind of divisive strategy that has so far worked for the Donald in the US is unlikely to be a formula for winning elections everywhere.

And it wasn’t for former Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper. When he started playing the anti-Muslim card as he sought re-election last year, he was trounced by his opponent Justin Trudeau who ran a more inclusive campaign. Like most Londoners, Canadians made it clear that there is no place for religious bigotry in their secular societies.

The calm, unyielding yet racially and religiously inclusive campaign of Sadiq Khan has come to symbolise all that is most impressive about London: its diversity. About a quarter of its residents are foreign-born, and one-eighth Muslim. But he is not the first Muslim to hold important office in Europe. Sajid Javid is the British Secretary of State for business, a cabinet rank. Rotterdam, in the Netherlands, has had a Morocco-born Muslim mayor since 2009. Across Britain many councilors – typically in the Labour party – and 13 MPs are Muslim.

The win, which garnered more than 1.3 million votes, reaffirms London’s multicultural image at a time when Europe’s anti-immigration parties have been making inroads in recent months, fuelled by rising public fears following the attacks in Brussels and Paris. Lord Hain, a former Labour cabinet minister, said, “In the dominant British city, probably the most important city in the world, to have a Muslim mayor is an important statement.”

And yet the fact remains – many of those who demand that Muslims in the West prove their fidelity to secular values have not yet begun to internalise these values themselves.

“Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.”

The writer is a member of the editorial team at The Daily Star.

This story was originally published by The Daily Star, Bangladesh

Cartoon: The New York Times

By Amitava Kar
Apr 28 2016 (The Daily Star, Bangladesh)

“Clothes make the man. Naked people have little or no influence on society,” said Mark Twain. In fewer places than Myanmar has the saying held truer where clothed men—uniformed to be more precise—have had all the influence for more than 50 years.

That’s changing with Aung San Suu Kyi’s National League for Democracy winning a decisive majority in the November 2015 elections. She is sending a clear message to the generals: civilians are going to call the shots from now on and she will be in charge.

Barred from becoming president by the military-drafted 2008 constitution “for the good of the mother country”, she assumed three key positions in the government to fortify her leadership—“State Counsellor”, foreign minister and minister in the president’s office. The combination of jobs will allow her to oversee the president’s office, shape foreign policy and coordinate decision-making between the executive branch and the parliament.

Things have started moving. As “State Counsellor”, she bypassed the military-controlled Ministry of Home Affairs and used legal processes to release students who had been jailed last year for protesting the new education reform law. In her first meeting as foreign minister with her Chinese counterpart Wang Yi, she made it clear that Beijing would have to pursue its interests in Myanmar with her rather than through the Army, as had been the case in the past.

Military members of the parliament denounced the moves as “democratic bullying”. At a parade last month, Min Aung Hlaing, commander-in-chief of the Armed Forces, reminded citizens that “the Army ensures the stability of the country” and “has to be present in a leading role in national politics”. The four-star general, despite reaching the retirement age of 60, will see his term extended for another five years, according to Wall Street Journal. He is in no hurry for the Army to step back from politics.

Suu Kyi cannot send the generals, who kept her under house arrest for 15 years, back to the barracks overnight. They still control three important ministries—home affairs, defence and border affairs. The first allows them to control the state’s administrative apparatus, right down to the grassroots level. Through these centres of power, it dominates the National Defence and Security Council which can dissolve parliament and impose martial law. Amending the constitution remains impossible as it requires a majority exceeding 75 percent in the parliament. Since the army has 25 percent seats reserved by law, it holds a perpetual veto.

The task ahead is daunting. In most key human development indicators, her country sits at the bottom of the pit in Southeast Asia. The new government inherits high inflation, large budget and current-account deficits, an unstable exchange rate and institutions ossified by decades of corruption and authoritarian rule. FDI rose to over USD 8 billion during the last fiscal year, but much of that money remains concentrated in the country’s jade, oil and gas industries—tied to former generals. And as the country opens up further, it is the urban “elites” and big corporations under the control of armed forces that are likely to benefit most from increased liquidity while people in rural and ethnically segregated live in extreme poverty, without basic physical or financial infrastructure.

Other priorities include reaching lasting peace with ethnic minorities along the country’s borders some of whom have been fighting the central government for decades and put an end to laws that have been used to stifle dissent. Most important of all is to redress the vicious persecution of hundreds of thousands of Muslim Rohingyas who have been made stateless by a 1982 law and have been languishing in squalid camps or confined to their villages while thousands more have fled the country, many into the hands of human traffickers. Suu Kyi has to find a way to quash the Anti-Islamic sentiment violently stirred-up among the near 70 percent Bamar population in part by the 969 movement initiated by radical Buddhist monk Wirathu.

Myanmar’s new government will also have to tackle land rights: confusing and poorly enforced laws leave rural farmers vulnerable to confiscation. The NLD’s election manifesto promised land reform, but it is easier promised than delivered as it will have to confront the still-powerful Army on the matter.

As of right now, Myanmar has the world’s goodwill and potential abounds. Washington wants to seize the opportunity to pull the Army away from China’s ambit and towards itself at a time when it is looking for new partners in the Indo-Pacific region to bolster its “pivot” strategy. The country has abundant natural resources and is wedged between the massive markets of China, India and Southeast Asia. A lot of expatriate Burmese are returning home, bringing in ideas, enthusiasm and skills with them. Foreign investment, especially in telecoms and energy, is pouring in. Many believe it can reclaim its title as the world’s leading rice exporter.

The low-hanging fruits of Suu Kyi’s victory have been picked. Further change will rest on deeper, structural changes that will take much longer. “People expect that the NLD will solve all their problems,” said Bo Bo Oo, an MP who spent 20 years in jail for supplying medicine to students. “But it will take at least ten years before we see real change.”

The writer is a member of the editorial team of The Daily Star.

This story was originally published by The Daily Star, Bangladesh

In an email interview, Dr Geof Wood shares with Amitava Kar of The Daily Star why poverty and inequality persist despite all the fuss. Emeritus Professor of International Development at the University of Bath, Dr Wood is an internationally renowned development anthropologist and author of several books and numerous journal articles, with a regional focus on South Asia. On March 9, he presented a seminar titled “The Security of Agency: Towards a Sociology of Poverty” at Bangladesh Institute of Development Studies (BIDS). Here is a condensed version of the interview.

Professor Geof Wood

The core problem at present is that the ‘duty bearers’ of the society in both government and industry are also the major rent-seekers through corruption in the public sector, especially using the regulatory apparatus in discretionary ways to extract rents from those seeking avoidance from regulation. This avoidance enables industrialists to deepen the exploitation of their workers. Officials also issue contracts to their private sector friends with payback expectations. So there is an unholy alliance between the state and the type of capitalism emerging in many countries which works against the interests of its ordinary citizens.

A hungry person is a hungry person. Why do we need so many theories to understand how to alleviate poverty?
Partly of course because women and children, especially girls, are likely to be hungry before the men in their families become hungry. So, immediately, you have one set of theories around gender inequality leading to gendered and intergenerational poverty within households as a function of both patriarchal society and labour markets which privilege adult male earners over female ones.

Poverty is multidimensional and not just about food security. People need to be healthy and they need to be secure over time. If the investment in public goods such as public health and water and sanitation is low, or below quality due to corruption, then the poor are even more exposed and dependent upon bad deals, to achieve short term assistance. These bad deals reinforce relations of dependent security and thus postpone a rights-based, more autonomous security. I have called this the Faustian Bargain.

These are all examples of ‘theory’ statements based upon evidence, which answer questions about how poverty and unequal access to essential services is reproduced and why. And there are other theories too: about how access is limited; about under what conditions people morally care for others rather than treat them instrumentally for their own purposes; about whether people can act for themselves (actor-oriented perspectives) or whether they are constrained by relationships and institutions; about whether people have the ‘freedom to’ act for themselves or only the ‘freedom from’ being subordinated by others (the subaltern argument); about whether they can trust each other enough to act collectively to manage their own lives as well as protest against commonly perceived enemies or threats. To understand how poverty and inequality is reproduced, we need to understand all these things and more.

Does poverty persist because we want it to?
It is true that many people like some inequality and thus the poverty which accompanies it. Inequality offers rank and status, and some economists would argue that rank and status relative to others is a driver of creativity, innovation, risk taking which all societies need to move forward and grow. The aphorism ‘The Poor will always be with us’ is a convenient way of saying that the poor are responsible for their own condition through laziness and lack of application, a kind of ‘culture of poverty’ argument which attributes poverty to the wilful behaviour of those experiencing it, to the point where no one else is responsible for their plight but themselves.This way of thinking becomes an alibi for those in power to do nothing.

Is it possible to combat poverty without addressing corruption and man-made disasters like wars?
The two issues (corruption and war) have to be disentangled, and anyway the man-made disaster which affects poverty most will be climate change.

There are some who argue that historically and globally, economic growth occurs alongside corruption, and if growth delivers poverty reduction, therefore corruption and poverty reduction are compatible. I do not share this view, because unfortunately growth does not automatically lead to poverty reduction. Corruption is another word for rent-seeking in a poorly governed society where no one, therefore, can enjoy secure rights. The poor suffer the effects of uncertainty and insecurity more acutely than any other classes.

With reference to war, we should remember that conflict is sometimes unavoidable. It would be satisfying to imagine a world of peace and harmony, and thus release resources for social protection and so on. But preferences for inequality and prejudicial discrimination based upon images of the undeserving poor, or ethnicity, or race, or gender etc. appear to remain a feature of the human condition. So some wars (international or civil) have to be fought to combat poverty.

I raised the issue of climate change as a more significant man-made disaster in terms of poverty. Bangladesh is in the frontline of this evolving man-made disaster, which will likely entail a large scale movement of the human population as habitats and residential locations become untenable under well predicted effects of global warming. These ‘climate refugees’ will lose their livelihoods. Does Bangladesh, or indeed the world community, have the values and institutions to cope with this prospect?

This reminds us that poverty eradication is not a linear process towards zero. Under hazard, i.e. predictable conditions, it may go in reverse. Constant vigilance and institutional, not just technological, innovation is required.

As long as countries keep on spending a big portion of their national budgets on many non-productive sectors, how can we expect people’s conditions to improve?
Are we talking about defence budgets or welfare budgets? Many neo-liberals, especially in my own country, the UK, regard welfare budgets as ‘non-productive’. If military budgets contribute to positive order and aid ordinary people to combat aggressors who might make their lives worse off economically, socially, politically and culturally, then some defence capacity (and capability) is required. So military budgets are not always a negative trade-off. But if those budgets are being used for internal repression and to keep certain rent-seeking elites in power, including the arms industry around the world, then no doubt they are part of the problem.

Welfare budgets perform functions which can be considered productive: employment insurance, for example, enables the rhythm of capitalism to continue its inherent process of destroying jobs, dislocating labour, alongside the creation of new opportunities employing different people with new skills, sometimes in new locations. They also subsidise private capital by underwriting living wage/family reproduction costs—tax credits in the UK, for example. So hardly non-productive in the sense of supporting capitalism!

This story was originally published by The Daily Star, Bangladesh