George Orwell, Jack Hilton, and the Working Class

Intellectual freedom versus economic centralization 1984 and George Orwell ’ s

TO THE END of his life, George Orwell remained a socialist. In “Why I Write” (1946), we find his programmatic statement: “Every line of serious work that I have written since 1936 has been written, directly or indirectly, against totalitarianism and for democratic Socialism, as I understand it.”* Orwell had fiercely attacked the attitude of capitalist society towards the poor in Down and Our in...

Down and almost out in Scotland: George Orwell, tuberculosis and getting streptomycin in 1948.

Old George Orwell Got It Backward: Some Thoughts on Behavioral Tax Economics

It is entirely appropriate that the study of public finance take seriously ‘‘behavioral’’ inconsistencies with traditional models of individual and collective decision-making. This raises the question of whether the state should play a role in protecting individuals from themselves, and whether individuals are susceptible to manipulation, or even exploitation, by the people who comprise the sta...

The Eckman - Hilton argument and higher operads

To the memory of my father. Abstract The classical Eckmann-Hilton argument shows that two monoid structures on a set, such that one is a homomorphism for the other, coincide and, moreover, the resulting monoid is commutative. This argument immediately gives a proof of the commutativity of the higher homotopy groups. A reformulation of this argument in the language of higher categories is: suppo...

Working-Class Power, Capitalist-Class Interests, and Class Compromise1

This article proposes a general theoretical framework for understanding the concept of “class compromise” in terms of a “reverseJ” model of the relationship between the associational power of workers and the interests of capitalists: increases in working-class power adversely affect capitalist-class interests until such power crosses some intermediate threshold beyond which further increases in...