The economic turmoil in the world today, including the brutal treatment of millions of people through “austerity”—what is its true cause? For the tremendously needed answer to that question, read “Shame, Pride, & Economics,” the current issue of The Right of Aesthetic Realism to Be Known.

The commentary by Ellen Reiss begins:

Dear Unknown Friends:

With this issue we begin a serialization of the historic lecture Shame Goes with It All, by Eli Siegel. The “It” is the profit system: economics based on seeing one’s fellow humans in terms of how much financial profit one can extract from them—how much money one can get from them and their labor while giving them as little as possible.

Shame Goes with It All, of October 1970, is one of the lectures in Mr. Siegel’s Goodbye Profit System series. In May of that year he explained that the profit way of economics had reached the point at which it was no longer able to succeed. Though it might be made to continue, it would do so with more and more difficulty and would never flourish again. In his lectures he gave the reasons why and provided evidence from history and the immediate moment, from economic texts and from world literature. He explained:

There will be no economic recovery in the world until economics itself, the making of money, the having of jobs, becomes ethical; is based on good will rather than on the ill will which has been predominant for centuries. 

…It is nearly four and a half decades since Eli Siegel gave the lecture we’re serializing. And much has been done to keep the profit way grinding on, all of which efforts have brought increasing pain, increasing poverty, to millions of people.  Read more