Anthony Giddens

“Political economy … founds its theory of society upon the self-seeking of the isolated individual. Political economy, in this way, “incorporates private property into the very essence of man.””

“Human consciousness is conditioned in a dialectical interplay between subject and object, in which man actively shapes the world he lives in at the same time as it shapes him.”

“The expropriated peasantry are “turned en masse into beggars, vagabonds, partly from inclination, in most cases from stress of circumstances.” This is met with fierce legislation against vagrancy, by which means the vagabond population is subjected to “the discipline necessary for the wage system.””

“The concept of the “isolated individual” is a construction of the bourgeois philosophy of individualism, and serves to conceal the social character which production always manifests.”

“Marx rejects as “absurd” the contention made by John Stuart Mill, and many of the political economists, that while production is governed by definite laws, distribution is controlled by (malleable) human institutions. Such a view underlies the assumption that classes are merely inequalities in the distribution of income, and therefore that class conflict can be alleviated or even eliminated altogether by the introduction of measures which minimize discrepancies between incomes.”

“To renew the energy expended in physical labour, the worker must be provided with the requirements of his existence as a functioning organism—food, clothing, and shelter for himself and his family. The labour time socially necessary to produce the necessities of life of the worker is the value of the worker’s labour power. The latter’s value is, therefore, reducible to a specifiable quantity of commodities: those which the worker requires to be able to subsist and reproduce.”

“I argued more recently for a hypothecated wealth tax on very high earners to support the campaign against child poverty. Why shouldn’t the super-rich be obliged to help the super-poor?”