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Studia Neophilologica

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Is economic inequality also a literary problem?

Robert Appelbaum & Roberto del Valle Alcalá

To cite this article: Robert Appelbaum & Roberto del Valle Alcalá (2020) Is economic inequality also a literary problem?, Studia Neophilologica, 92:2, 149-158, DOI:

10.1080/00393274.2020.1751705

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/00393274.2020.1751705

© 2020 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group.

Published online: 14 Sep 2020.

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ARTICLE

Is economic inequality also a literary problem?

Robert Appelbaum aand Roberto del Valle Alcaláb

aMalmö University, Sweden;bSödertörn University, Sweden

ABSTRACT

This is an introduction to our special issue on literature and economic inequality. Beginning with a discussion of Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s ‘Origin of Inequality’, and moving on to a brief analysis of the current juncture of the conditions of inequality and the conditions of litera-ture and literary study, we introduce our seven contributions and try to frame the challenges literary study faces today.

ARTICLE HISTORY

Received 13 November 2019 Accepted 17 November 2019

KEYWORDS

Literary Theory; Economics; Inequality

Introduction

‘What is the origin of inequality among mankind and is it justified by natural law?’ That was the question posed in 1755 by the Academy of Dijon for a competition in essay writing to which Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Discourse of Inequality was the most notable contribution. But actually, two questions were involved:first, how did inequality come to be, and second, is it justified? The assumption, which had a basis in ancient philosophy, was that inequality was at once a historical problem and a moral one– and that the moral problem could be explained by but not reduced to the historical problem. But what kind of problem was either? What was inequality, in thefirst instance? Rousseau begins by stating that there are two kinds of inequality among the human species;‘one, which I call natural or physical, because it is established by nature, and consists in a difference of age, health, bodily strength, and the qualities of the mind or of the soul: and another, which may be called moral or political inequality, because it depends on a kind of convention, and is established, or at least authorised by the consent of men. This latter consists of the different privileges, which some men enjoy to the prejudice of others; such as that of being more rich, more honoured, more powerful or even in a position to exact obedience’ (Rousseau1913: 9).

Leaving aside ‘natural inequality’, which Rousseau relegates as a subject not worth investigating, Rousseau gives us a‘such as’, in other words, a list of some but not all outcomes of the condition of inequality: wealth, honour, power, and the ability to‘exact obedience’.

Rousseau’s answer to the riddle of inequality was anthropological: it was to lay hold of the nature of mankind itself, and especially‘the natural man’, or to put it otherwise, to study‘the original man’, ‘his real wants, and the fundamental principles of his duty’, in order to see how specific conditions of inequality might be critiqued by appeal to universal law. The idea was to make the two problems into one, merging the ‘is’ and

CONTACTRobert Appelbaum r_appel@yahoo.com

STUDIA NEOPHILOLOGICA 2020, VOL. 92, NO. 2, 149–158

https://doi.org/10.1080/00393274.2020.1751705

© 2020 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group.

This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any med-ium, provided the original work is properly cited, and is not altered, transformed, or built upon in any way.

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the ‘ought’, and to find out how ‘the original man’, imagined to be unfamiliar with inequality, came to decline into an artificial man, who not only creates but also consents to conditions of inequality.‘Consent’ is a key term here, and we will get back to it; so too, very interestingly, is language itself, which makes it possible for a creature not only to suffer domination but also to ‘authorise’ its own domination by consent. But first of all what needs to be established is that for Rousseau, humanity is by nature equal and by convention unequal, such that anthropologically speaking, the prevalence of inequality means that humanity is at odds with itself, economic life (and to begin with, the institu-tion of private property) having established a fundamental alienainstitu-tion of man from man and even man from himself. (As he would put it in the opening line of The Social Contract, ‘Man is born free, yet everywhere he is in chains’). The establishment of inequality came with humanity’s adopting an artificial economics, based on private property and the division of wealth and labour. The formation of human society as we know it,

bound new fetters on the poor, and gave new powers to the rich; which irretrievably destroyed natural liberty, eternallyfixed the law of property and inequality, converted clever usurpation into unalterable right, and, for the advantage of a few ambitious individuals, subjected all mankind to perpetual labour, slavery and wretchedness.(Rousseau,1913: 30)

Rousseau’s mid-eighteenth-century intuitions foretold the social and economic drama that was about to unfold in the next century under the guise of industrialisation. Under the ancien régime, the inequality of status groups and social classes was commonly taken to be natural, and unalterable, in spite of all the evidence that Rousseau and others could muster to show that it was unnatural– customary and artificial – and for that reason, in principle, alterable. With the collapse of the ancien régime and the coming of the Industrial Revolution, the illusion faded away. As peasants left thefields for manufacturing towns and the towns themselves rapidly grew, their populations divided between a newly formed bourgeoisie and a new-formed mass of workers and their families and what Marx would eventually call the lumpenproletariat– vagrants, criminals, prostitutes, the unem-ployed and the unemployable, the‘surplus population’ – it was clear that inequality was now something invented, an outcome of the deliberate, innovative, custom-breaking behaviour of the dominant classes, led by industrialists andfinanciers (Marx 1887, c.25, sec. 3; and see Hayes,1988). In England, by the turn of the century, to use what is probably the most pertinent example, inequality of this new kind was rampant– and recorded as such by leading artists and writers. A changing physical landscape of‘dark Satanic Mills’, in the prophetic words of William Blake, expressed a changing economic and political system, in which property and labour, wealth and poverty, emerged as deliberately separate worlds, based not on the natural or traditional order of things but on the development of industry itself. This is the‘strange system of human society’ into which Mary Shelley’s Rousseauian creature is born in 1818, one in which ‘the division of property’ could not be distinguished from the accumulation of‘immense wealth’ on the one hand and‘squalid poverty’ on the other (Shelley2012: 83).

Yet the Romantics also taught that the world of inequality was a world of affirmation, a struggling towards equality. ‘The seed you sow, another reaps;/The wealth ye find, another keeps’, writes Mary’s husband Percy Bysshe against the bloody echoes of Peterloo in 1819, before issuing an exhortation that will not go unheeded by workers throughout the nineteenth century:‘Sow seed – but let no tyrant reap:/Find wealth – let no impostor

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heap’ (Shelley2013: 386–387). That struggle towards equality was a key tenet of Marx: capitalism was the instrument through which socialism would be reached, such that the progenitor of inequality that would ultimately lead to universal equality. It was indeed the ‘womb’ out of which the early stages of communism would be born (Marx1970). But it would not be ‘born’, apparently, without a fight. In 1848 alone over fifty national insurrections broke out around the globe, pitting middle classes against the upper classes and working classes against both (Rapport2009).

By the 1900s, the wave of contestation and resistance against industrial capitalism’s consecration of inequality had reached a climax. In Britain, again, the‘Great Unrest’ that began in 1910 with the Cambrian Combine mining strike in South Wales soon spread across the country, leaving behind a trail of riots and state repression and paving the way for the General Strike of 1926. In Russia, an industrial conflict at the Putilov factory in Saint Petersburg escalated into the Revolution of 1905, while a series of mass strikes raged across the rest of Europe and North America. This cycle would come to a head with the Russian Revolution of 1917, which dramatically altered the balance of forces in world capitalism. According to Antonio Negri:

The October Revolution had once and for all introduced a political quality of subversion into the material needs and struggles of the working class, a spectre that could not be exorcised (. . .) The recognition of the originality of 1917, of the fact that the entire existing material structure of capital had been thrown out of gear and that there was no turning back, would sooner or later become a political necessity for capital. (Negri1994: 26-27)

The crash of 1929 and the Great Depression that followed confirmed the impossibility of restructuring capitalist command simply on the earlier model of technological innovation plus laissez-faire. It was not enough just to‘let do’. It had become imperative for capital, by means of governmental intervention, as politicians such as Franklin Delano Roosevelt and economists like John Maynard Keynes recognised, to integrate the demands of the working class into the system. General well-being was at stake, but also the danger that for want of any other solution the working class would stray in a revolutionary direction. Keynes sought to translate these demands, by means of the scientific language of economics, ‘into the problematic of effective demand and its role within capitalist accumulation’ (De Angelis

2000: 7). The downward rigidity of wages, which would become a pillar of economic doctrine in the post-war years (Baldi1972; De Angelis2000: 17), thus became a technical expression of the newly institutionalised working-class power, and a fundamental acknowl-edgement that, under the circumstances, the alternative to economic equalisation from above was the destruction of capitalism from below.

The social lineaments of the‘great transformation’ (Polanyi1944) that announced itself at the end of World War Two have been widely documented by contemporary economists such as Thomas Piketty (2014), whose monumental Capital in the Twenty-First Century offers detailed empirical evidence of a significant ‘compression’ of wage and income inequalities in this period. By the 1970s, however, the political nature of this drive towards equality in the Global North (which, let it be stressed, had hardly improved the conditions of workers in the Global South, and of other social strata across the capitalist world-system) planted the seeds of its own undoing. The inflationary crisis that ultimately brought the Keynesian consensus to an end (Clarke1988) thus spoke of capital’s incapa-city to increase productivity in the face of its own structural rigidities and against the

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growing pressure of wage demands on the part of workers (Aglietta 2015; Holloway

2019). What followed this crisis was a traumatic process of capitalist restructuration, often linked to the names of Thatcher and Reagan and broadly described with the term neoliberalism, which specifically targeted the egalitarian class compromise institutiona-lised after 1945. Recent developments, especially following the recessionary cycle that began with thefinancial crash of 2008, have only intensified the return of inequality as a stock feature and functional principle of contemporary capitalism.1

In the United States and the United Kingdom especially, economic inequality is at its worst level since the Gilded Age (Lord2018). Thefigures are staggering. In 2017, in the US, the top 0.1% of earners, taken together, received 188 times more income than the bottom 90%, taken together. Meanwhile, in 2016 the top 5% of Americans owned over 65% of the nation’s wealth; the bottom 90% owned only 22% of that wealth (Inequality.orgn.d.). In the UK, the topfifth of the nation earns 41% of all income, the bottom fifth 8% (House of Commons2019). As for wealth in the UK, the top 10% of the country owns about 44% of it. ‘In July 2014 to June 2016, the wealth held by the top 10% of households was around five times greater than the wealth of the bottom half of all households combined’ (Equality Trust2017). One per cent of the population owns 50% of the land in England (Evans2019). Even countries with highly developed welfare states, such as Germany and France, have seen a dramatic increase in economic inequality in recent years, and around the world the top 1% control 45% of the world’s wealth; in 2017 it earned a whopping 80% of all newly created wealth (Oxfam 2018).2 Even in Sweden, we might add, does such a problem persist. Although it is one of the more equal societies in the developed world with respect to income, Sweden’s rate of billionaires per capita is on par with that of the United States (Brinded2017) and, according to one Global Wealth Report by Credit Suisse, the wealth-iest 10% of Swedish citizens control 73% of the nation’s capital wealth (Bird2014).

The concentration of wealth among the few at the expense of the many, as Aristotle observed 2500 years ago, corrupts political society, as the wealthy acquire dispropor-tionate influence on political speech, policy and behaviour, and only for the sheer reason that they happen to be wealthy.3In the United States and the United Kingdom, particu-larly, as well as in many states in the Global South today, it corrupts access to education, knowledge, technology and the means of communication, as the wealthy monopolise access to the best schools and other significant social institutions, including the media – and again, only for the sheer reason that they happen to be wealthy (Marginson 2014). It corrupts culture, placing the interests, lifestyles and values of the rich at the centre of the symbolic life of the public, and, as many critics have argued, undermining trust in the social compacts and institutions that are designed to hold populations together. In such

1Theorist Maurizio Lazzarato has recently described the anti-egalitarian agenda of post-1970s capitalism as a‘separatist’

class project that follows its failure to integrate workers in the Global North through mass consumption whilst reproducing exploitative conditions in the colonial South. Falling‘under the blows of anti-colonial and anti-imperial revolutions’ after the 1960s, as part of a wider cycle of struggles that also included women and subaltern sections of the Western proletariat, the capital was‘forced to change its strategy and to transform the separation between populations of the North and South into competition among all populations on the planet. Globalisation is this strategic act of putting in competition of labour at a world scale’ (Lazzarato2019: 43; our translation).

2

Also see The Global Wealth Report of 2018 (Credit Suisse2018:20), which states that 45% of all global wealth is held by 0.8% of the world population.

3

‘Economic elites and organized groups representing business interests have substantial independent impacts on U.S. government policy, while mass-based interest groups and average citizens have little or no independent influence’ (Gilens and Page2014: 565).

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cases, the whole of political life is compromised by economic inequality; not only is this inequality undemocratic, it is also, in an Aristotelian sense, anti-political.

Political scientist Gordon Arlen, following Aristotle, calls this condition‘oligarchic harm’ (Arlen2017). And we hasten to add that this political harm is not to be equated with the harm caused by poverty, which poses different kinds of problems. Because of technolo-gical progress, it would be possible to eliminate absolute poverty in the world today without eliminating or even without putting a significant dent in our condition of general inequality.4Nor would it necessarily harm oligarchic interests. From both a classic Marxist and a Keynesian perspective, the oligarchs need fit employees and freely spending customers, whosefitness to work and freedom to spend require a good level of income. The globalised economy of the past few decades has increased the flow of income to workers and consumers in many parts of the Global South. And so in much of the world absolute poverty has in fact decreased over the last twenty years. But it also appears to be in the interest of oligarchs today– or in other words, the interest of a global capitalist system controlled for the sake of the 1%– to perpetuate relative poverty, which is to say to perpetuate relatively poor wages and a relatively poor concentration of wealth among the many. And to accomplish this feat of perpetuating inequality without perpetuating absolute poverty, the capitalist system has exacted a ‘price’ of society, as economist Joseph Stiglitz puts it: a forfeit of the rule of law, such that the system of‘justice for all’ is being replaced by a system of‘justice for those who can afford it’ (Stiglitz2012: 258).5 He might have added that a price has also been paid by a forfeit of freedoms, from freedom of speech to freedom of movement. The rich can buy political speech, and, unlike the rest of us, they can go anywhere they want with the money that pays for going anywhere they want.

There is, of course, plenty of evidence that the growth in inequality in the developed world is having adverse effects on a large number of people in an absolute sense. Stagnating wages, rising personal debt, deteriorating health outcomes, systemic harass-ment by law enforceharass-ment officials, rising levels of drug abuse, deteriorating public services, including access to education – all such depredations are well documented, again particularly in the United States and the United Kingdom. Three centuries after equality before the law was established in principle in the United States and France– however incompletely, since women, slaves and their descendants and minority groups were disenfranchised for so long– the new inequality brings back and strengthens what Rousseau called privilege for the few and misery for the many. Systemically speaking, we may now be in a condition not only of a rebound from the Great Compression of inequalities mentioned by Piketty but in an era of what Saskia Sassen (2014) calls great ‘expulsions’, a rupture from the past dynamics of capitalism that leads to the systematic exclusion of masses from power and relative prosperity.

4

On eliminating poverty see Sachs2005and Banarjee and Duflo2011.

5In addition to these general exclusionary effects on the democratic process and the rule of law, authors such as Katherina

Pistor (2019) have recently drawn attention to the ways in which economic inequalities are entrenched by capitalism through the increasingly arcane practices of legal coding that accompany the contemporary expansion of capital rights. Traditional mechanisms of state intervention and wealth redistribution through taxation are often found to be powerless in the face of these insidious operations. As Pistor observes,‘many states have realised [that] the power of the tax sword has been blunted by sophisticated legal coding strategies that can hide assets from their reach. Even more generally, promoting the interests of capitalfirst and foremost boosts private, not necessarily national, wealth and thereby fosters inequality’ (2019: 20–21).

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Where, then, are literature and literary studies in the midst of this exasperating situation? What are literature and literary studies doing about it? Or, what ought they do about it? Is economic inequality even a problem that literature and literary studies have been designed to redress? Or are the two institutions not infrequently complicit with it? These were questions that perplexed us, one of us a specialist in British working-class fiction, the other a specialist in Renaissance Studies, with a foot in the door of contem-porary cultural studies. To find some answers to these questions we convened a conference in Uppsala in 2017, summoning researchers from the United States and Europe, in answer to the question,‘Is economic inequality also a literary problem?’

Back in 2006, Walter Benn Michaels of the University of Illinois-Chicago, who attended our conference, published The Trouble with Diversity: How We Learned to Love Identity and Ignore Inequality. He argued that modern liberalism, whether of the left, centre, or right, has learned to be comfortable with inequalities of wealth, and used the concept of ‘diversity’ as a way to disguise that comfort. Michaels was most scathing about his fellow liberals of the left.‘The answer to the question, “Why do American liberals carry on about racism and sexism when they should be carrying on about capitalism?”, is pretty obvious: they carry on about racism and sexism in order to avoid doing so about capitalism’ (Michaels 2008: 36). Without even beginning to suggest that the injuries suffered by minorities, women, and others subjected to discrimination were not real, and should not be redressed, Michaels argued that the fundamental problem of life in the West today, or at least in America, is economic.

But what does this have to do with literature and literary studies? The problem, if what is at stake here is what can legitimately be called a‘problem’, would seem to be a job for economists and social thinkers, including philosophers and sociologists, not to mention political activists and social organisers. Is it not the case that literary artists are merely interpreters of the world around them, and literary critics are mainly interpreters of their interpretations? If the point, as Marx once said, is not to interpret the world but to change it– if, that is, there is a gulf between interpretive and practical arts that is insuperable by the act of interpretation itself– then literature and literary studies, however germane in other ways, would seem to have little to offer in the face of the Great Expulsion.

We may recall, however, that among groups like the Romantics literature was not merely interpretive. As M.H. Abrams long ago argued, though from an apolitical perspec-tive, for the Romantics literature could be not just a mirror of the world, but also a lamp showing the way to new ones (Abrams1953). Many writers in subsequent movements have toyed with the idea as well– and Abrams might well have given credit to earlier literary movements. The satires of Cervantes and Swift, or for that matter of Aristophanes and Lucian, provide models where imaginative writing was aimed as much towards illuminating as reflecting. For Samuel Johnson and Voltaire, to give two great eighteenth-century examples, the task of literature and literary appreciation was to countenance ways of being in the world– and of course, ways of not being. ‘To please and to teach’, those Horatian watchwords concerning the task of literature, were the imperatives governing a good deal of literary production in the Age of the Enlightenment. And after the Romantics (as Abrams might have agreed) the Industrial Revolution provoked the development of the social novel, where the task of the novelist was understood not only to illuminate the dark matter of social life but also to advocate for changing it for the better.

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A view of literature as simply a body of interpretations is surely inadequate. But that is hardly a controversial position, whether from a political or an aesthetic point of view. The question, though, is whether literature and literary study are implicated in economic inequality, or otherwise disposed towards critiquing and changing it. And the question is whether literature and literary study at this current juncture can play roles of illumination, critique and transformation, given the dominance of economic inequality as a feature of life today and given the limitations of the institutions of literary production and literary study. Literary production is a commercial enterprise, and its successes and failures are tallied in the marketplace, the same marketplace where oligarchy and relative poverty are roiled into being. Literary study, by contrast, is a non-commercial enterprise, primarily, but for that very reason it is beleaguered as a practice today, as student numbers drop in higher education in the humanities and as academic positions in literary study drop along with them, the profession being increasingly subject to what is often called‘adjunctification’. One critic, himself an adjunct, calls the system of contingent employment so widespread in the humanities today, as well as in many other disciplines,‘a form of labour-market polarization’ (Birmingham 2018). In such circumstances, professional literary study in the university is not only implicit in the current system of inequality but also complicit with its reproduction. Whether in the case of literary production or the case of literary study, we seem tofind ourselves in a system that is consistent with economic inequality.

The character of our present juncture is subject to dispute, of course, and not all of our contributors understand and respond to it in the same way. For some, even our con-ference, which included professors who perhaps occupy the top 20% of income recipi-ents, was complicit with the dominance of inequality, whereas for others it represented a promising beginning, where literature and literary study could challenge the status quo. But all contributors seemed to agree that in order to come to terms with the relation between literature and economic inequality the critic needs to target the phenomenon that Rousseau called‘consent’ and that later came to be known, via the prison notebooks of Antonio Gramsci, as ‘hegemony’. We consent to inequality, according to Rousseau, because of a combination of necessity, self-interest and blindness. If only we knew enough, if only we saw our current situation for what it is, and if only (but how?) we could escape the hold that immediate necessity and self-interest exerts upon us, we might break the chains that bind us.

‘Give me some light!’ cries King Claudius in Hamlet. And so too our contributors can be seen to be looking for light, and therefore looking at literary texts and practices that challenged the hegemony of capitalist inequality. Thus contributor Sonia Arribas, looks at the literary output of the anarchist Peter Kropotkin (1842–1921) and considers what it means for literature to harness the power of eloquence and imagination in the service of revolution. Jodie Childers provides a study of The New Masses, an American literary journal which, in the 1920s, challenged the poetics of high modernism and espoused an overtly proletarian aesthetic. For his part, Magnus Nilsson offers a Marxist reading of the working-class literary tradition in Sweden, focusing on a number of contemporaryfictional exam-ples. Sarah Bernstein examines the vexed political landscape of Thatcher’s Britain and the promise of an oppositional‘commons’ in Doris Lessing’s novel The Good Terrorist. Kathleen Starck brings us nearly up-to-date, discussing Alexander Zeldin’s play Love, performed in London in 2016, which presents the plight of London’s poor today in a context of brutal austerity and growing social uncertainty. Heinz Wessler contribution that leads off our

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collection, enlarges the picture by bringing his analysis to contemporary India and the emergence of a tradition of Dalit writing. In India, economic inequality has for centuries been coupled with status inequality; the situation has improved for many hailing from ‘untouchable’ families, but the differences continue. In Wessler’s analysis, Dalit literature, which is becoming more and more mainstream in India, has been a tool for breaking down caste barriers. Finally, Melissa Kennedy asks literary artists and scholars to seriously consider what popular economists can offer today by way of radical imaginaries of an effective alternative to neoliberal capitalism.

The essays here cover literature and literary practice over a period of about 120 years, in North America, Europe and India. Surely that is only the beginning. But we hope our readers willfind the essays illuminating. The essays are politically engaged, responding to texts that are politically engaged. In some of them, we find a new genre of criticism emerging: criticism of literature that is also in dialogue with contemporary journalism and other contemporary non-literary forms of expression. Thanks to the Internet, critics can now access public debate, taking place outside the immediate world of literary study, with an ease that was unthinkable before. Some of the essays celebrate little known achievements: Kropotkin as a literary artist, The New Masses as a vehicle of literary dissidence, Swedish working-class writing, Dalit writing in India. Others have had to read both with and against the grain of the texts they respond to. Though Nobel Laureate Doris Lessing had early in her life been affiliated with the Communist Party, by the 1980s she was a critic of contemporary Marxism. But that did not mean that she could not brilliantly dissect the injustices of her age, or charm us with the dream of a common life that has been such an inspiration to dissident literary artists. Plays like Zeldin’s Love, in the meantime, show us how vital dissident drama can be even in the belly of the beast, which is to say modern London: for there, in the midst of the greatest city of Europe (in size and wealth) is also precisely the poverty and the indignity that the Conservative government has rained upon its own people in the name of wealth for the few and austerity for the many. And there too are voices agitating against the government,finding a platform in London’s greatest artistic institution, the theatre.

Only a start– but we have to start somewhere. By way of conclusion, we may assert an injunction, following Melissa Kennedy, to both literary artists and literary critics. Read up on economics. Engage yourselves economically, which is to say, politically. We have nothing to lose, etc. And if you don’t know what our ‘etc.’ alludes to, you are part of the problem, not the solution.

Acknowledgment

Roberto del Valle Alcalá wishes to acknowledge the support of the Swedish Research Council through project # 2015-01746.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Funding

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ORCID

Robert Appelbaum http://orcid.org/0000-0002-8370-1851

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References

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