Trickle-Down Economics

Question 1

Neoliberalism Would Lead to Trickle-Down Economics
MPWMR

Answer 1

Neoliberalism only frees mechanisms of Capitalism
Marx
Polanyi
Wolf
Mintz
Ross

Question 2

Marx - SESON

Answer 2

• SURPLUS Extraction
• Capitalists EXTRACT profit by paying workers less than the value they produce; this structural exploitation ensures that economic growth under capitalism inherently concentrates wealth at the top, rather than redistributing it downward.
• The working class is SYSTEMATICALLY denied the full fruits of their labor.
• OXYMORONIC - fundamentally mutually exclusive = a system built off devaluing the value of worker’s labour cannot benefit them
• NEOLIBERALISM exarcerbates this tendency, removing any checks and balances that impede this central, centralising process; growth benefits capitalists, not labourers.

Question 3

Marx Case Studies - English - BEF NLD

Answer 3

• Early industrial BRITAIN, which Marx used as his empirical foundation in Capital, the dramatic rise in productivity and GDP during the Industrial Revolution did not lead to widespread prosperity.
• Instead, it generated an era of extreme EXPLOITATION: dire working and living conditions for labourers — child labour, slums, disease, and unregulated factory regimes
• Entire FAMILIES lived in overcrowded, unsanitary slums; child labour was rampant, and workplace accidents were common.
• The money that does trickle down is only meant to NULLIFY the desire to revolt, while the key mechanism of capitalist accumulation is extracting surplus value from the labourer while minimising costs.
• Small segment of the working class in Britain - “LABOUR aristocracy” - had benefited modestly from imperialism and industrial expansion: earned relatively higher wages and enjoyed better conditions than the mass of workers
• DIVIDED the working class, fostering loyalty to the system and reducing the desire to revolt.

Question 4

Karl Polanyi - PCN

Answer 4

Disembedding Economy
- PRE-capitalist societies embedded economic life within social relations; markets were subordinated to moral, communal norms - governed by reciprocity, redistribution, and subsistence, not market profit.
- CAPITALISM’S rise disembedded the economy from society, making markets “self-regulating” at the cost of human security and stability, ultimately only accountable to the ‘invisible hand’.
- NEOLIBERAL policies take this even further, completely detaching the economic system from the communitarian needs.

Question 5

Polanyi Case Studies - EF

Answer 5

• In The Great Transformation, Karl Polanyi shows how the rise of capitalist markets in 19th-century Britain required the violent disembedding of the economy from society, most starkly seen in the ENCLOSURE Acts, which privatised common lands and dispossessed rural communities.
• This FORCED people into wage labour, breaking traditional forms of subsistence and mutual support, and subordinated livelihoods to the logic of the self-regulating market—leading to poverty, instability, and widespread social dislocation.

Question 6

Eric Wolf - G

Answer 6

• Capitalist Growth Built on GLOBAL Exploitation = always relied on forcibly integrating non-European societies into unequal systems.
• From the start, growth has been unequal — those “without history” were not helped by growth, but consumed by it.

Question 7

Wolf Case Study - PSM FPPE

Answer 7

• Europe and the People Without History: The POTOSI silver mines in present-day Bolivia exemplify how early capitalism depended on the violent incorporation of non-European labor and resources into a global system that generated immense wealth for European powers while entrenching poverty and exploitation in the periphery.
• Discovered in the 16th century, Potosí became one of the richest SOURCES of silver for the Spanish Empire, fuelling European mercantile and later capitalist expansion.
• This wealth was extracted under the brutal MITA system, where indigenous Andean communities were required to provide a certain number of labourers for public works projects and mining operations.
• The silver FUNDED imperial wars and European consumption, but the source populations were decimated — socially, demographically, and economically.
• The wealth enabling industrial capitalism was built on the backs of “PEOPLE without history” - colonised peoples who were rendered invisible in dominant histories
• Value created in the PERIPHERY did not enrich local workers or economies but was siphoned to metropolitan centers, reinforcing a global hierarchy of accumulation.
• Rather than producing shared prosperity, the integration of Potosí into the world economy illustrates how capitalist systems structurally marginalise the very populations they rely on, a pattern that is EXACERBATED under neoliberal globalisation.

Question 8

Sidney Mintz Case Study - SDR

Answer 8

• In Sweetness and Power (1985), Sidney Mintz traces how SUGAR became a mass consumer good in Britain by the 19th century, made possible through the brutal plantation economies of the Caribbean, where enslaved Africans laboured under extreme violence to produce cheap commodities.
• This link between DISTANT production zones and metropolitan consumption reveals how capitalist growth was predicated on systemic exploitation, not shared prosperity.
• This REINFORCED poverty, racialised labour hierarchies, and economic dependency in the periphery, while the wealth generated by colonial commodity chains enriched consumers and industrial capitalists in the core — a historical pattern that allows neoliberal globalisation to run riot with.

Question 9

Kristin Ross - P

Answer 9

• Imagining Redistribution Without Growth — the PARIS Commune.
  Ross helps us see that inequality isn’t inevitable — other models have existed, and can exist again.

Question 10

Ross Case Studies - CLSRC

Answer 10

• COLLECTIVE ownership and labour democracy: The Commune abolished wage hierarchies in government and some workplaces, replacing them with elected and recallable positions paid no more than workers’ wages.
• LABOUR was reorganised through worker cooperatives and federations, rejecting top-down capitalist management in favor of democratic self-organisation.
• SOCIAL and educational reform: The Commune launched free, secular education and promoted the integration of manual and intellectual labour, including proposals for polytechnic schools to merge technical training with artistic and civic engagement—challenging class and gender divisions entrenched by the bourgeois state.
• RECLAIMING urban space and public life: Churches and aristocratic homes were repurposed for public use; art, printing presses, and community theaters were mobilised for collective expression.
• Ross highlights this as an effort to reclaim “COMMUNAL luxury”—not material opulence, but shared access to beauty, creativity, and meaningful participation in urban life beyond profit motives.