for - from - MSN article - How a poor boy from Scotland became the richest man on Earth - The life of Andrew Carnegie - Daniel Coughlin - essay - The Gospel of Wealth - Andrew Carnegie - philanthropy adjacency - Carnegie - The Gospel of Wealth - Anthropocene - critique

summary - It is interesting to read this article from the perspectives of a commons activist - The link to the MSN article that led me to Carnegie's essay is below and it provides a good summary of his life. - He came from a very challenging life of poverty, growing up in a family and in circumstances where they were constantly struggling to make ends meet - His is the story of the deep imprint of poverty providing him with motivation to escape it - Having risen to become the world's richest man, and then giving his fortune away due to the deep imprint of poverty experienced in childhood, - he formed an opinion on inequality and capitalist material production that was borne out of his experience as a successful entrepreneur and the contrast of quality of life between: - a pre-industralized society in which he was familiar from childhood experiences and - the profound material improvements accessible to all due to mass production that he helped to pioneer - In the essay, he sees the inequality found in society to be the price that needed to be paid for everyone to have access to a higher standard of living - This is where critical analysis from a modern post-Marxist, post-Capitalist perspective might provide an interesting critique, - especially from the anthropocene perspective, where the epitome of the system Carnegie praised has led to a state of environmental destruction so vast that Carnegie could never have foreseen it - A question: would Carnegie have written his essay differently were he alive to witness the environmental destruction of the Anthropocene?

from - MSN article - How a poor boy from Scotland became the richest man on Earth - The life of Andrew Carnegie - Daniel Coughlin - https://hyp.is/urXCfo1hEe-OdSMr4kqwyg/www.lovemoney.com/news/135656/the-astonishing-rags-to-riches-story-of-andrew-carnegie