The political economy of gambling in a neocolonial economy

Conclusion

This study has attempted to show the entrenched character of parasitic capitalism in the form of gambling in the Jamaican economy on a scale that massively but painlessly redistributes income from the working class to the petite bourgeoisie. It speaks to a dimension of class exploitation that is often ignored in the focus on large multinational corporations and has parallels in the parasitic forms of capitalism that exploit the black community in the United States. Parasitic capitalism is seen as promoting a form of false class consciousness that seeks outlets to class frustrations in precapitalist illusions of luck and chance that feed the coffers of the grasping petite bourgeoisie with hard-earned working class wage incomes. The data and findings point clearly to the need to either eliminate parasitic capitalist activities such as gambling or alternatively remove it from the control of the petite bourgeoisie and convert the capital accumulated to community and mass-oriented development and social projects.