26 June 2019 — theplanningmotive.com
This thesis is about measuring intangible and creative labours.
Tag: capital
Problems of Value Production (1) By S. Artesian
5 December 2018 — The Wolf Report: Nonconfidential analysis for the anti-investor
The intensity of production
Competition, according to an American economist, determines how many days of simple labor are contained in one day’s compound labor. Does not this reduction of days of compound labor to days of simple labor suppose that simple labor is itself taken as a measure of value? If the mere quantity of labor functions as a measure of value regardless of quality, it presupposes that simple labor has become the pivot of industry. It presupposes that labor has been equalized by the subordination of man to the machine or by the extreme division of labor; that men are effaced by their labor; that the pendulum of the clock has become as accurate a measure of the relative activity of two workers as it is of the speed of two locomotives. Therefore, we should not say that one man’s hour is worth another man’s hour, but rather that one man during an hour is worth just as much as another man during an hour. Time is everything, man is nothing; he is, at the most, time’s carcase.
Quality no longer matters. Quantity alone decides everything; hour for hour, day for day;
Marx – The Poverty of Philosophy
Video: The 1% and Piketty
30 April 2014— The Real News Network
Welcome to The Real News Network. I’m Jessica Desvarieux in Baltimore. And welcome to this edition of The Hudson Report. Now joining us is Michael Hudson. Michael is a distinguished research professor of economics at the University of Missouri-Kansas City. His two newest books are The Bubble and Beyond and Finance Capitalism and Its Discontents. Continue reading
The Middle East: State and revolution By Maged Mandour
13 February 2014 — openDemocracy
The Arab world, after analyzing the nature of states in the Middle East, needs to find its own indigenous path to democracy, based on its own unique historical, and societal conditions.
'Left reformism' and socialist strategy By Ed Rooksby
7 October 2013 — International Socialism
There has been a significant revival of interest among the radical left in “big picture” questions of socialist strategy that, as Mark L. Thomas has pointed out, represents a return to “important debates of the left largely absent over the last three decades”.1
Shock Doctrine' Americana: Endless War as the Ultimate Business Model By William Astore
22 October 2013 — TomDispatch
Disaster Capitalism on the battlefield and in the boardroom
People’s Inquiry – a grassroots vision for our NHS? By John Lister
14 October 2013 — Our NHS
As the NHS groans under cuts and chaotic reorganisation, government bodies are calling for yet more ‘radical change‘ and ‘difficult decisions’. Will their answers be hospital closures and privatisations? The new People’s Inquiry is calling for evidence to support a different way forward.
Contested Reproduction and the Contradictions of Socialism By Michael A. Lebowitz
13 September 2013 — The Bullet • Socialist Project E-Bulletin No. 877
Some Explanations About the Fall of ‘Real Socialism’
Why did ‘real socialism’ and, in particular the Soviet Union, fall? Let me note a few explanations that have been offered. With respect to the Soviet Union, one very interesting explanation that has been suggested is that it’s all the fault of Mikhail Gorbachev. And not simply the errors of Gorbachev but the treachery. Those who offer this explanation rely in particular upon a document which is sometimes described as his confession. This document begins as follows:
The Full Story on Why Obama Backed Down on Syria By: Ibrahim al-Amin
2 September 2013 — Al-Akhbar
Commentators in the West will surely declare that it was their democratic systems of government that forced US President Barack Obama to back down on attacking Syria. But the events that led up to Washington’s de-escalation suggest there were other factors at play.
Housmans Books Newsletter September 2013
3 September 2013 — Housmans
NEWS
1. Housmans New Online Shop – In Affiliation With Hive
2. Peace News fundraiser: “Come Out! We Have You Surrounded!”
3. The Cally Festival, Sunday 8th September 12-6pm
Video: The Impact of Robots: Abundance and the Need for Radical Structural Reform
1 September 2013 — Solidarity Economy
Marx anticipated the problem as capitalism’s systemic crisis, the growth in the ‘organic composition of capital’ (machines) in an inverse relation to ‘living labor’ (jobs). The way out, in the shorter run, is a social wage combined with shorter hours, and in the longer run, socialism on the path to a classless society. McAfee here sees the problem, if not the full solution. – Carl Davidson
Preoccupying: an interview with David Harvey
16 August 2013 — Our Kingdom – Occupied Times
David Harvey highlights the importance of challenging the state and addresses the everchanging ideal of the city and the social groups that sustain and contest it.
Creating a Situation that Does Not Yet Exist
15 August 2013 — The Bullet • Socialist Project • E-Bulletin No. 864
For some two decades, the anti-globalization movement and its successors have assumed that society contains within itself – and automatically throws up – political oppositions and organizational forms independent of capital and of the state. There is simply the need to encourage the cumulative growth of society’s own potentialities for forming alternatives apart from the state and apart from the terrain of politics. Politics is not about the contesting directly, never mind conquering, political power. Instead, politics is viewed as the evolutionary and ‘progressive emptying out of the power of capital and of the state.’ Social coalitions, social forums, networks, and localist alternatives – with an associated range of one-off tactical actions – became the outer limit of organizational agendas.
France’s New Anti-capitalist Party seeks to cover up its support for Middle East wars By Alex Lantier
13 August 2013 — WSWS
In an attempt to salvage what little remains of his “socialist” credentials, Professor Gilbert Achcar, a longtime associate of France’s New Anti-capitalist Party (NPA), has written an essay entitled “Inventive Illiteracy Amidst Petty Sectarianism.”
SYRIZA: The Great Social and Political Movement of Subversion
7 August 2013 — The B u l l e t • Socialist Project • E-Bulletin No. 860
Political Resolution, First Congress of SYRIZA
1 The Conference of the Coalition of the Radical Left (SYRIZA) is a continuity and a breakthrough in its course, which started in 2000, continued with its official founding in 2004, and was sealed when it took on the historic responsibility to deliver the Greek people from the catastrophic neoliberal memoranda policies that have turned our country into a debt colony and led its creative, social, and productive forces to marginalization.
A Socialist Programme for London? By Carl Rowlands
30 July 2013 — New Left Project
It is easily forgotten that the 1980s were nearly not the 1980s at all, politically speaking. At the decade’s outset, an aggressively organised, ideologically diverse Left insurgency was the ascendent force in a Labour Party hovering around 50% in opinion polls, as the British public recoiled from the initial, monetarist-brutalist phase of Thatcherism.
Book Review: One Eye on the Red Horizon – The Condition of Communism By Joseph G. Ramsey
22 July 2013 — Dissident Voice
The eye-grabbing cover of Jodi Dean’s The Communist Horizon (Verso, 2012) depicts what could be the dawn of a new day. A red sun, half in view, arcs across the volume’s bottom edge. From this solid red spot, dozens of thin but widening beams fan out; crossing the background, the sunlight splits the sky itself into stripes of red and white.
Class Warfare in Egypt By By SEAN F. McMAHON
10 July 2013 — Greanville Post
State Capital Wins Again
Cairo – Egypt is at war. More accurately, Egypt is experiencing yet another battle in its ongoing class war. The battle is so fierce because the primary combatants are the two most powerful social forces in Egypt, both factions of the capitalist class – the military as the state capitalist class and the Ikhwan (the Muslim Brotherhood) representing the competitive capitalist class.
The Snowden Affair and the Destruction of Effective Democracy in Europe By Diana Johnstone
6 July 2013 — The Greanville Post
The Snowden affair has revealed even more about Europe than about the United States.
Certainly, the facts of NSA spying are significant. But many people suspected that something of the sort was going on. The refusal of France, Italy and Portugal to allow the private aircraft of the President of Bolivia to cross their airspace on the mere suspicion that Edward Snowden might be aboard is rather more astonishing.
Mandela's Democracy by Andrew Nash
April 1999 – Monthly Review Volume 50, Number 11
[I first read this essay back when I was living in South Africa and what with all the fuss over the Old Man, I remembered this essay and how it helped explain the contradictions of Mandela, the ‘peacemaker’ indeed, what made him a peacemaker and its limits. does or did teach Political Studies at the University of the Western Cape, South Africa. WB]
The New Dark Age 