Tag: Marx

MMT, Marglin and Marx

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Friday, 11 February 2022 – Michael Roberts Blog

By Michael Roberts

Let me start this post by quoting Noah Smith, liberal economist and Bloomberg journalist from his blog on Modern Monetary Theory (MMT): “The New York Times (NYT) just came out with a big glowing writeup of MMT, entitled “Time for a Victory Lap*”. This article aroused the anger of just about every macroeconomist on Twitter, and with good reason — it demonstrates very little understanding of the issues at play or the state of the policy debate, and it rhetorically elevates a fringe ideology to a position of importance and centrality that it neither occupies nor deserves.  The NYT article on MMT, written by Jeanna Smialek, is mostly a puff piece about Stephanie Kelton, MMT’s most well-known proponent. In glowing tones, it describes Kelton’s clothes, her office, her house, her neighborhood, her blog, her manner of speaking, her personal story, and so on, calling her “the star architect of a movement that is on something of a victory lap”. Very little is written about the background of the macroeconomic policy debate, and what does appear is highly questionable.”

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Inflation and financial risk

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9 May 2021 — Michael Roberts Blog

Is inflation coming back in the major capitalist economies?  As the US economy (in particular) and other major economies begin to rebound from the COVID slump of 2020, the talk among mainstream economists is whether inflation in the prices for goods and services in those economies is going to accelerate to the point where central banks have to tighten monetary policy (ie stop injecting credit into the banking system and raise interest rates).  And if that were to happen, would it cause a collapse in the stock and bond markets and bankruptcies for many weaker companies as the cost of servicing corporate debt rises?

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The Ideology of Late Imperialism

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1 March 2021 — Monthly Review

The Return of the Geopolitics of the Second International

Stuttgart Congress of the Second International 1907

Stuttgart Congress of the Second International, 1907.

In 1990, when renowned Indian Marxian economist Prabhat Patnaik asked “Whatever Happened to Imperialism?,” once vibrant and influential schools of theories on imperialism were at a postwar historic low.1 When he left the West to return to India in 1974, imperialism was at the center of all Marxist discussions. But when he came back to the West merely fifteen years later, imperialism already seemed out of fashion. After all, the end of the Soviet Union and liberals’ declaration of the end of history were near.

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Breaking the glass screen – framing monopoly capitalism in global commodity chains

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6 January 2021 — Monsoon Storms

PROLOGUE

In 2007 – a digital time not spatially long ago – a month before the iPhone was production scheduled, the late Steven Jobs took some of his staff to an office. He had been carrying a prototype of the device in his pocket daily for weeks.

Mr. Jobs angrily held up his iPhone so that everyone could see the dozens of tiny scratches marring its plastic screen. He then pulled his keys from his jeans.

People will carry this phone in their pocket, he was quoted to say.
“I won’t sell a product that gets scratched,” he said tensely.

The only solution was to use unscratchable glass instead.

“I want a glass screen, and I want it perfect in six weeks.”

(Duhigg, C and Bradsher, K. “How the U.S. Lost Out on iPhone Work“, The New York Times, published January 21st., 2012).

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Marx Didn’t Invent Socialism, Nor Did He Discover It

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9 December 2020 — Internationalist 360°

Steve Lalla

https://libya360.files.wordpress.com/2020/12/31cd2-1cu8zmelqf3xeiu9iavpxnw.jpeg

Revered as the Father of Socialism, in popular conception Karl Marx (1818–1883) is the originator of socialist theory, the creator of a plan implemented thereafter by the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics and other socialist nations. He remains one of the most cited authors of all time, and his writings are endlessly scrutinized and analyzed. Was he standing on the shoulders of giants?

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Engels’ pause and the condition of the working class in England

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15 March 2020 — Michael Roberts Blog

by michael roberts

On this day, 15 March 1845, Friedrich Engels published his masterpiece of social analysis, The Condition of the Working Class in England.  This year is the 200th anniversary of Engels’ birth.  Below is a short (rough) extract from my upcoming book on the contribution that Engels made to Marxian political economy.  

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Marxism and the Climate Crisis: African Eco-Socialist Alternatives

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16 February, 2020 — MROnline

Originally published: ROAPE (Review of African Political Economy) by Vishwas Satgar (February 14, 2020)   |

Introducing an important book series on Democratic Marxism in Africa, Vishwas Satgar explains that the project is premised on a rejection of the authoritarianism of vanguardist politics and the need to learn critical lessons from all the left projects of the 20th century. There is a rich inheritance of emancipatory Marxism in Africa, which includes Frantz Fanon, Ruth First, Samir Amin, Sam Moyo, Harold Wolpe and many others. Today, Satgar argues, the challenge is to defeat carbon capitalism accelerating the climate crisis and fomenting exclusionary nationalisms and for this there has to be a return to Marx.

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A Certain Stage of Development

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13 January 2020 — Anticapital

1. At a certain stage of development, the material productive forces of society come into conflict with the existing relations of production, or–this merely expresses the same thing in legal terms–with the property relations within the framework of which they have operated hitherto.  From forms of development of the productive forces, these relations turn into their fetter.  Then begins an era of social revolution.

And the era of social counterrevolution.

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Marx’s notebooks and the origins of Marxist ecology

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18 August 2019 — Climate & Capitalism

Finally published in full, Marx’s notebooks from the 1860s provide important insights into his views on ecology and capital’s destruction of nature.

Teinosuke Otani, Kohei Saito, Timm Graßmann (eds)
MARX-ENGELS-GESAMTAUSGABE, IV, 18
Exzerpte und Notizen. Februar 1864 bis August 1868 (de Gruyter, 2019)

[Marx-Engels Complete Works, Part IV, Volume 18
Excerpts and Notes, February 1864 to August 1868]

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The Handbook of Karl Marx: profitability, crises and financialisation

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6 August 2019 — Michael Roberts Blog

The Oxford Handbook of Karl Marx, edited by Matt Vidal, Tomas Rotta, Tony Smith and Paul Prew, brings together a series of chapters by prominent Marxist scholars covering all aspects Marxist theory, from historical materialism, dialectics, political economy, social reproduction and post-capitalist models.

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Could this be the most Marxist film ever made?

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14 May 2019 — MROnline – The Public Autonomy Project by Steve Darcy (May 8, 2019)

Boots Riley’s masterpiece of socialist cinema — Sorry to Bother You — may be the most self-consciously marxist film ever made. It is an exhortation to rebel, but to do so with our eyes open, with ‘sober senses,’ so we don’t replicate uncritically the logics that we aspire to contest.

[Note: this contains some plot spoilers.]

Those who avoided reading Karl Marx’s three-volume, 2,500 page magnum opus, Capital, in the improbable expectation that someday a movie version would come out, have finally got their wish. Boots Riley’s film, Sorry to Bother You, may indeed be the most marxist film ever made.

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Invisible Leviathan – Marx’s law of value in the twilight of capitalism By michael roberts

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6 April 2019 — Michael Roberts Blog

My foreword to Invisible Leviathan, by Professor Murray Smith of Brock University, Ontario, Canada, published by Brill in November 2018.   Relevant, I think, to my recent presentation on the contribution of Marx to economics made at the Rethinking Economics conference at Greenwich University, London.

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Climate and contradiction in Marx’s theory of history by Matt Huber

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11 February 2019 — GreenLeft – Marxist Sociology Blog
Climate change is often seen as a “new” kind of crisis of capitalism – one that throws into question the standard Marxist analysis as having a blind spot with respect to nature. This has led to a whole host of intellectual efforts to “green” Marxism, or to argue an ecological Marxism must go beyond class to incorporate the “new” social movement of environmentalism.

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Problems of Value Production (1) By S. Artesian

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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

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‘Karl Marx’s Ecosocialism’ wins the 2018 Deutscher Prize

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25 November 2018 — Climate & Capitalism

Kohei Saito honored for his brilliant study of Marx’s views on the relationship between society and nature

I’m thrilled to report that Kohei Saito’s brilliant book, Karl Marx’s Ecosocialism: Capital, nature, and the unfinished critique of political economy, has won the 2018 Deutscher Memorial Prize. The prize, named for the great Marxist scholar and historian Isaac Deutscher, is awarded annually to “a book which exemplifies the best and most innovative new writing in or about the Marxist tradition.”

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The specter of Marx haunts the American ruling class By Barry Grey

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6 November 2018 — WSWS

White House report on socialism

Last month, the Council of Economic Advisers, an agency of the Trump White House, released an extraordinary report titled “The Opportunity Costs of Socialism.” The report begins with the statement: “Coincident with the 200th anniversary of Karl Marx’s birth, socialism is making a comeback in American political discourse. Detailed policy proposals from self-declared socialists are gaining support in Congress and among much of the younger electorate.”

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John Bellamy Foster answers five questions about Marxism and ecology

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27 March 2017 — Ecologize – Climate & Capitalism

Can Marxism strengthen our understanding of ecological crises? The author of Marx’s Ecology replies to a critic on metabolic rift, sustainable human development,  degrowth, population growth, and industrialism. 

Introduction: The Indian website Ecologize recently published John Bellamy Foster’s Foreword to Ian Angus’s book Facing the Anthropocene. Commenting on Foster’s article, journalist and activist Saral Sarkar,  who describes his views as eco-socialist, raised questions that challenge the usefulness of Marxist analysis in understanding the global ecological crisis. Foster’s reply was posted by Ecologise on March 26.

The exchange, republished below, addresses important questions about Marxist perspectives on the global ecological crisis. C&C welcomes further discussion.

C&C has added paragraph breaks to both articles to improve on-screen readability.

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