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Articles by Sandwichman

Matt Huber’s and Leigh Phillips’s “classical Marxist critique” of Kohei Saito

9 days ago

I have expressed my disagreement with Kohei Saito’s Slow Down and Marx in the Anthropocene in previous posts. I welcome Huber’s and Phillips’s critique of Saito at Jacobin. They get much right in their criticism of Saito’s Utopianism and implicit primitivism but they share with Saito a fundamental misreading of Marx. This misreading is based on a speculative interpretation of a stirring but ambiguous passage in Marx’s Preface to his 1859 Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy:In the social production of their existence, men inevitably enter into definite relations, which are independent of their will, namely relations of production appropriate to a given stage in the development of their material forces of production. The totality of these relations of production constitutes

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Labour power as a common-pool resource

11 days ago

Labour power as a common-pool resource: in memory of Paul Burkett

Human mental and physical capacities to work have elastic but definite natural limits. Those capacities must be continuously restored and enhanced through nourishment, rest, and social interaction. Over the longer term that capacity for labour also has to be replenished by a new generation of young people, reared by the previous generation.

It is this combination of definite limits and of the need for continuous recuperation and replacement that, according to Paul Burkett, gives labour-power the characteristics of a common-pool resource. As Burkett explained, Karl Marx also regarded labour power not merely as a marketable asset of private individuals but as a “reserve fund for the

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Lost in translation: Slow Down by Kohei Saito

January 2, 2024

Kohei Saito’s "manifesto" of degrowth communism was BIG in Japan, selling half a million copies in the first year and a half after publication. It’s debut in English is already tarnished, though, by a colossal, cringe-inducing Celsius to Fahrenheit conversion error that repeats throughout the book.The formula for converting Celsius to Fahrenheit is: multiply the Celsius temperature by 1.8 and add 32. The addition of 32 is to account for the fact that the freezing point of water is 0° in Celsius but 32° in Fahrenheit. However, when converting a temperature change, such as the IPCC’s upper limit of 1.5° C above preindustrial global annual mean temperature, one doesn’t add 32. In Slow Down, the 1.5°C limit is rendered as 34.7°F, suggesting that the IPCC thinks we would be O.K. with a global

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Is Redistribution the Solution?

December 9, 2023

Toward the end of a very interesting and worthwhile conversation about how right-wing “populism” co-opts righteous anger at established institutions, Vincent Bevins asked Naomi Klein how she would counter that co-optation. Her answer was to advocate a “real left that has a political program that is actually redistributive,” which sounds good until you realize that the capitalist economy is already massively redistributive so “redistributing the redistribution” would end up building a doppelganger of capitalism, to use Naomi Klein’s own term.

Throughout his mature critique of political economy work from the Grundrisse to Capital to his work with the First International, Marx consistently advocated shorter working time as the prerequisite for the

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Seeing the frowns on the jugglers and the clowns

December 5, 2023

It is a problem that has vexed and eluded Marxists — and tantalized critics of Marx — for a century and a half. If I am correct, Karl Marx had an intuition of the argument I am about to present but he couldn’t quite bring himself to articulate it. A bit over a century later, in "Proletariat and Middle Class in Marx: Hegelian Choreography and the Capitalist Dialectic." Martin Nicolaus almost got it or may have gotten it but couldn’t put it into words. The question is usually framed in terms of a New Middle Class, although the agglomeration isn’t a class, it isn’t in the middle, and it isn’t particularly new. For background on the debates about this so-called new middle class, see Val Burris’s 1986 review article, "The Discovery of the New Middle Class" in Theory and Society, Vol. 15, No.

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Growth below zero and the development of the productive forces

November 18, 2023

Was Karl Marx a “degrowth communist” as Kohei Saito claims in Marx in the Anthropocene? In a word, no. But the whole truth is even stranger and more wonderful than Kohei Saito’s oxymoron anachronism.André Gorz is credited with the first use of la décroissance (degrowth) in the context of modern criticism of the political imperative of economic growth. The occasion was a public forum held in Paris by Le Nouvel Observateur on June 13, 1972 to discuss the Club of Rome’s Limits to Growth report. Gorz’s remarks were largely a reply to a speech and interview given by European Commission President, Sicco Mansholt.In the interview, Mansholt had called for “growth below zero” and the end of wasteful and environmentally destructive consumer society. Gorz acknowledged the compatibility of Mansholt’s

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Risk, Ambiguity and Daniel Ellsberg

June 20, 2023

The death of Daniel Ellsberg on Friday reminded me of his contribution to economics and his influence on my own thinking. In 1987, I was at Cornell, beginning an abortive PhD candidacy. In one of my courses there was an assigned reading on decision theory by Leonard Savage. One of the footnotes referred to an article by “Daniel Ellsberg” and I naturally wondered if it was the same Daniel Ellsberg of Pentagon Papers fame. “Risk, Ambiguity and the Savage Axioms” was indeed by the same Daniel Ellsberg. It also happened that a copy of his PhD dissertation was available at the Catherwood ILR library, which I read eagerly.

Ellsbergian ambiguity is very similar to Keynesian uncertainty with the important distinction that Ellsberg performed experiments,

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The Unbearable Tightness of Peaking

February 5, 2023

– Sandwichman @ Econospeak

The Unbearable Tightness of Peaking

Sandwichman came across a fascinating and disconcerting new dissertation, titled “Carbon Purgatory: The Dysfunctional Political Economy of Oil During the Renewable Energy Transition” by Gabe Eckhouse. An adaptation of one of the chapters, dealing with fracking, was published in Geoforum in 2021

As some of you may know, the specter of Peak Oil was allegedly “vanquished” by the invention of methods for extracting “unconventional oil” from shale formations (or “tight oil”), bitumen sands, and deep ocean drilling. A large part of that story was artificially low interest rates in response to the stock market crash of 2008 and subsequent recession. 

What Eckhouse’s dissertation and

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The Unbearable Tightness of Peaking

February 1, 2023

Sandwichman came across a fascinating and disconcerting new dissertation, titled "Carbon Purgatory: The Dysfunctional Political Economy of Oil During the Renewable Energy Transition" by Gabe Eckhouse. An adaptation of one of the chapters, dealing with fracking, was published in Geoforum in 2021As some of you may know, the specter of Peak Oil was allegedly "vanquished" by the invention of methods for extracting "unconventional oil" from shale formations (or "tight oil"), bitumen sands, and deep ocean drilling. A large part of that story was artificially low interest rates in response to the stock market crash of 2008 and subsequent recession. What Eckhouse’s dissertation and article explain is the flexibility advantage that fracking provides because the investment required for a well is

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This Life: faith, work, and free time, part two

December 22, 2022

This Life: faith, work, and free time, part two

At the beginning of this year, I posted a response to Martin Hägglund’s This Life: Secular faith and spiritual freedom. In October I learned of a conference next May in Belgium at which Hägglund will be one of the keynote speakers. So I submitted an abstract to present a paper.

When it came time to start working on a draft for the conference, I remembered my blog post and it formed the core for the rest of the draft. In that earlier post, I wrote about Marx’s identification in the Grundrisse of the inversion between necessary labour time and superfluous labour time. During editing of a first draft of the conference presentation I took a break and went for a walk. There it struck me that the

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This Life: faith, work, and free time, part two

December 18, 2022

At the beginning of this year, I posted a response to Martin Hägglund’s This Life: Secular faith and spiritual freedom. In October I learned of a conference next May in Belgium at which Hägglund will be one of the keynote speakers. So I submitted an abstract to present a paper.When it came time to start working on a draft for the conference, I remembered my blog post and it formed the core for the rest of the draft. In that earlier post, I wrote about Marx’s identification in the Grundrisse of the inversion between necessary labour time and superfluous labour time. During editing of a first draft of the conference presentation I took a break and went for a walk. There it struck me that the inversion of necessary and superfluous labour time was a parallel to the inversion of this life and

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The Audition Commodity

November 17, 2022

The Audition Commodity

Richard Serra and Carlotta Fay Schoolman produced the video, “Television Delivers People” in 1973. It manifests a critique of television mass media that was subsequently defined by communications scholar, Dallas Smythe as the “audience commodity” but the outline of which had already been presented by him in 1951 in the Quarterly of Film, Radio and Television:

The troublesome fact is that under our uneasy institutional compromise by which the stations are publicly licensed and commercially operated, the effective, if not the legal, responsibility is divided. And the voice which speaks most often to the consumer is that of the advertiser. Is it any wonder that the consumer is confused and inarticulate in trying to

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The Audition Commodity

November 11, 2022

[embedded content]Richard Serra and Carlotta Fay Schoolman produced the video, "Television Delivers People" in 1973. It manifests a critique of television mass media that was subsequently defined by communications scholar, Dallas Smythe as the "audience commodity" but the outline of which had already been presented by him in 1951 in the Quarterly of Film, Radio and Television:The troublesome fact is that under our uneasy institutional compromise by which the stations are publicly licensed and commercially operated, the effective, if not the legal, responsibility is divided. And the voice which speaks most often to the consumer is that of the advertiser. Is it any wonder that the consumer is confused and inarticulate in trying to express his judgment as to how these media should conduct

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Happy 155th Birthday to volume one of Capital

September 16, 2022

Happy 155th Birthday to volume one of Capital!

In his 1965 farewell lecture at Brandeis University, Herbert Marcuse read a long passage from the Grundrisse’s “fragment on machines” and then observed: “But Marx himself has repressed this vision, which now appears as his most realistic, his most amazing insight!”

In Time, Labor and Social Domination, published 28 years later, Moishe Postone addressed the same section from the Grundrisse and commented:

These passages do not represent utopian visions that later were excluded from Marx’s more “sober” analysis in Capital but are a key to understanding that analysis; they provide the point of departure for a reinterpretation of the basic categories of Marx’ s mature critique that can overcome the

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Happy 155th Birthday to volume one of Capital!

September 14, 2022

In his 1965 farewell lecture at Brandeis University, Herbert Marcuse read a long passage from the Grundrisse’s "fragment on machines" and then observed: “But Marx himself has repressed this vision, which now appears as his most realistic, his most amazing insight!"In Time Labor and Social Domination, published 28 years later, Moishe Postone addressed the same section from the Grundrisse and commented:These passages do not represent utopian visions that later were excluded from Marx’s more "sober" analysis in Capital but are a key to understanding that analysis; they provide the point of departure for a reinterpretation of the basic categories of Marx’ s mature critique that can overcome the limits of the traditional Marxist paradigm.Who was right? Did Marx repress his most amazing insight

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Abraham Lincoln quoting Thomas Jefferson on judicial despotism and oligarchy

July 8, 2022

Abraham Lincoln quoting Thomas Jefferson on judicial despotism and oligarchy

At Springfield, Illinois, July 17, 1858

Now, as to the Dred Scott decision; for upon that he [Douglas] makes his last point at me. He boldly takes ground in favor of that decision.

This is one-half the onslaught, and one-third of the entire plan of the campaign. I am opposed to that decision in a certain sense, but not in the sense which he puts on it. I say that in so far as it decided in favor of Dred Scott’s master and against Dred Scott and his family, I do not propose to disturb or resist the decision.

I never have proposed to do any such thing. I think, that in respect for judicial authority, my humble history would not suffer in a comparison with that of

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Abraham Lincoln quoting Thomas Jefferson on judicial despotism and oligarchy

July 6, 2022

At Springfield, Illinois, July 17, 1858Now, as to the Dred Scott decision; for upon that he [Douglas] makes his last point at me. He boldly takes ground in favor of that decision.This is one-half the onslaught, and one-third of the entire plan of the campaign. I am opposed to that decision in a certain sense, but not in the sense which he puts on it. I say that in so far as it decided in favor of Dred Scott’s master and against Dred Scott and his family, I do not propose to disturb or resist the decision.I never have proposed to do any such thing. I think, that in respect for judicial authority, my humble history would not suffer in a comparison with that of Judge Douglas. He would have the citizen conform his vote to that decision; the Member of Congress, his; the President, his use of

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There is so little real friendship in the world!

June 1, 2022

On April 27 a bot began viewing one post on EconoSpeak every five minutes. It continued to do so until yesterday when I reverted the post to draft. That’s 288 fake views every day for a little over a month. Looking back at overall EconoSpeak traffic there are unexplained spikes that occur every two months or so. Tens of thousands of "views" suddenly appear out of the blue. There is so little real friendship in the world.

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The Cultural Marxism – Conservative Christian Consensus on America’s Culture of Violence

May 31, 2022

The Cultural Marxism – Conservative Christian Consensus on America’s Culture of Violence

Gun Culture and the American Nightmare of Violence by Henry Giroux, January 10, 2016:

Mass shootings have become routine in the United States and speak to a society that relies on violence to feed the coffers of the merchants of death. Given the profits made by arms manufacturers, the defense industry, gun dealers and the lobbyists who represent them in Congress, it comes as no surprise that the culture of violence cannot be abstracted from either the culture of business or the corruption of politics. Violence runs through US society like an electric current offering instant pleasure from all cultural sources, whether it be the nightly news or a television

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The “Red” Roots of the U.S. National Security State

May 31, 2022

During the time he was drafting collective bargaining legislation for the National Industrial Recovery Act in July 1933, Leon Keyserling wrote to his father: Under a capitalistic society, the same people who profited by the anarchy are likely to work most of the controls, and in the same stupidly selfish and self-destructive manner. Without revolution which transfers power to the workers and sets up a socialized state, little will be gained. But the establishment of controls and the centralization of authority make the revolution more likely, because the excesses of the capitalists will become so great and their abuses so violent that the reaction will be terrific.In February 1934, he wrote the following in a letter to his father:I am very much afraid that the country is recovering too

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An Army of All-American Paramilitary Death-Squad Soloists

May 30, 2022

An Army of All-American Paramilitary Death-Squad Soloists

In their 2014 Super Bowl ad (declined by the NFL), Daniel Defense, the AR-15 merchants of death, EXPLICITLY tied a ‘paramilitary army-of-one’ motif to its role as a military-industrial complex supplier. A man arrives home — presumably from a tour of duty — and enters the house past a conspicuously displayed, framed photo of him in his Marine uniform. Behind that photo is another photo with a wide frame labeled “FAMILY… they are always…” the last words are hidden behind the photo of the Marine. 

He walks into the next room where his wife is folding baby clothes and they hug. His voice over narrative: “And my family’s safety is my highest priority. I am responsible for their

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The Cultural Marxism – Conservative Christian Consensus on America’s Culture of Violence

May 28, 2022

Gun Culture and the American Nightmare of Violence by Henry Giroux, January 10, 2016:Mass shootings have become routine in the United States and speak to a society that relies on violence to feed the coffers of the merchants of death. Given the profits made by arms manufacturers, the defense industry, gun dealers and the lobbyists who represent them in Congress, it comes as no surprise that the culture of violence cannot be abstracted from either the culture of business or the corruption of politics. Violence runs through US society like an electric current offering instant pleasure from all cultural sources, whether it be the nightly news or a television series that glorifies serial killers.Mass Shootings: The Vicious Cycle Fueled By America’s Toxic Cult of Violence by John W. and Nisha

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And Babies?

May 28, 2022

And Babies?

Uvalde = My Lai. This is not hyperbole. War crimes are an inevitable byproduct of war. Mass shootings are an inevitable byproduct of militarism and a militarized culture. 

The same political process that led to and perpetuated the war in Vietnam continues to perpetuate the slaughter of innocents in American schools, supermarkets, nightclubs, subways, and synagogues.

It is not just the “extreme right” doing this. It is the cultural consequence of the political aspects of full employment. It is the result of the pursuit of full employment through a perpetual war economy, as Michal Kalecki warned about 80 years ago. I posted Kalecki’s Political Aspects of Full Employment to EconoSpeak in 14 installments 13 years ago. If anybody wants

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An Army of All-American Paramilitary Death-Squad Soloists

May 27, 2022

In their 2014 Super Bowl ad (declined by the NFL), Daniel Defense, the AR-15 merchants of death, EXPLICITLY tied a ‘paramilitary army-of-one’ motif to its role as a military-industrial complex supplier. A man arrives home — presumably from a tour of duty — and enters the house past a conspicuously displayed, framed photo of him in his Marine uniform. Behind that photo is another photo with a wide frame labeled "FAMILY… they are always…" the last words are hidden behind the photo of the Marine. He walks into the next room where his wife is folding baby clothes and they hug. His voice over narrative: "And my family’s safety is my highest priority. I am responsible for their protection."  [embedded content]The two of them then walk over and peek into the baby’s room. Baby is awake so

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And Babies?

May 26, 2022

Uvalde = My Lai. This is not hyperbole. War crimes are an inevitable byproduct of war. Mass shootings are an inevitable byproduct of militarism and a militarized culture. The same political process that led to and perpetuated the war in Vietnam continues to perpetuate the slaughter of innocents in American schools, supermarkets, nightclubs, subways, and synagogues.It is not just the "extreme right" doing this. It is the cultural consequence of the political aspects of full employment. It is the result of the pursuit of full employment through a perpetual war economy, as Michal Kalecki warned about 80 years ago. I posted Kalecki’s Political Aspects of Full Employment to EconoSpeak in 14 installments 13 years ago. If anybody wants to argue "we’re not really doing that," please explain to me

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American Impotence

May 25, 2022

"The evenly-divided Senate approved the legislation – formally known as the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) – on Wednesday in an 88-11 vote, garnering strong support from both Democrats and Republicans. The House of Representatives passed it by 363-70 last week."Do Americans really think politicians who eagerly approved a $777 billion military industrial complex bill by an 8-1 margin in the Senate and a 5-1 margin in the House will "do something" about civilian gun violence? Democrats and Republicans have their priorities on which they are unequivocally "bipartisan."

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Goats and Dogs: Eco-Fascism and Liberal Taboos

May 15, 2022

UPDATE (May 15, 2022):I started reading Buffalo shooter’s manifesto expecting the same eco-fascism/green nationalism type language we saw in the El Paso and Christchurch shooters’ manifestos and sure enough: “green nationalism is the only true nationalism” pic.twitter.com/Pbb81Y6EMj— Tad DeLay (@taddelay) May 15, 2022When remembered at all, Edward Abbey is mostly thought of as an environmentalist and anarchist but there is no gainsaying the racism and xenophobia on display in his 1983 essay, "Immigration and Liberal Taboos." The opinion piece was originally solicited by the New York Times, which ultimately declined to publish it — or to pay him the customary kill fee. It was subsequently rejected by Harper’s, The Atlantic, The New Republic, Rolling Stone, Newsweek, Mother Jones and

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Remember the Sabbath Day…

May 6, 2022

…to keep it holy.In The Big Lebowski, Walter Sobchak does not f***ing roll on Shabbos. Why not? The Old Testament gave two rationales for observing the Sabbath. The first, in Exodus, was that God created the earth in six days and on the seventh, He rested. Deuteronomy gave a different rational: And you shall remember that you were a slave in the land of Egypt, and that the Lord your God took you out from there with a strong hand and with an outstretched arm; therefore, the Lord, your God, commanded you to observe the Sabbath day.Reading Sigmund Freud’s Moses and Monotheism in the early 1980s, I became convinced that the story about the golden calf and Moses’s two forays up Mount Sinai suggested that the second set of tablets could not have contained the same text as the first. Thus the

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