EconoSpeak

 From The Decline of American Capitalism by Lewis Corey (1934):Capitalist production saves on labor and multiplies the productive forces. But two contradictions arise which constantly torment capitalist enterprise. Saving on labor decreases relative wages and limits the conditions of consumption. This sets in motion the forces of excess capacity, sharpened competition, and mounting distribution costs. These costs absorb much, if not most, of the saving on labor, and eventually strengthen the...

We sense too little for the process of containment to unfold. Yet phenomenologists focus on early representations from the scaffolding for subsequent events in front of the now not-blindfolded infants. Infants looked at longer aspects of the psychoanalytic scaffolding: how reverie can be and is being a weird kind of blindfold. Since our dynamical, reciprocal exchanges unfold and lead to changes -- gaze-following behavior of another blindfolded person in which students were blindfolded and...

 About a half century ago I urged by my oldest friend to read a book by Fritjof Schuon (1907-1998) written in 1953, The Transcendental Unity of Religions. The book's title basically tells its message: that while each religion has its own exoteric forms that differ from those of each other, there is a core to all of them that is the same, a transcendental unity of cosmic truth and fundamental reality. Schuon had links with the Shadhili Sufi order, the Sufis being the branch of Islam open to...

‘Profit,’ says the same Chalmers, ‘has the effect of attaching the services of the disposable population to other masters, besides the mere landed proprietors, . . . while their expenditure reaches higher than the necessaries of life.’The above quote is not the point Marx considered correct in Chalmers's "otherwise... ridiculous and repulsive" book. It does, however, indicate Marx's knowledge of Chalmers's concept of disposable population. The remark occurs in the Grundrisse only seven pages...

The central role of economic sanctions in the US/EU strategy against Russia has returned international political economy to center stage, if it had ever left it.  Here are some thoughts occasioned by Adam Tooze’s interesting analysis of Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) as perceived by the Russian economic policy apparatus, connected to the role of monetary reform in the anti-colonial struggle of the 1930s as documented by Eric Helleiner in Forgotten Foundations of Bretton Woods.Let’s start with...

In the introduction to One-Dimensional Man, Herbert Marcuse listed four authors -- Vance Packard, C. Wright Mills, William H. White, and Fred J. Cooks -- whose works were of "vital importance" to his analysis. In the text, he mentioned "the affluent society" several times, which, of course, was the title of a famous book by John Kenneth Galbraith. Galbraith, Mills, and White all cited Thorstein Veblen in their books. Packard cited the influence of Stuart Chase's The Tragedy of Waste on his...

I’ve had dreams of all sorts from time to time, but I don’t remember them too well. There was one dream that had a sort of philosophical content.I dreamt I was in a place that had a cat. I came into the room where this cat was talking to another cat, making a date to meet at a certain time. I said, “There’s something wrong here. What could it be? I know what it is: Cats can’t tell time!”I went up to this cat and said, “What do you mean by making this date? You know you can’t tell time. ”The...

 The original sin of the current catastrophe in Ukraine was the failure of the US and UK to defend the sovereignty and territorial integrity of Ukraine when Putin's Russia seized control of Crimea as they promised to do in the Budapest Accord of 1994 when Ukraine gave up the third largest stock of nuclear weapons in the world.  They are also now in violation of that Accord now by their weak effort to save Ukraine. They can and should enforce a no fly zone over Ukraine, which I believe they...

 There are reports that many Russian soldiers are lacking in morale for the invasion of Ukraine. They were told repeatedly like the rest of us that there would be no invasion. The Ukrainians are very similar, and most of them know Putin has exaggerated the things they have supposedly done or not done wrong.  And rather than welcoming them as liberators and throwing down their arms to surrender, the Ukrainians have been fighting back hard. But they have a lot more armor and weapons.What may...

In Herbert Marcuse and Planned Obsolescence I undertook to develop a theoretical foundation for 'planned obsolescence' from Georg Simmel's analysis of the "preponderance of objective culture over subjective culture that developed during the nineteenth century." My intuition has proved to be uncannily prescient. Besides the indirect influence of Thorstein Veblen -- by way of Vance Packard and Stuart Chase -- Marcuse's argument was indirectly influenced by Simmel, through the mediation of...