EconoSpeak

In his farewell lecture at Brandeis University, "Obsolescence of Socialism," Herbert Marcuse quoted a passage from the Grundrisse and claimed that in Capital, Marx had "repressed this vision, which now appears as his most realistic, his most amazing insight!"As large-scale industry advances, the creation of real wealth depends increasingly less on the labor time and the quantity of labor expended in the productive process than on the power of the instruments set in motion during the labor...

The Russian invasion of Ukraine has triggered a spike in oil and gas prices worldwide.  A natural response is for countries with untapped reserves to expand production as quickly as possible, but doesn’t this contradict the pledges they have also made to combat climate change?  This issue is covered at some length in a New York Times article today, and the entire discussion—the arguments used by government officials and energy experts and the assumptions of the journalists who quote them—is...

 At New Year's I disagreed with forecasts made by David Ignatius that Putin would fully invade Ukraine and that the JCPOA nuclear deal with Iran would be revived. I have been proven wrong on the first matter already. As of a week or more ago it looked like I would be about the second as well as reports had a revived deal nearly made, which I would like to see.But now it looks like it may fall victim to the Ukraine invasion. In particular Russia is now demanding that any deal not involve any...

In Selling Mrs. Consumer, Christine Frederick shilled for progressive obsolescence, which had been advocated the previous year in an article by her husband, J. George Frederick. Or at least that is the way it seemed to her biographer, Janice Rutherford, who wrote, "she now took up and elaborated upon his theme, even using the same words..." Even using the same words?! It is possible that Mrs. Frederick copied passages from her husband's article. It is also possible that her husband, editor,...

Lewis Corey was a pseudonym for Louis Fraida, one of the founders of the U.S. Communist Party. In a letter to Marcuse dated August 16, 1960, Raya Dunayevskaya replied at length to his request for references to the American literature dealing with the issues of "the transformation of the laboring class under the impact of rationalization, automation and particularly, the higher standard of living." This was in connection with his research for One-Dimensional Man.In her reply, Dunayevskaya...

 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...