EconoSpeak

 It’s generally conceded that Terry McAuliffe’s statement “I don’t think parents should be telling schools what they should teach” was a big blunder that contributed to his defeat last week.  The context was a debate with his Republican opponent, Glenn Youngkin, who had used his party’s playbook on Critical Race Theory and the “leftist” takeover of education.  Not surprisingly, Youngkin hammered McAuliffe with this quote in TV and web ads.So what should McAuliffe have said instead?  Imagine...

 It’s generally conceded that Terry McAuliffe’s statement “I don’t think parents should be telling schools what they should teach” was a big blunder that contributed to his defeat last week.  The context was a debate with his Republican opponent, Glenn Youngkin, who had used his party’s playbook on Critical Race Theory and the “leftist” takeover of education.  Not surprisingly, Youngkin hammered McAuliffe with this quote in TV and web ads.So what should McAuliffe have said instead?  Imagine...

Who owns general social knowledge? Who owns the general intellect? Alf Hornborg pointed out that without the fuel to run it, a tractor is simply a piece of sculpture. It is not even a sculpture, though, if there is no one to design it and build it and operate it, let alone to design and manufacture the tools needed to build the tractor and so on.Marx's list of things nature does not build, "machines... locomotives, railways, electric telegraphs, self-acting mules etc." is echoed in the next...

Who owns general social knowledge? Who owns the general intellect? Alf Hornborg pointed out that without the fuel to run it, a tractor is simply a piece of sculpture. It is not even a sculpture, though, if there is no one to design it and build it and operate it, let alone to design and manufacture the tools needed to build the tractor and so on.Marx's list of things nature does not build, "machines... locomotives, railways, electric telegraphs, self-acting mules etc." is echoed in the next...

On Saturday, November 13 I will be presenting, "Disposable Time, Surplus Population, and Limitation of the Hours of Labour," at the Historical Materialism conference. I will be exploring relative surplus population and the dialectic of "the superfluous and the necessary" from the perspective of three keyword-linked fragments from Marx's Grundrisse, beginning with Marx's proposition that "[t]he whole development of wealth rests on the creation of disposable time." My presentation is a...

On Saturday, November 13 I will be presenting, "Disposable Time, Surplus Population, and Limitation of the Hours of Labour," at the Historical Materialism conference. I will be exploring relative surplus population and the dialectic of "the superfluous and the necessary" from the perspective of three keyword-linked fragments from Marx's Grundrisse, beginning with Marx's proposition that "[t]he whole development of wealth rests on the creation of disposable time." My presentation is a...

 In the nid-1970s when I was finishing my PhD diss and also working for the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources in its Water Quality Bureau, where I was mostly dealing with sewer systems issues, the Wisconsin branch of the Posse Comitatus was attacking and "arresting" individuals from my department who were trying to enforce limits on fishing of certain fish in certain lakes in Northern Wisconsin, some of these involving local Native American rights to fish some of these species in...

 In the nid-1970s when I was finishing my PhD diss and also working for the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources in its Water Quality Bureau, where I was mostly dealing with sewer systems issues, the Wisconsin branch of the Posse Comitatus was attacking and "arresting" individuals from my department who were trying to enforce limits on fishing of certain fish in certain lakes in Northern Wisconsin, some of these involving local Native American rights to fish some of these species in...

 The phrase quoted in the title is probably the most well-known in the Grundrisse. It has been cited in books and journal articles at least a hundred times, an order of magnitude more frequently that the alternative translation found in the collected works, "capital itself is a contradiction-in-process," It is also a centerpiece of Moishe Postone's Time, Labor and Social Domination, where Postone quotes the sentence that contains it twice, in full: Capital itself is the moving contradiction,...

 The phrase quoted in the title is probably the most well-known in the Grundrisse. It has been cited in books and journal articles at least a hundred times, an order of magnitude more frequently that the alternative translation found in the collected works, "capital itself is a contradiction-in-process," It is also a centerpiece of Moishe Postone's Time, Labor and Social Domination, where Postone quotes the sentence that contains it twice, in full: Capital itself is the moving contradiction,...