EconoSpeak

 In the last few days for the first time in many years northern Israel has been on the receiving end of rockets fired out of southern Lebanon, territory under the control of the Shia Hezbollah group long supported by Iranian interests, although apparently some think that it was Palestinians living in this area who fired the rockets. Even if it was, clearly this would not have happened without approval from Iran.Also in the last few days an oil tanker in the Persian Gulf controlled by the...

 Fox News's biggest star, Tucker Carlson, is broadcasting this week from Budapest where a political festival is happening under the aegis of Hungarian leader, Victor Orban.  As observers have noted, Orban has engaged in a gradual process of turning Hungary from a functioning EU democracy into an authoritarian state that maintains a veneer of democracy. Crucial to this is control over most of the media as well as the judiciary. His actions have put him in a running conflict with the EU's...

Our pamphleteer overlooks two things: The greater the social wealth, the functioning capital, the extent and energy of its growth, and, therefore, also the absolute mass of the proletariat and the productiveness of its labour, the greater is the industrial reserve army. The same causes which develop the expansive power of capital, develop also the labour power at its disposal. This is the absolute general law of capitalist accumulation: As a result of the introduction of machinery, a...

 When technical specialists adopt an everyday word, they often give it a meaning that differs from its everyday use.  This can be misleading for nonspecialists, especially when little effort is made to explain the difference.  A well known example is “significance”, which means one thing when used in statistical work and another when it just denotes whether something is important.Let’s look at another example, vaccine “effectiveness”.  What do people most want to know about the coronavirus...

 1. If both x and n are positive whole numbers, can x + n < x?(show your work)

I long knew it was coming, but it has arrived.  I learned of this because some have closed due to heat and or the pandemic surging, K-12 schools.  This happened in Arizona.  They opened in July.  Really.  People in those districts may think this is fine, but I am horrified.  I view this as a situation where a frog has been in a pot of increasingly hot water that has now boiled, almost literatlly given some of these schools having to close temporarily due to extreme summer heat. What were...

Afterword to the Second German Edition [of Das Kapital, Buch 1] (1873):I must start by informing the readers of the first edition about the alterations made in the second edition. One is struck at once by the clearer arrangement of the book. Additional notes are everywhere marked as notes to the second edition. The following are the most important points with regard to the text itself:In Chapter I, Section 1, the derivation of value from an analysis of the equations by which every...

 Arguably the Arab Spring ended a long time ago.  It was after all, Spring 2011, to be precise in terms of when the spring was.  It had arguably started a bit earlier, in December 2010 when an informal street vendor in Tunisia set fire to himself and died as a result of unhappiness over corrupt authorities demanding bribes from him he could not pay.  This led to massive demonstrations against the super corrupt and dictatorial regime of Tunisian President Ben Ali. This led soon after to him...

 One of the more curious things in 2017 in the first year of the Trump presidency was how when Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates (UAE) placed a boycott on Qatar and more directly attempted to overthrow the government of Qatar, President Trump openly supported this effort initiallly.  He would later be pulled back from this position his first Secretary of Defense and that of State also after they noted that Qatar hosts the largest US air base in the Middle East, al-Udeid, from which...

Back in December I posted an excerpt from the Grundrisse, Reichtum ist verfügbare Zeit und nichts weiter, without noticing that in it was a prototype for Marx's concept of socially necessary labour time (Gesellschaftlich notwendige Arbeitzeit): Die Schöpfung von viel disposable time außer der notwendigen Arbeitszeit für die Gesellschaft überhaupt und jedes Glied derselben (d.h. Raum für die Entwicklung der vollen Produktivkräfte der einzelnen, daher auch der Gesellschaft), diese Schöpfung...