Socialdem. 21st Century

The issue of protectionism – and the related issue of industrial policy – is back on the political agenda, mainly because of the current US election season.Some very good books and articles relevant here are as follows: Amsden, Alice. 1989. Asia’s Next Giant: South Korea and Late Industrialization. Oxford University Press, New York.Amsden, Alice. 1990. “East Asia’s Challenge – to Standard Economics,” American Prospect 2 (Summer): 71–77.Bairoch, Paul. 1993. Economics and World History: Myths...

At the moment the British Labour party is in the news with claims of anti-Semitism in its ranks. On the one hand, I don’t doubt that the modern Labour party has certain people in it like Livingstone or former members like the odious George Galloway who have a disgraceful and disgusting relationship with Islamists, and who have a one-sided and unfair bias against Israel in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.But, despite all the hysteria, this is such an overblown issue. If one really wants to...

A brief but serviceable enough overview: “In the immediate post-war years France was in poor shape; wages remained at around half prewar levels, the winter of 1946–1947 did extensive damage to crops, leading to a reduction in the bread ration, hunger and disease remained rife and the black market continued to flourish. Germany was in an even worse position, but after 1948 things began to improve dramatically with the introduction of Marshall Aid—large scale American financial assistance...

Keynes visited the Soviet Union in the summer of 1925. He evidently tried hard to take a fair-minded view of Soviet Communism to please other people on the left, but just couldn’t do it.From his essay “A Short View of Russia” (1925): “Like other new religions, Leninism derives its power not from the multitude but from a small minority of enthusiastic converts whose zeal and intolerance make each one the equal in strength of a hundred indifferentists. .... Like other new religions, it...

Is this the future of Europe? Now (apparently) people in Germany can’t even engage in rude political satire against a quasi-authoritarian head of a foreign state…[embedded content]And, of course, it has backfired already:[embedded content]

I’ve covered the life of Karl Marx (1818–1883) in the series of posts here.Below is a chronology of Marx’s life to complement those posts, with some other major political, social and cultural events of the time: 1810s 5 February 1811 – the Prince of Wales George becomes the Prince Regent25 October 1760–29 January 1820 – reign of George III18 June 1815 – Battle of Waterloosummer of 1816 – famous summer at the Villa Diodati by Lake Geneva, Switzerland, where Percy Bysshe Shelley, Mary Shelley...

Marx published volume 1 of Capital in German in 1867 (by the publisher Meissner of Hamburg), but this was the only volume of Capital, which was a proposed 4 volume work on economics, to be published in Marx’s lifetime. Volumes 2 and 3 were edited and published by Engels after the death of Marx. No English translation of volume 1 appeared in Marx’s lifetime either.In the summaries below, I have used these two translations of volume 1: Marx, Karl. 1906. Capital. A Critique of Political Economy...

The term “regressive left” was supposedly coined in 2012 by Maajid Nawaz to describe leftists who make shameful apologetics for Islamist religious bigotry and fanaticism, as Nawaz explains in the video below.[embedded content]The regressive left in 2016 is increasingly made up of millennials, who have been profoundly influenced by, and steeped in, the core ideas of Postmodernism, which they have no doubt learned at universities.However, many of these millennials do not consciously...

Chapter 33 of volume 1 of Capital is called “The Modern Theory of Colonisation” and examines how capitalism is established in European colonies. This is the final chapter of volume 1 of Capital.By colonies, Marx means those countries with “virgin soils, colonised by free immigrants” (Marx 1906: 838, n. 1), such as America or Australia.Marx is concerned with the theory of Edward Gibbon Wakefield (1796–1862), an Englishman who helped to colonise New Zealand, and the author of England and...

Chapter 32 of volume 1 of Capital is called the “Historical Tendency of Capitalist Accumulation” and is essentially Marx’s conclusion to Capital, since Chapter 33 is more of an appendix and addendum to the volume (Brewer 1984: 83).Chapter 32 is therefore Marx’s summing up of his vision of the past and future of capitalism, and contains a famous – and discredited – doomsday prediction of the collapse of capitalism.The tendency of “primitive accumulation of capital” which Marx has described in...