Socialdem. 21st Century

Eduard Bernstein in Evolutionary Socialism: A Criticism and Affirmation (1909) describes Friedrich Engels’ attempt to defend the idea that the law of value in volume 1 of Capital was both empirical and historical: “According to the Marxist theory surplus value is, as we have seen, the pivot of the economy of a capitalist society. But in order to understand surplus value one must first know what value is. The Marxist representation of history and of the course of development of capitalist...

It was actually not a human being in his full range of conscious mental life, but something much more specific: “The idea behind digital computers may be explained by saying that these machines are intended to carry out any operations which could be done by a human computer. The human computer is supposed to be following fixed rules; he has no authority to deviate from them in any detail. We may suppose that these rules are supplied in a book, which is altered whenever he is put on to a new...

And now I have your attention, we have the relevant quotation below, and, yes, it is a type of back-handed compliment to capitalism: “See, capitalism is not fundamentally racist—it can exploit racism for its purposes, but racism isn’t built into it. Capitalism basically wants people to be interchangeable cogs, and differences among them, such as on the basis of race, usually are not functional. I mean, they may be functional for a period, like if you want a super exploited workforce or...

Chapter 23 of volume 1 of Capital is called “Simple Reproduction” and deals with capitalist accumulation on an unchanged base of capital (Brewer 1984: 67).This Chapter begins Part 7 of volume 1 called “The Process of Accumulation of Capital” (which includes Chapters 23, 24, and 25).For Marx, there is a process called the circulation of capital: “The conversion of a sum of money into means of production and labour-power, is the first step taken by the quantum of value that is going to...

Marx’s Grundrisse der Kritik der Politischen Ökonomie (Outlines of the Critique of Political Economy) was a manuscript which he wrote from 1857–1858. These 800 manuscript pages by Marx on political economy were not even published until 1939 (Wheen 2001: 227), but they formed the basis of A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (1859) (Sperber 2014: 421).Marx had an interesting passage in the Grundrisse where he discusses technological unemployment: “Contradiction between the...

Karl Bücher (1847–1930) was a member of the Younger German Historical School, an important 19th century and early 20th century alternative to the Classical and Neoclassical schools of economics.The German Historical School had an interesting theory on the origin of money, rather similar to that of Karl Marx.This is from Karl Bücher’s book Industrial Evolution (1901) (N.B. his language and some of his attitudes, as you’d expect, are of the 19th century, so please get over that): “… it must be...

A Marxist called “Jehu” who writes at The Real Movement blog challenges me here with four questions: Jehu, “Four Questions for LK on Money,” The Real Movement, February 20, 2016. His four questions are as follows: (1) Did not Marx predict the collapse of production on the basis of exchange value?(2) Did this collapse occur in the 1930s just as Marx predicted it would?(3) To save capitalism was it not necessary to sever gold from fiat?(4) What was the implication of the collapse of the gold...

Carl Menger’s famous 1892 article “On the Origin of Money” in the Economic Journal was based on an earlier article called “Geld” (“Money”) in the German language publication the Handwörterbuch der Staatswissenschaften (Menger 1892). This article went through a further two revised editions in 1900 and 1909 (Menger 1900 and 1909).In the third edition of 1909, Menger had expanded the article to about 55 pages from the original 27 pages in the 1892 version.In his first section of the 1909 article...

From the anthropologist A. H. Quiggin’s A Survey of Primitive Money: The Beginnings of Currency (London, 1949) on cattle or oxen as a standard of value in ancient and less developed societies: “Throughout the greater part of the immense region which includes Europe to the West and stretches to Further India in the East, cattle were the chief form of wealth, and, as is seen in Africa, where cattle form the standard of value, varieties of primitive money are undeveloped. .... Cattle, however...

From Karl Marx’s Critique of Political Economy (1859): “Direct barter, the spontaneous form of exchange, signifies the beginning of the transformation of use-values into commodities rather than the transformation of commodities into money. Exchange-value does not acquire an independent form, but is still directly tied to use-value. This is manifested in two ways. Use-value, not exchange-value, is the purpose of the whole system of production, and use-values accordingly cease to be use-values...