Socialdem. 21st Century

From Rothbard’s The Ethics of Liberty: “No man can therefore have a ‘right’ to compel someone to do a positive act, for in that case the compulsion violates the right of person or property of the individual being coerced. ….Applying our theory to parents and children, this means that a parent does not have the right to aggress against his children, but also that the parent should not have a legal obligation to feed, clothe, or educate his children, since such obligations would entail...

I pointed out in the last post why Chomsky’s views are different from those of the Postmodernist left and its modern offshoot the regressive left on many points.Now for some criticism. Here Steven Pinker makes interesting criticisms of Chomsky’s politics and his views of human nature. For Pinker, we need the leviathan state, and anarchism is an absurd utopian fantasy – and he is right. Also, badly missing here is the reality that religions cause terrible conflicts between human beings and...

I tire of people trying to paint Chomsky as the father of the regressive left.Yes, some elements of this thinking have influenced it and flowed into it (e.g., an often unbalanced and one-sided critique of US foreign policy). And, yes, you can make serious and sometimes very serious criticisms of Chomsky too.But I also tire of regressive leftists trying to invoke Chomsky as if he is one of their own. This is blatantly untrue.If you look seriously at Chomsky’s thought and beliefs, there is a...

The speaker is the feminist Anita Sarkeesian.[embedded content]Whether this is just Sarkeesian’s rhetoric or a throw-away comment, it actually illustrates a deep problem with the modern left.Parts of the modern left have become a toxic mix of extreme identity politics, cultural relativism, Postmodernist nonsense, extremist Third Wave Feminism, hatred of free speech, hatred of men, and lack of interest in serious economic issues.For such people, *everything* is racist, sexist, and homophobic –...

A really fine analysis here, with an excellent history of American neoconservatism: Michael Lind, “The Neocons Are Responsible for Trumpism,” The National Interest, March 7, 2016. Trumpism, at least in the rhetoric we hear from Trump, is a rejection of second wave “fusionist” neoconservatism and its foreign policy, and is a kind of protectionist statism and a rejection of aspects of neoliberalism.He notes too that the left is also partly responsible for Trump. The mainstream Democratic left...

Chapter 14 of volume 1 of Capital is called “The Division of Labour and Manufacture” and examines the nature of division of labour in early manufacture from the mid-16th to the late 18th centuries.Marx divides the chapter into five sections: (1) The Dual Origin of Manufacture.(2) The Specialised Worker and his Tools(3) The Two Fundamental Forms of Manufacture(4) The Division of Labour in Manufacture, and the Division of Labour in Society(5) The Capitalist Character of Manufacture. It is...

To the Marxists everywhere, my simple challenge: Is your view that Marx’s theory of wage determination in volume 1 of Capital that real wages in capitalism can and will rise above the value of the maintenance and reproduction of labour, and in the long run will keep rising, vastly improving the living standards of workers? If you say “yes,” then my refutation here of Marx’s view of a rising rate of exploitation in capitalism (from increasing surplus value extracted from workers) is...

Böhm-Bawerk, in his 1896 essay “Karl Marx and the Close of His System,” understood the problem well: “ … [sc. Marx] declares that labor … means the ‘expenditure of simple [unskilled] labor power, an average of which is possessed in his physical organism by every ordinary man, without special cultivation"; or in other words ‘simple average labor’ (I, 51, and also previously in I, 46).‘Skilled labor,’ he continues, ‘counts only as concentrated or rather multiplied unskilled labor, so that a...

Yes, my title is partly facetious. Now Roger Scruton is a decent analytic philosopher, and the author of Modern Philosophy: An Introduction and Survey (1994), which is actually a very good introduction to analytic philosophy and a favourite book of mine. Scruton (2015) is also a decent critique of some Postmodernist thinkers (though his critique of John Kenneth Galbraith in that book is both lazily ignorant and flawed).But Scruton is also a conservative, and the author of the recent book How...

Yves Smith explains why: Yves Smith, “Clinton will build her biggest lead on March 15. Sanders will erode it after that,” Naked Capitalism, March 5, 2016.