Socialdem. 21st Century

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.

A fair few months old, but very good discussion of the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) in the videos below. For excellent and concise analysis, see here. The Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) means grotesque corporate tyranny for the relevant nations involved.One of the many outrageous aspects of the TPP is that it would effectively ban any sensible and effective financial regulation in the countries concerned, and that under its State Dispute Settlement (ISDS) provisions corporations can sue...

Read the consequences of the insanity of 30 years of cultural relativism here. No comment necessary.Let me put it in simple terms: Postmodernism + cultural relativism = regressive left insanity.The Postmodernist left and its bastard offspring the regressive left are a cancer on Western civilisation. To the flames with both of them.[embedded content]

On Canada’s single payer health care system. Spoken by Trump in 2011 in the video below.[embedded content]Yes, I know he didn’t commit himself to such a system, but as late as last year he was saying very un-Republican things on health care. Again, see the videos below.[embedded content][embedded content][embedded content][embedded content]Now look: I have no idea whether he sincerely believed those earlier positions, and I know his actual health care plan seems very confused and pro-free...