Socialdem. 21st Century

As should other countries: it’s plain common sense.The EU and Eurozone are catastrophic. Of course, sanity prevailed and the UK never joined the Eurozone, but the EU itself is still catastrophic.Britain should leave the EU as quickly as possible, for the following reasons: (1) to protect the UK’s economic and political sovereignty;(2) to protect its democracy;(3) to protect its welfare state and social services;(4) to have some hope for a Post Keynesian-style or MMT-style economic policy in...

The trouble with this idea of Marx is that, as formulated in volume 3 of Capital, Marx has insulated it against empirical refutation. As Michael Heinrich has argued here, it collapses into an anti-empirical and analytic tautology, which cannot be proven by empirical evidence. For Marx, it becomes a long-run tendency so that even if we had 1,000 years of capitalism and there was no long-run tendency of the rate of profit to fall visible in the data, Marx can evade criticism by claiming that...

To continue from my post here, Paul Bairoch’s book Economics and World History: Myths and Paradoxes (New York and London, 1993) further analyses Western colonialism, the industrial revolution, and non-Western versus Western imperialism.Did British imperialism from the 15th to the early 19th century play a major – or indeed necessary – role in triggering the British industrial revolution?The fact is that, economically speaking, the British empire was not very big in the early modern period and...

A priceless moment in a Sanders versus Clinton debate last year![embedded content]In reality of course, Bernie is just an honest New Dealer who wants a Western European social democracy.And as for the top US federal marginal tax rates under Eisenhower, we can see them in the graph below. This graph shows the top US federal marginal tax rates on (1) earned income (in red) and (2) (where it diverges from the latter) ordinary income (in blue), from the the data here. And yet even with rates...

The economic historian Paul Bairoch (1930–1999) subjected some Marxist myths about Western capitalism and imperialism to critical scrutiny in his now classic book Economics and World History: Myths and Paradoxes (New York and London, 1993).First, was the Western industrial revolution dependent on energy from the Third World?Bairoch (1993: 59) notes that right up until the post-WWII era the West was almost completely self-sufficient in energy, and as late as the 1930s much of the developed...

Good fun.[embedded content]

It’s surprising how many people have forgotten what the radical American left used to believe about this issue.At a famous Socialist Congress that occurred in Chicago in 1910, American socialists adopted the following resolution: “The Socialist party of the United States favors all legislative measures tending to prevent the immigration of strike breakers and contract laborers, and the mass importation of workers from foreign countries, brought about by the employing classes for the purpose...

What happens as the few workers we see in these videos below are no longer needed? And, even more importantly, when middle class and professional jobs get hit by the same trend through AI and more sophisticated software?Capitalism has both a supply-side and demand-side. As more and more work is done by machines or software, the relationship between aggregate demand growth and private sector employment growth will start to break down – or at the very least become very weak. Eventually, a...

This can be clearly seen from Marx’s statement in Chapter 3 of volume 1 of Capital: “The State puts in circulation bits of paper on which their various denominations, say £1, £5, &c, are printed. In so far as they actually take the place of gold to the same amount, their movement is subject to the laws that regulate the currency of money itself. A law peculiar to the circulation of paper money can spring up only from the proportion in which that paper money represents gold. Such a law...

What will its result be? And if the UK leaves how will this affect the ongoing EU crisis?In the interview below, we have one of those odd moments when the radical left and populist right agree: the EU corporate tyranny is a threat to UK democracy.[embedded content]