Socialdem. 21st Century

The Swiss global financial services company UBS has put out a report called “The Future of Europe” on 13 January, 2016: “The Future of Europe,” UBS, Chief Investment Office, January 2016. If you want to see one example of a neoliberal vision for the future of Europe, read it.At one level, there is some very interesting analysis in it and at least the recognition that the EU needs some central fiscal policy.But, in its other economic proposals, it makes horrifying reading. Because of the...

An International Monetary Fund study is gushing over the benefits of 1.1 million new migrants in Germany.Why, you ask?Once you put aside the minor point about a temporary boost to GDP, we get to the real issue: according to the pro-business IMF, Germany can get migrants into jobs in the coming years by ramping up “labor-market flexibility” – which is nothing but neoliberal code for smashing up what’s left of German labour market regulations and trade unions, since unhinged neoliberal...

Quite simple. He’s in favour of the UK staying in the EU, even when a heroic wing of his own Labour party is anti-EU and wants out, because they correctly see that the EU is a corporate tyranny and threat to democracy and left-wing economics.Democracy and the EU are incompatible, and more and more people in Europe agree.Meanwhile, over at the European parliament, it’s left to the leader of the UK’s right-wing, populist Thatcherite party to complain that the EU is anti-democratic. Poor old...

In my opinion, the theories of Thomas Kuhn and Postmodernism have wrought a catastrophic anti-science mentality to elements of the modern left.If we were to go through the endless, hare-brained rantings of Postmodernists about the natural sciences, it would take us ages (see here and here for just two examples).But there is a more insidious assumption lying behind a lot of hatred of science.It is this: (1) science never finds objective truths, but only “paradigms,” and (2) science will...

A key passage in that letter is here: “The price so regulated = the expenses of capital, + the average profit (F.I. 10 p.c.), is what Smith called the natural price, cost price, etc. It is the average price to which competition between different trades (by transfer of capital or withdrawal of capital) reduces the prices in different trades. Hence, competition reduces commodities not to their value, but to the cost price, which, depending on the organic composition of the respective capitals,...

The feminist Christina Hoff Sommers discusses them below.[embedded content]Second wave feminism had some very good ideas indeed and was, generally, a positive development.Third wave feminism seems to be largely a betrayal of women and an outgrowth of the same rotten Postmodernism, identity politics, and cultural relativism that has poisoned the rest of the left. As Sommers documents, third wave feminism often also has the same contempt for facts that characterises Postmodernism.

This is lecture 4 of Steve Keen’s course at Kingston University in the UK. It concerns the Post Keynesian school.[embedded content]

In the video below, which struck me as very interesting, especially his remarks on his brother Christopher Hitchens.[embedded content]The amusing meme that the American neoconservatives who planned the Iraq war (which Christopher Hitchens supported so vehemently) were the new liberal Trotskyists is a favourite of libertarians (see here), and there may well be an element of truth to it, given that the neoconservative foreign policy was a radical departure from the realist school of foreign...

Just look at this article here in the UK Independent by Edward Siddons, which concerns the recent sexual assaults in Germany.If we read it carefully we can see before our eyes an outstanding fault of the modern left: the bizarre conflation of culture with race.First, Siddons points out that some people on the far right are complaining that maybe the cultural attitudes of the attackers might have something to do with their crimes.But then Siddons immediately implies that this means that such...

It looks more and more like it.Why? Because Merkel’s irresponsible decision to throw Germany’s borders open to 1.1 million migrants has killed it.There is some interesting analysis here and here, which, despite the brave face put on Wolfgang Schäuble’s remarks in Brussels, reveals a deep, new crisis hitting the EU.Last year the major threat to the EU was the surge of democracy in Greece against austerity, but in the end the EU – and above all Germany – smashed any hope of that and the Greek...