Socialdem. 21st Century

You really can’t get someone more left-wing on the American political spectrum than Ralph Nader – that is, without going to communism or Marxism.And yet here he is below giving us a badly-needed left-wing perspective on why open borders and mass immigration are a bad idea. And he is perfectly right too. I put forward a similar case here.Yet another thing to add is this: with open borders, Keynesian fiscal policy and policies to create full employment are badly thwarted and disrupted, because...

This is an interesting point about Marx’s economic theory: he rejected the orthodox Classical “iron law of wages.” Nevertheless, there are still severe problems with Marx’s theory of wages.In essence, the Classical “iron law of wages” was derived from (1) the wage fund theory in Classical economics and (2) Malthusian population theory. The “iron law of wages” was, then, in view of (2) a kind of “law of nature.”By contrast, Marx rejected Malthusian population theory (Baumol 1983: 304, 305),...

Here is the passage and it concerns the rural social and economic organisation of India in the 19th century: “... we must not forget that these idyllic [sc. Indian] village-communities, inoffensive though they may appear, had always been the solid foundation of Oriental despotism, that they restrained the human mind within the smallest possible compass, making it the unresisting tool of superstition, enslaving it beneath traditional rules, depriving it of all grandeur and historical...

Steve Keen speaks below on the catastrophe that is the Eurozone, and this is lecture 7 that is part of Keen’s course at Kingston University in the UK.[embedded content]

A truly fascinating interview with the investigative reporter Seymour Hersh on US policy in Syria in the videos below. More here. Seymour Hersh’s article “Military to Military” in the London Review of Books is here.If true, we see here how US foreign policy is much more complex than people both on the left and on the right think.[embedded content][embedded content]

I can’t count the number of times some absurd apologists for Marxism cite some paper in my comments section showing prices are correlated with labour costs – as if this proves the classical Marxist labour theory of value.It does no such thing. The Marxist labour theory of value says much more than this.In volume 1 of Capital, the “law of value” expounded there was later described by Marx in these terms: “The assumption that the commodities of the various spheres of production are sold at...

It is illustrated perfectly by this news story here.So a Mexican restaurant at a British university hands out sombreros to students as a “celebration of Mexican culture” (according to none other than the restaurant’s general manager). In our truly bizarre politically-correct culture, this is condemned as “racist.”This is an utter abuse of the term “racist,” and an insult to people who have genuinely experienced real racism.What is racism, if it is to have any coherent, sensible and defensible...

Dave Rubin interviews Faisal Saeed Al-Mutar, an Iraqi dissident, human rights activist and atheist in the fascinating interview below, which should be of great interest to people on the left and right, for its many interesting insights.Dave Rubin is a liberal who has a series of great interviews in his show The Rubin Report, and he is a strong critic of the regressive left.[embedded content]

In the introduction to volume 2 of Capital written on May 5, 1885, Engels made this famous challenge: “The Ricardian school failed about the year 1830, being unable to solve the riddle of surplus-value. And what was impossible for this school, remained still more insoluble for its successor, vulgar economy. The two points which caused its failure were these:1. Labor: is the measure of value. However, actual labor in its exchange with capital has a lower value than labor embodied in the...

In Friedrich Engels’s Herr Eugen Dühring’s Revolution in Science (1894; first published in 1878), he argued that industrial capitalism, partly by means of automation and use of machines, drove workers’ wages down to a subsistence level and tended to keep them there: “Thus it comes about that the excessive labour of some becomes the necessary condition for the lack of employment of others, and that large-scale industry, which hunts all over the world for new consumers, restricts the...