Socialdem. 21st Century

In 1886, Engels made the following prediction in his introduction to the English translation of volume 1 of Marx’s Capital: “The time is rapidly approaching when a thorough examination of England’s economic position will impose itself as an irresistible national necessity. The working of the industrial system of this country, impossible without a constant and rapid extension of production, and therefore of markets, is coming to dead stop. Free trade has exhausted its resources; even...

Chapter 9 of volume 1 of Capital is called “The Rate of Surplus Value” (Marx 1990: 320), and it discusses aspects of surplus value.Marx divides the chapter into four sections: (1) The Degree of Exploitation of Labour-Power;(2) The Representation of the Value of the Product by Corresponding Proportional Parts of the Product;(3) Senior’s “Last Hour”(4) The Surplus Product. A section by section summary follows.(1) The Degree of Exploitation of Labour-Power Surplus value is generated in...

Here are some here: Sombart, Werner. 1894. “Zur Kritik des ökonomischen Systems von Karl Marx” [Toward a Critique of the Economic System of Karl Marx], Archiv für soziale Gesetzgebung und Statistik 7: 555–594.Lexis, W. 1895. “The Concluding Volume of Marx’s Capital,” Quarterly Journal of Economics 10 (October): 1–33.Schmidt, Conrad. 1895. “Der dritte Band des Kapital,” Sozialpolitisches Zentralblatt 22 (25th February): 254–258.Sorel, G. 1897. “Sur la théorie marxiste de la valeur,” Journal...

If one reflects carefully on the left today, what Salman Rushdie says here is obviously true.Extreme multiculturalism is not just multi-racialism. Multi-racialism as a principle is right. The view that a country should not discriminate against people on the basis of skin colour or race is entirely right and moral.But culture is not race. So many cultural ideas are not biologically determined, and are flexible and changeable, even if no rational personal would deny that certain human traits...

An amusing but serious take on Postmodernism from Gad Saad, an evolutionary behavioural scientist.[embedded content]

If what is described here is true, it is pure evil.Where are all the cultural relativists now? All those people who think all cultural beliefs or cultures are totally equal in every way?And, even worse, certain people on the left in the Western world still obsess over “safe spaces” and “culturally insensitive” Halloween costumes. These whining, narcissistic, intellectually crippled, infantile idiots make me sick, given how much real evil there is in the world.

Here is a good example of it.[embedded content]Now, first of all, I do think Chomsky makes errors – and even some very bad errors in his political or economic thinking.This, however, is mostly laughable.Let’s take the accusations: (1) “There is no social vision” in Chomsky’s work or thought Rubbish. Chomsky is a left libertarian. There is a clear social and economic vision in his thinking, but the problem is it is wrong, as I point out here. Chomsky’s anarcho-syndicalist libertarianism as a...

Yes, he really was. Let’s just list some examples below.First, take the most well known one: Marx’s conspiracy theories about Lord Palmerston.Around 1854 Marx was befriended by David Urquhart (1805–1877), a British aristocrat and vitriolic anti-Russian conspiracy-theorist, who thought Lord Palmerston was a secret Russian agent (Wheen 2001: 189). Marx, who also hated Tsarist Russia, was converted to this conspiracy theory by 1853 to 1854, and, even though he met Urquhart early in 1854 and...

This is one of the many problems with Marx’s bizarre and incoherent labour theory of value.In essence, for Marx, factors of production that have no embodied labour value transfer no value into the output commodity: “It is thus strikingly clear, that means of production never transfer more value to the product than they themselves lose during the labour-process by the destruction of their own use-value. If such an instrument has no value to lose, if, in other words, it is not the product of...

It was in the spring of 1895 that Engels wrote his supplement to volume 3 of Capital (Howard and King 1989: 48), a small essay which clarifies how Engels understood Marx’s law of value at the end of Engels’ life (Engels died on August 5, 1895).This was written in May 1895 for the Neue Zeit (Marx 1991: 1027, n.), which is available as the “Supplement and Addendum” to Volume 3 of Capital in Marx (1991: 1027–1047).This supplement was partly inspired by the critical reviews of volume 3 of Capital...