Socialdem. 21st Century

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...

The German economist Wilhelm Lexis (1837–1914) mentions it, quite casually, as a matter of fact in an article in 1895: “Under normal conditions, reductions of wages are in our time almost impossible. Even under the worst conditions, capitalists in many cases prefer to endure a diminution of their profits rather than enter upon a struggle with their organized laborers. How many corporations maintain wages unchanged, even though the stockholders – i.e., the capitalists – get no dividends?”...

It follows clearly if you accept the interpretation of Marx’s law of value (as he expressed it in volume 1 of Capital) by Engels in his “Supplement and Addendum” to Volume 3 of Capital (see my discussion of it here).According to this interpretation, the view that labour values are anchors for individual prices and that prices tend to correspond to labour values can only be held to be true for the pre-modern modern of commodity exchange before about the 15th century. This law of value ceases...

... will this, admittedly amongst other issues, have a great deal to do with it?The situation in Calais is extraordinary: it is now being described as a “war zone.”This is the European Union today: its policies have caused a breakdown in law and order so bad that many ordinary working people driving trucks between England and France can’t do their jobs properly and fear for their lives.The documentary below illustrates this, although it fails to ask the tough question: how many are just...