Tag Archives: capitalism

Communist Party members should study contemporary capitalism but must never deviate from Marxism, Chinese President Xi Jinping said... “If we deviate from or abandon Marxism, our party would lose its soul and direction,” Xi said. “On the fundamental issue of upholding the guiding role of Marxism, we must maintain unswerving resolve, never wavering at any time or under any circumstances.”Xi said the party should better integrate the basic tenets of Marxism with the “reality of contemporary...

Read these two posts together. Art brings up an interesting issue. Why can capitalism not survive in a no-growth world? Because that's how we set it up. If we set it up differently, it would work differently. If we designed economic policy for a no-growth world, we could live in a no-growth world. You see it in economic models all the time. We're almost there now, actually. We live in an almost-no-growth world, right? And yes, things are not very good. And even I have been calling for (or...

Theresa May’s speech this morning was trailed as a defence of free market capitalism. If that’s what it was, it failed because she failed to answer the big questions.... Stumbling and MumblingDucking questions about capitalism Chris Dillow | Investors Chronicle

Critique of David Harvey's reading of Das Kapital.Michael Roberts BlogCapital.150 part two: the economic reason for madnessMichael Roberts

Marx's capital (Volume 1) was published September 14, 1867, exactly 150 years ago. Below a few links to posts on Marx written over the years.What makes capitalism capitalism? (on the definitions of capitalism as a mode of production) Sraffa and Marxism or the Labor Theory of Value, what is it good for? (on the labor theory of value) Was Marx right? Nice of you to ask, but... (on common misconceptions about Marx)A Note on the Concept of Vulgar Economics (an important idea, often...

All these studies have one thing in common: they demonstrate that reflection on power relationships and property, which for a moment was thought to have been annihilated after the Soviet disaster, in reality is only beginning. Europe and France must take their rightful place. The magic work — "power." Le blog de Thomas Piketty — EnglishRe-thinking the capital code Thomas Piketty | Professor at EHESS and at the Paris School of Economics

An inconvenient truth — history. However, capitalism, alone or chiefly, cannot be blamed. Historical development is a dialectical process with many inputs and a variety of factors that "could have been different." But they weren't different for a variety of reasons, some economic, some social, and some political , that occurred with bourgeois liberalization. The transition away from monarchy and feudalism influenced historical events not only through individual choices but also shaped it...

Value is a social relation. As such, it is ‘immaterial but objective.’ The ‘phantom-like objectivity’ of value arises because ‘not an atom of matter enters into the objectivity of commodities as values’. Their status as values contrasts with ‘the coarsely sensuous objectivity of commodities as physical objects. We may twist and turn a single commodity as we wish; it remains impossible to grasp it as a thing possessing value.’ The value of commodities is, like many other features of social...

An international campaign by capitalist politicians and media has been unleashed against president Nicolás Maduro’s Venezuelan government. It has been used by Labour’s Blairista right wing to try to weaken Jeremy Corbyn. In Spain, the spectre of Venezuela has been held up as a warning of what a Podemos-led government would mean. The close links of Podemos leader Pablo Iglesias to Hugo Chávez regime in the past has facilitated this idea. Across Latin America this campaign has been conducted...

Imagine we lived in a feudal society in which lords exploited peasants. A defender of the system might argue that wealthy lords perform a useful service; they protect their peasants from invasion and theft thus giving them security and a little prosperity. And competition between lords should improve these services; bad lords will find their lands and peasants seized by better lords who become wealthier as a result.Such an argument would, however, miss the point. The case against feudalism...