Tag Archives: Karl Marx

Magpie critiques Paul Mason's criticism of MMT from the POV of a Marxist.Magpie's Asymmetric WarfareGetting all Tied Up (2) Magpie

Distinguishing currency acceptance from currency value therefore carries a social significance. So long as a sovereign government’s currency is accepted, neither the currency nor society is ultimately beholden to the law of value. Since a currency can be made viable irrespective of (marxist) value considerations, a currency-issuing government can override the law of value whenever this is the political will. This opens the way for an extension of not-for-profit activity and, if desired, a...

Marx’s dialectic is unique, Marshall says, because it straddles two distinctive ideas of modernization and modernism. Typically, analyses of each have been set apart. Modernization, on the one hand, has meant sustained economic development and industrial expansion, large-scale social planning and urban growth, bureaucratic regulation and rationality, the shattering of traditional cultures, perpetual progress and productivity. On the other hand, modernism suggests something more artistic and...

Marx, MMT, wage labor and surplus value.Bill Mitchell – billy blogMarxists getting all tied up on MMT Bill Mitchell | Professor in Economics and Director of the Centre of Full Employment and Equity (CofFEE), at University of Newcastle, NSW, AustraliaSee alsoThe Radford Free PressA Quick Note: Utopian or Real? Peter RadfordAlsolibcomThe Iron Fist Behind Exchange: The Problems With The Freed Market Ivysyn

What then is the escape from capitalism? What would be the essential features of a socialist economy, one the would be really achievable? Exactly the right question. It's not just about there but getting from here to there. The former is utopian, the latter involves being realistic. This is not primarily a theoretical question but a practical one.Marx concluded that capitalism is based on a monetary production economy, and that monetary production economies tend toward capitalism, as China...

I  (Tom Hickey) recommend reading this paper now that "socialism" is the new buzz word. You may recall Professor Wolff from The Poverty of Liberalism, In Defense of Anarchy, and A Critique of Pure Tolerance (with Herbert Marcuse and Barrington Moore, Jr.), which were popular at the time of the "countercultural revolution" in the Sixties and Seventies. He also published scholarly works on Emmanuel Kant and Karl Marx. He blogs at The Philosopher's Stone, which I follow and occasionally offer...

Fact: If you use the word "carceral" instead of "prison" your argument immediately becomes more persuasive. Good praxis is to use words like "praxis" that nobody understands. -- Matthew Yglesias (5 April 2019, on Twitter) A large academic literature exists around Antonio Gramsci's Prison Notebooks. Topics discussed include the relationship of civil society to the state, hegemony, the contrast between consent and coercion, class alliances in political parties, Fordism, the contrast...

This is a good historical backgrounder and it should be read for that reason alone. But Michael Roberts also brings up other issues that follow upon this history that are relevant to the current debate, at least some of which that have been brought up previously in the comments here. Highly recommended. As Maria Ivanova has shown, there remains a blind belief that the crisis-prone nature of the latter can be managed by means of ‘money artistry’, that is, by the manipulation of money,...

I tend to be doubtful, albeit sometimes amused, by comments drawing on Hegel. But I thought I would adopt some of that sort of language for a post. Capitalism constantly revolutionizes production, leading to a fantastic increase in productivity. An ever more diverse set of commodities is produced, including for consumption. Machines for making, controlling, and communicating with other machines, are constantly being introduced, reducing the labor time needed to produce any commodity....

A perennial question for Marxists is how to overturn capitalism. Will institutional changes that improve the lot of workers but fall short of ending capitalism immediately help or harm this cause? To the extent that social struggle is a learning-by-doing process, it may be that the securing of small gains can whet the appetite for more significant gains and that institutional reforms of a transformational nature can place revolution on a more secure footing if and when it does occur. But...