Tag Archives: Marxism

Recent extreme volatility and sharp drops in US stock markets underscore the instability of capitalism yet again. As many commentators now note, another economic downturn looms. We know that all the reforms and regulations imposed in the wake of the Great Depression of the 1930s failed to prevent both smaller downturns between 1941 and 2008 and then another big crash in 2008. Capitalism’s instability has, for centuries, resisted all efforts to overcome it with or without government...

Didn't know that Marx was a feminist? Then you don't know about his wife, Jenny von Westphalen Marx. She was an aristocrat become social and political activist. Jacobin has the story of her life. ... we are in union with Marx, “to overthrow all relations in which man is a debased, enslaved, forsaken, despicable being”.... The German term Marx uses that is translated "man" here is Menschen. While it is correct to translate Menschen as "man" in the generic, non-gender specific sense, the...

The ‘Matching functions’ mentioined in the quote explain unemployment by assuming that finding a job or a worker takes time. And this does explain unemployment – part of it (2%-point?). The rest must be explained by crises and the inability of the market system to create jobs. As is clear from comparing graph 2, short-lived crises cause lower levels of job creation and higher levels of job destruction. Basically, these swings are not even that large. But together they lead to a fast...

Part 1 is here if you missed it when linked to here at MNE when it came out. The post begins with an analysis of geopolitics that is quite good. Its' a long piece and this is the most section that is most relevant to current events. Williams sets up a hypothetical scenario to examine the relevance of MMT to the issue has he has constructed it, which I think is a "good move." The future is uncertain, of course, so it makes sense to address a hypothetical case that seems to be...

...there is, if you like, a third way between utopian communism on the one hand and technocratic tweaks on the other. It begins from the idea that ten years of stagnant productivity might mean we are now at the phase of capitalism that Marx foresaw: At a certain stage of development, the material productive forces of society come into conflict with the existing relations of production or – this merely expresses the same thing in legal terms – with the property relations within the...

Weekend reading.This post presents the Marxist position on human nature as socially embedded and historically determined in contrast to the the natural law position of classical liberalism that is based on individualism.Longish, but clearly written and informative.CounterfireMarxism and Human Nature Elaine Graham-Leigh

MMT economists advocate that the central government – the federal government in the U.S. – can and should employ every person who desires to work but cannot find work in the private sector at a living wage. This living wage, the MMT supporters point out, would function as a minimum wage, since no person would work for a private employer who offers a wage lower than the wage the government offers. Assuming such a reform could be implemented under the capitalist system, if your search for...

Indeed, the real issue ahead is the battle for trade and investment globally between China and the US. The US is out to curb and control China’s ability to expand domestically and globally as an economic power. At the workshop, Jude Woodward, author of The US vs China: Asia’s new cold war?, outlined the desperate measures that the US is taking to try to isolate China, block its economic progress and surround it militarily. But this policy is failing. Trump may have launched his tariff...

First there was the Great Gatsby curve. Then there was the Proust index. Now, thanks to Neil Irwin, we have the Marx ratio. Each, in their different way, attempts to capture the ravages of contemporary capitalism. But the Marx ratio is a bit different. It was published in the New York Times. Its aim is to capture one of the underlying determinants of the obscene levels of inequality in the United States today—not class mobility or the number of years of national income growth lost to the...

The Dynamics of Capitalism: Money and Financialization Greta Krippner – The Power of Abstraction: Marx on Money and Credit Aaron Sahr – From Pen Strokes to Keystrokes: the Production of Money in Early and Contemporary Capitalism Michael Löwy: Marxism and Romantic Anticapitalism Michael Löwy is Emeritus Research Director at the CNRS (French National Center for Scientific Research) Lecturer, École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales. Immanuel Wallerstein: The Contemporary Relevance of...