Tag Archives: Marxism

[embedded content] Robert Paul Wolff always worth. Should read his Understanding Marx. He surprisingly says that Analytical Marxism has taken over Marxism. To get to Marxism he had to learn economics, the classical political economy of the Ricardian kind, and learn linear algebra. Hegelianism was not really central to the message (in my view, but he does say he hates Hegel). Labor Theory of Value explained, but he does not discuss Piero Sraffa's contributions directly here. There is no way...

By David FieldsNote: The references below are drawn from The Marx-Engels Reader, edited by Robert C. Tucker.Is Marx’s concern with aspects of alienation subsumed in his mature writings? To suggest so is a falsity. Marx’s depiction of the proletariat becoming, in the Hegelian sense, emancipated from the objective conditions of estranged labour, is not withered as the analysis moves toward the technical conditions of production. Marx’s humanism is still apparent.In Wages, Labour, and...

A Marxist called “Jehu” who writes at The Real Movement blog challenges me here with four questions: Jehu, “Four Questions for LK on Money,” The Real Movement, February 20, 2016. His four questions are as follows: (1) Did not Marx predict the collapse of production on the basis of exchange value?(2) Did this collapse occur in the 1930s just as Marx predicted it would?(3) To save capitalism was it not necessary to sever gold from fiat?(4) What was the implication of the collapse of the gold...

In a word: no.Why? Because an economy with more and more automation based on private enterprise and private capitalist production could still sell its output and obtain money profits, if a government managed the demand-side of the economy by providing a guaranteed income (with, say, taxes on consumption, property, and ownership of financial and real assets and returns from those assets, with the shortfall covered by central bank money creation). As long as the balance of payments functioned...

Chapter 12 of volume 1 of Capital is called “The Concept of Relative Surplus Value” and it deals with yet further aspects of surplus value.Marx points to another way of increasing surplus value. He considers this representation of the working day: Working Day 1: A-----------B--CWorking Day 2: A-----B′---B--C AB represents the necessary labour-time equivalent to the value of maintaining and reproducing workers. BC therefore represents surplus labour.In Working Day 2, the total length of the...

From Louis Boudin’s book The Theoretical System of Karl Marx in the Light of Recent Criticism (1920): “The appearance in 1894 of the third volume of Capital created a sensation in interested circles. While it does not stand in any direct relation to the Revisionist movement, it can hardly be denied that it made its formal argumentation more plausible. The solution of the Great Contradiction contained in the third volume, and the rest of the matter therein contained and intimately connected...

Chapter 10 of volume 1 of Capital is called “The Working Day” (Marx 1990: 340), and it deals with aspects of the working day in capitalism.Marx divides the chapter into seven sections: (1) The Limits of the Working Day;(2) The Voracious Appetite for Surplus Labour;(3) Branches of English Industry without Legal Limits to Exploitation(4) Day-Work and Night-Work. The Shift System(5) The Struggle for a Normal Working Day(6) The Struggle for a Normal Working Day. Laws for the Compulsory...

In 1904, Rudolf Hilferding wrote a response to Böhm-Bawerk (1896) called “Böhm-Bawerk’s Criticism of Marx” (Hilferding 1949 [1904]).In this essay of Hilferding, we have a fascinating confirmation of the way in which the early Marxists were concerned to still vindicate the law of value in volume 1 of Capital – the idea that commodities tend to exchange at pure labour values – as an empirical theory.Like Engels, they seized on Marx’s statement in Chapter 10 of volume 3 of Capital as follows:...

In the video below, which struck me as very interesting, especially his remarks on his brother Christopher Hitchens.[embedded content]The amusing meme that the American neoconservatives who planned the Iraq war (which Christopher Hitchens supported so vehemently) were the new liberal Trotskyists is a favourite of libertarians (see here), and there may well be an element of truth to it, given that the neoconservative foreign policy was a radical departure from the realist school of foreign...

The relationship is a favourite of Marxists and even other leftists, and the usual line is: capitalism is inherently imperialistic.But is it? There are different forms of capitalism, and, above all, laissez faire ideology is not monolithic, and it comes in different forms.And it’s rather obvious that some of the most vehement capitalist ideologues are also the most vehemently anti-imperialist. Just think of Murray Rothbard or Ron Paul.For instance, just take Ron Paul’s comments in the videos...