Judith Butler — the art of branding fashionable mumbo jumbo .[embedded content] Judith Butler’s theory of identity rests on the idea that there is nothing between the Scylla of the metaphysical ‘modernist’ subject and the Charybdis of the totally deconstructed identity where the subject becomes nothing but a fictitious fantasy. But this can’t be right. The social constructivist anti-essentialism is unsatisfactory and ends up in an idealist ‘slippery slope.’...

Another belated reprint, from The Conversation, 27 June Opposition Leader Peter Dutton’s plan to build seven nuclear power plants in Australia has attracted plenty of critical attention. But there’s a striking feature which has received relatively little discussion or criticism: the nuclear plants would be publicly owned and operated, similar to the National Broadband Network (NBN). On the contrary, it received enthusiastic endorsement from free-market advocates such as The...

Just look for the many abundant contradictions. 

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"There is in every society or neighbourhood an ordinary or average rate, both of wages and profit, in every different employment of labour and stock... There is likewise in every society or neighbourhood an ordinary or average rate of rent... These ordinary or average rates may be called the natural rates of wages, profit and rent, at the time and place in which they commonly prevail. When the price of any commodity is neither more nor less than what is sufficient to pay the rent...

The third in the famous trilogy of spurious Chinese curses that begins with “May you live in interesting times” is “May all your wishes come true”. I may have triggered this curse with a piece I wrote for The Conversation in March. headlined “Dutton wants a ‘mature debate’ about nuclear power. By the time we’ve had one, new plants will be too late to replace coal” which ended Talk about hypothetical future technologies is, at this point, nothing more than a distraction. If Dutton...

My latest in The Guardian henever I mention concepts such as gross domestic product (GDP), there’s a high probability that arguments about the merits of “growth” and “degrowth” will erupt. Almost invariably, these arguments are stuck in a conceptual framework that’s 50 years out of date, or even more. The national accounting system, of which GDP is a central part, was developed in the 1930s. It was designed to measure the working of the industrial economy that had emerged in the...

A phrase I hardly ever use and here’s why. 

As an advocate of Post Keynesian economics, I reject Marx’s economic theories in the three volumes of Capital because they are founded on the false Labour Theory of Value (LTV). Here is a concise case against the LTV, although I limit myself only to some of the most serious criticisms of the theory: (1) Marx’s Argument for the LTV is Logically Flawed: Marx does not prove it is a real Empirically-Relevant Concept In chapter 1, volume 1 of Capital, Marx assumes that, when one commodity...

The Marxist Paul Cockshott presents his defence of the Labour Theory of Value in this video:[embedded content]It appears that Paul Cockshott defends the Labour Theory of Value (LTV) found in volume 1 of Capital, albeit in a grossly simplified way.He defines the LTV in three senses, as follows:(1) The average price of a good will be proportional to the average amount of labour used to make it;(2) The value added in an industry will thus be roughly proportional to the labour it uses.(3) Price...