real utopias

Engels once said of certain critics of Marx’s Capital, Volume I that they “took more trouble to understand it wrongly than was necessary to understand it correctly” (Engels, “Supplement”). So it is with those who claim that Marx’s Labor Theory of Value (LTOV) cannot account for the way demand affects the price of a commodity. Theirs is not a critique of Marxist economics, but a critique of a misunderstanding of Marxist economics, though admittedly a misunderstanding that is defended by plenty of so-called Marxists. In this essay I will argue that use-value is in fact central to the LTOV without creating any irresolvable contradiction in it, as some have claimed (Keen, “Use­Value, Exchange Value, and the Demise of Marx’s Labor Theory of Value” 107). Instead, we must recognize a dialectical relation between use-value and exchange-value, while maintaining that socially necessary labor time is the source of all exchange-value.

The revolution that started on January 25 was about citizens keen to overcome "torture, corruption, injustice and unemployment." They sought to hold more accountable a government that treated Egypt like a "piece of property that can be divided among a few" while the rest "sit and watch." They came from all social classes, religions and backgrounds. And most of them were demonstrating for the first time in their lives. In the process, they gave credence to the view that "Egyptians are capable of the impossible if they stand united."

A Slovenian philosopher and ardent supporter of the Greek extreme left political party SYRIZA has suggested that to ensure a democratic future all those who do not support SYRIZA should be given one-way tickets to the gulag.

 

A few years after having written my first book on bilingualism (Life with Two Languages: An Introduction to Bilingualism), I contacted Professor Noam Chomsky at MIT to ask him whether he would be kind enough to give me a bit of his time to talk about bilinguals and bilingualism. He very kindly accepted and the interview took place in his office in the now famous Building 20 at MIT.

After years of relying on state spending to supercharge growth, China’s new prime minister, Li Keqiang, said the government would seek to unleash the nation’s creative energies.

In Greece, the perils of a drawn-out debt crisis are imprinted on its younger population — whose unemployment numbers are soaring — who turn to selling their bodies for money and to a dangerous, cheap new street drug for escape.

Operating a workplace as a democracy in the contemporary business world isn't easy, Morgan says, but worker cooperatives are showing the way while thriving and multiplying

British literary theorist Terry Eagleton’s new book starts by asking you to imagine a similar conversation, a group of university students discussing Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights. For Eagleton, the problem with both conversations is the same: Both discuss everything about these novels except the qualities that make them novels, works of imaginative literature.

interview on the boston bombings, us terror inflicted abroad, drones, obama's rebranding of bush administration policies, the national defense authorization act and other topics (more wise words.

LATEST NEW INTERVIEW OF PROFESSOR NOAM CHOMSKY.

The one SF trope embraced more than any other by the mainstream in recent years is the dystopia. From Wool to The Hunger Games, it seems like everyone’s looking ahead to a world of scarcity, drastic inequality and state brutality. The societies of most Western countries have been operating in crisis mode – and it’s a very long, drawn-out crisis – for the past few years, and perhaps there’s something to be said for throwing up a worst-case scenario and trying to shock people out of their complacency with the threat of Big Brother. Then again, maybe it’s time for another view of the social future. One that suggests a direction we might want to go in, rather than what we should be desperate to avoid.

Marx supported universal suffrage as a democratic demand, but he hardly prioritized "electioneering" at the time. Later, he did argue that workers should participate in elections where possible, but so did Proudhon, if not in words, then in deeds. Proudhon stood for election himself twice in 1848, winning office in June and serving in the Constituent Assembly, where he generally opposed workers taking to the barricades, as they did later that same June.

  “However like Columbo Kliman usually goes on to say ‘and one more thing?

Noam Chomsky "How The World Works" http://t.co/96sZCTWuBS