Jason Moore is a key figure in the World-Ecology Research Network and has produced a text that is required reading. It is a challenging read which assumes the reader is familiar with Marx’s critique of political economy but Moore and his co-thinkers seek to bring nature to the centre of historical change and a dialectical understanding of capitalism to the heart of the analysis.
Karl Marx believed that work, at its best, is what makes us human. It allows us to live, be creative and flourish. But under capitalism he saw workers aliena...
The long read: Before he entered politics, Yanis Varoufakis, the iconoclastic Greek finance minister at the centre of the latest eurozone standoff wrote this searing account of European capitalism and how the left can learn from Marx’s mistakes
Back last summer, there was growing concern that the world economy, already making the weakest recovery from the deepest slump in production and investment since 1945, was slowing down. Indeed, it ...
monopoly-man-running-with-money-bagIn the first part of this three-part series, Adam Booth looked at the sharing economy, with the rise of companies like Uber and AirBnB.
Paul Mason’s latest book, PostCapitalism, presents a vision of a new society, without the horrors of the current capitalist system. However, he no longer sees the possibility of mass working-class struggle to change society and dismisses socialism as an old idea whose time has passed. Peter Taaffe reviews.
In the first part of this three-part series, Adam Booth looked at the sharing economy, with the rise of companies like Uber and AirBnB. In the second part, we examine the impact that new technologies and business models will have on the nature of work and jobs. The trend under capitalism is towards more precarious employment and rising inequality.
The central weakness of Mason’s analysis is his failure to take account of the inevitable resistance of the ruling class and their state to his project. Rather than contemplating the future, we’ll have to fight for it. No surprise there. A future without capitalism is well worth fighting for, but ‘networked individuals’ will only achieve their freedom along with the socialist transformation of society.
The left “needs to abandon its mythology of the ‘liberation of the productive forces’”, Ned argues. “Instead of that narrative of progress, we need to realise that industrialism is a 200-year-old bubble that is beginning to burst.”
However, both the Keen-Minsky debt school and the behaviourist ‘animal spirits’ school have one thing in common. They see the flaws of capitalism in the financial sector only. In contrast, Marx posits the ultimate cause of capitalist crises in the capitalist production process, specifically in production for profit. That does not mean the financial sector and, in particular, the size and movement of credit does not play any role in capitalist crises. On the contrary, the growth of credit and fictitious capital (as Marx called speculative investment in stocks, bonds and other forms of money assets) picks up precisely in order to compensate for the downward pressure on profitability in the accumulation of real capital.
In my last post on Greece ( I said it was ten minutes past midnight for the Greek government and the Eurogroup credit institutions in getting an agreement to release outstanding funds so that the G...
The only way to change the structure of wealth in society, is to change the way we produce and share, by producing and distributing wealth differently, we change the structure of society itself. The preamble of constitution of the IWW states this quite well: “The army of production must be organized, not only for everyday struggle with capitalists, but also to carry on production when capitalism shall have been overthrown. By organizing industrially we are forming the structure of the new society within the shell of the old”
Last week, I presented a paper at the annual meeting of the American Economics Association (ASSA) as part of a joint session between the AEA and the Union for Radical Political Economy (URPE). At this joint session, Marxist and heterodox economists presented papers and mainstream economists commented on them as ‘discussants’. My paper was entitled…
In Defense of Marxism The Sharing Economy, the Future of Jobs, and “PostCapitalism” - part two In Defense of Marxism But as Engels stresses elsewhere (in Socialism: Utopian and Scientific), the “ascent of man from the kingdom of necessity to the...
CounterCurrents.org Marxism And Ecology: Common Fonts Of A Great Transition CounterCurrents.org “By destroying the circumstances of this metabolism” related to “the eternal natural condition” governing human production, this same process, Marx...
I am grateful to Maria Chehonadskih for her lengthy review of Molecular Red. However, I do not think she gives an accurate account of my book. That inattention obscures rather than clarifies what might otherwise be some interesting points of disagreement. Her review is in no sense comradely. She seems to prefer to score some quick points. I’ll take responding to it as an opportunity to give a Cliff Notes version of my argument.
In the final part of his series on the rise of the sharing economy, Adam Booth reviews Paul Mason's new book, PostCapitalism, about the impact of information technology and its contradictory contribution within the crisis-ridden capitalism system. What is the way forward for society in order to utilise the abundance of technology and wealth we see around us today?
In the first of a three-part article, Adam Booth examines the rise of the sharing economy, which has featured heavily in the media because of firms like AirBnB and Uber. These new models are presented as offering a revolutionary new dynamic phase in the life of capitalism. But the reality under capitalism is far from this utopian promise.
Socialist thought is re-emerging at the forefront of the movement for global ecological and social change. In the face of the planetary emergency, theorists have unearthed a powerful ecological critique of capitalism at the foundations of Marx’s materialist conception of history. This has led to a more comprehensive conception of socialism rooted in Marx’s analysis of the rift in “the universal metabolism of nature” and his vision of sustainable human development. This work resonates with other approaches for understanding and advancing a Great Transition. Such a social and ecological transformation will require a two-step strategy. First, we must mount struggles for radical reforms in the present that challenge the destructive logic of capital. Second, we must build the broad movement to carry out the long revolutionary transition essential for humanity’s continued development and survival. - See more at: http://www.greattransition.org/publication/marxism-and-ecology#sthash.M8zbagkN.dpuf
Leftist journalist and broadcaster, Paul Mason, has a new book out at the end of this month. It's called ‘Postcapitalism’. I don’t have a copy but Mason has written a long article in the British n...
In Marx and the Common, Luca Basso offers an articulated analysis of Karl Marx's anthropological insights, connecting the element of individual realisation to the collective dimension of working-class struggle and of communism.
On June 17, 2015 the Russian International Affairs Council (RIAC) and the Valdai International Discussion Club will hold a seminar “Global Alternatives to Left-Wing Powers in the 21st Century: Marxism and Other Ideologies”. The meeting will be broadcast online.
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