“Let us”, President Sarkozy of France told the UN on 23 September, “rebuild together a regulated capitalism in which whole swathes of financial activity are not left to the sole judgment of market operators, in which banks do their job, which is to finance economic development rather than engage in speculation.” This would normally...
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ALB
The end of “neoliberalism”?
Marx or Keynes again
It is not just Marx whose ideas are now been looked at again. So are those of Keynes. While the German Finance Minister, Peer Steinbrück, of the Social Democratic Party, has said that “certain parts of Marx’s thinking are really not so bad” (Times, 20 October) his British counterpart, Labourite Alistair Darling said (typically)...
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Will Belgium survive?
Belgium is a patently artificial state inhabited by people speaking two different languages. It survived for many years with one of them (French) as the dominant language because it was the language of the ruling class. Now that this has ceased to be the case, and Dutch (Flemish) has also become a language of...
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How Capitalism Works (part 5)
AN ENTERPRISE’S RATE OF PROFIT is ihe ratio of the amount of profits it makes, say in a year, to the money-value of its assets at the beginning of that year. The average rate of profit of the whole economy is the ratio of total profit to total capital.The rate of profit would tend...
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How Capitalism Works (part 4)
In an exchange economy control over the use of the means of production is scattered among thousands of profit-seeking enterprises with no central co-ordination of decisions about the amount and the kind of wealth to be produced. Anarchy inevitably prevails. For a group of enterprises to make profits, its total productive capacity and output...
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How Capitalism Works (part 3)
To stick to the word’s original meaning only work which plays a direct part in producing wealth can be described as “productive”. Any other work would be “non-productive”. This is not to make a judgement as to its usefulness, but merely to record the fact that it does not result in any wealth being...
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How Capitalism Works (part 2)
The law of profits says that each enterprise strives to make the maximum amount of profits, and that each state strives to have the maximum amount of profits made by enterprises operating within its frontiers. An enterprise can only be said to “make” profits in the sense of acquiring through exchange more money than it...
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How Capitalism Works (part 1)
The reason the natural and industrial resources of the world are not used to provide the abundance they are capable of producing is to be sought, not in the realm of technology, but in that of economics. Economics is basically the study of what happens when wealth is exchanged — that is when it is...
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What Marx Should Have Said To Kropotkin
The following is the transcript of a talk given by Adam Buick to the 1994 Socialist Party of Great Britain Summer School, which was held that year at Ruskin College in Oxford, England. I once read a book which contained a sentence which began “As Marx said to Lenin …” This would not have...
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Profit Laundering
The Tax Justice Network thinks that world poverty can be effectively tackled by reforming the international system of taxing profits so as to eliminate tax havens and tax dodging – “profit laundering” as they aptly call it – by capitalist corporations. This would make no essential difference. World poverty is not caused by corporations...
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