Dirty gossip about the capitalist mode of production Guess who’s not getting that rose garden??? You would have to search long and hard to find someone who was better at sticking it to the working class than The Economist. It has perfected one of the most truly remarkable posturing acts in the annals of...
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  Erin McKean, a lexicographer writing in the Boston Globe, gives us a dictionary tour of today’s corporate capitalism and its private jargon that lights up a few interesting dark alleys. “The Word” of the day is “bonus” (as...
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  It is not uncommon to hear leftists talk knowingly of “ongoing struggles” when they project the day after tomorrow of an anti-capitalist revolution, as if it weren’t really over yet with the expropriation of the capitalist class. The working class must evidently “smash” the capitalist state and set up a “proletarian” régime holding...
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Advocates of reform often make the mistake of reducing capitalism to a logical structure rather than seeing it “holistically” — as a dynamic process. Even as they note its continued evolution, when they talk about changing it, their interest tends to focus on parts and wholes, on mechanical interactions. Hence, they usually assume it...
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If we may go by the trend emerging from the presidential primary results so far, we very likely will see the end of the CheneyBush era next November. Voters both Democratic and Republican have turned out in large, often record-breaking numbers to make preliminary choices from among the presidential candidates who have offered themselves....
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We read in the Boston Globe (Friday, January 4th) that the results of the Iowa caucuses among Democrats and Republicans are important for the unprecedentedly intense grassroots interest they reveal in the upcoming presidential election. But more to the point, to the extent voters in Iowa are still trying to make those two creaky...
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R. What is the condition of the working class today? How do you see the status of people who work for a living? W. Speaking very generally, in the early 21st Century, it’s true that certain luxuries are more easily available: it seems that everybody has television, running water, electricity. Certain consumer goods are...
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While you might not be surprised to learn that it’s customary at Holocaust commemorative events for German politicians to remain silent , you might find it interesting to know who else shows up at them. Remember the folks who brought 100,000 dead Iraqis shock and awe?...
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Now that it has become comfortable, even de rigueur, to admit capitalism can’t necessarily deliver the goods, we hear a lot less about that old standby, the standard of living. Socialists have often pointed out that capitalism is much better at providing us with poverty than with a living, and that we should more...
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The concept of turnover is related to production for exchange, in particular to the production of surplus value by wagelaborers. If society becomes the owner of the means of production, then what happens to surpluslabor and the production of surplusvalue? Surplusvalue is of course a form of exchangevalue, the moneyform of commodities produced by...
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