People are angry at the banks. They blame them for causing the crisis. They blame them for having to be bailed out and then still paying their top people obscene bonuses. They see them as producing nothing, just making money out of shuffling money around. Some of these criticisms are justified. Some are not....
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Capitalism
Who bailed out the bankers?
Socialist Guide to Marx’s Capital (2. The Starting Point)
Marx begins his examination of capitalism in Capital with the analysis of the commodity; and he succinctly explains the reason for his starting point in the first paragraph: “The wealth of societies in which the capitalist mode of production prevails appears as an ‘immense collection of commodities’; the individual commodity appears as its ...
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Socialist Guide to Marx’s Capital (1. Intro)
This series of short articles will examine the first volume of Marx’s Capital from a “socialist perspective,” which is to say, with an eye to how an understanding of capitalism can contribute to our understanding of socialism. I should recognize the obvious fact, right away, that a worker hardly needs to read Capital to...
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Haiti – An Un-natural Disaster
The earthquake in Haiti and similar misfortunes are presented as unavoidable natural disasters. To some extent, this is true. But it ignores the consequences of the deliberate pursuit of profit at the expense of environmental protection. It is not a coincidence that the number of victims of recent disasters such as the Asian tsunami...
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Real life monopoly
When we were children around about the time that we were tiring of Ludo and Snakes and Ladders we discovered the board game Monopoly. I can’t remember the details or the rules – something about cards that said such things as “Pass Go, collect £200″, “Go to jail”, “Get out of jail”. In real...
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Cab-ride to capitalism: servitude by the majority
Everyday taxicab rides may appear to be lacklustre experiences that are quickly forgotten. However, this might not always be the case. Sometimes our views of events may become clouded and we cannot see things for what they really are. However, after taking many cab-rides in an urban city, I began to see things in...
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This year’s Nobel Prize for Economics
This year’s Nobel Prize for Economics Every year the Bank of Sweden awards a prize to some economist, often called the Nobel Prize for Economics even though it wasn’t established by the old merchant of death himself. It has in fact only been going since 1968. Usually the prize goes to some obscure economist...
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Marx’s Contribution to the Critique of Reformism
A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, first published in 1859, only consists of two chapters (apart from its famous Preface). Marx had intended it to be the first installment in a massively ambitious project that was to include six separate “books” addressing, respectively, the topics of capital, landed property, wage labor, the...
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This Just In!
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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