This year is the 150th anniversary of the publication of Darwin The Origin of Species but also of the publication of Marx’s first economic writings after his more detailed study of the workings of capitalism, A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy. The Preface to this work contains a summary of Marx and Engels’ materialist conception of history. Marx comments that during the course of his studies he reached the conclusion that the explanation of social development was not to be found merely in the realm of ideas but rather in the material conditions of life, and that...
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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 state, international trade, and the world market. The first book on the topic of capital was to have included four “sections” dealing with: capital in general, competition, credit, and share capital. In other words, the two chapters of Contribution (“The Commodity” and “Money, or Simple...
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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 propaganda. When times are good, its contempt for working-class aspirations borders on the domineering, despite the fact that the working class not only runs capitalism from top to bottom but also compliantly does its bit to legitimate the system during elections. When times are bad,...
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Engels bought a copy of Darwin’s The Origin of Species as soon as it was published. Two books of importance were published in 1859, one in June and the other in November. Each one stands at the opposite pole of popularity at the time they were published. And this contrast has persisted up to the present day. One hundred and fifty years after their publication, one is being celebrated as one of the most significant and audacious books ever to be published; the other is virtually forgotten. Both were written with some degree of reluctance by their authors, requiring...
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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 in “Bonus reduced”). For example: …major financial institutions continued to pay massive bonuses to executives despite losing even more massive amounts of money. Last year Merrill Lynch essentially collapsed, but still paid almost 700 executives cash bonuses of more than $1 million each. (Boston Globe,...
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The severe economic crisis has dominated newspaper headlines – day after day for at least the past six months – like no other story in recent history. The massive layoffs, losses and bankruptcies have grown as familiar as the daily death-count in Iraq and Afghanistan. The ranks of the unemployed are overflowing and no job seems secure. Not only is the situation spinning out of control, but workers are being reminded how little control they have over their lives. Their own futures are in the hands of business leaders and politicians, who themselves can do nothing more...
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We continue describing how things could be like in a socialist society, where there would be no need for money. 1. Environment Bear in mind the aim here is an excursion into the benefits of money totally disappearing from our lives; for all to have access to the necessities of life and in return to contribute their effort for the common good. Havoc has been wreaked on the environment by corporations and others with the full consent of successive governments around the world – for the acquisition of necessary resources but using unnecessarily harmful methods. Peak oil and climate...
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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 down the entire capitalist class, if we are to take our cue from Lenin (The State and Revolution). The truth, however, is at once simpler and more complex: an anti-capitalist revolution cannot stop with promising capitalism’s eventual replacement worldwide but must make immediate global common...
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We are now in the middle of the biggest economic and financial crisis since the 1930s. In a world that has the potential to produce enough food, clothes, housing and the other amenities of life for all, factories are closing down, workers are being laid off, unemployment is growing, houses are being repossessed and people are having to tighten their belts. There are in fact already 16 million officially recorded unemployed in the EU. Outside Europe the situation is worse and people are rioting because they can’t afford even the basic necessities of life. Capitalism in relative “good” times...
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Socialist society will have no need for money. This will profoundly affect all aspects of life. Removing money from the current economic equation would strike most people as impossible, unthinkable, absolutely imponderable. Everything we do, every transaction we make, from a simple cup of tea to sending a space probe to Mars, from birth to death and at every step in between, money has become a necessary part of getting what we require. It has become an accepted, entrenched method of acquiring anything and everything but it wasn’t always so and in a genuine socialist system money will be...
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