Creatively Advancing into Novelty
“I’d like to talk about an idea that is often abused. The idea is the following: If we want to have workers [be] better off, well then we should do more in the way of educating them. This is a kind of idea that somehow conveys the dangerous notion that the unemployment suffered by many,…
“Lets remember what a market is. A market is not what is taught in the university; it’s not about supply and demand. Markets do not supply what people demand. They supply what people can afford. That’s a very different thing. We could easily right now come up with the demands we think a society like…
“The fact that the state regulates private capitalist enterprises and operates state capitalist enterprises does not reduce the capitalist structure of an economy. So long as employers, private or state, hire laborers to produce commodities and generate profits that the employers “exclusively” receive, the economy has a capitalist structure. So long as it is exclusively…
“The links between capitalism and racism have also been well documented. It is a little recognized fact that the breakdown of union power in the late 1960s was facilitated, in part, by the racial tensions that spread through heavily unionized industries (especially steel and automotive) in the wake of pushes to desegregate the unions. Working…
“The salient idea of process philosophy is that the world consists of—and must, in consequence, be understood in terms of—changes rather than fixed stabilities. But from the time of Pythagoras, various philosophers have taught that while the world’s phenomena may be ever-changing, the laws that govern the comportment of these changes are stable and fixed…
“In the “Fragment” Marx imagines an economy in which the main role of machines is to produce, and the main role of people is to supervise them. He was clear that, in such an economy, the main productive force would be information. The productive power of such machines as the automated cotton-spinning machine, the telegraph…
“If democracy is a genuine foundational social value, it ought to govern the workplace first and foremost” – Richard Wolff I was recently engaged in an (admittedly obsessive) online debate about the ramifications of certain cities like Seattle raising their minimum wage to $15/hr. I kind of hate to link to it, but an article…
“Fear of ET as invasive colonists presupposes that the aliens have no culture or history of their own — that they are merely an anonymous, imperial horde. Andrea Smith has written of “the racial logic of Orientalism” as marking “certain peoples or nations as inferior and as posing a constant threat to the well-being of…
“The Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938 set maximum hours and minimum wages for most categories of workers…These and other measures protecting workers and the public came to be known as the social “safety net”. In this analogy, the participants in the capitalist system are like acrobats swinging on a trapeze far above the floor…
“We use machines to make our labor more productive. Productivity is a measure of the amount of use-value created in a span of time. Since, for Marx, value is determined by labor time an increase in productivity (in use-values) does not create a corresponding increase in value. The same amount of value is created, just…