“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…
Category
Economics
Aliens Will Move Move to Earth and Compete in the Free Market
“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…
What is a social “safety net” and why do we need them?
“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…
Humans, Robots and Value Theory
“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…
Lack of Food is Not The Only Reason People Go Hungry: Thoughts on GMOs
The world has a surplus of food, but still people go hungry. They go hungry because they cannot afford to buy it. They cannot afford to buy it because the sources of wealth and the means of production have been captured and in some cases monopolized by landowners and corporations. The purpose of the biotech…
Producing in an Inhuman Way – or – Why Does Work Suck So Much?
“Marx’s innovation was to combine Smith and Feuerbach to derive an account of alienated labour. That is, the plight of the worker under capitalism is an instance of the way in which a person’s essence becomes detached from his or her existence; i.e. that workers live in a way that does not express their essence….
The final destination is nothing. The Movement is everything. // The Nordic Model of Social Democracy
Einar Gerhardsen, Prime Minister of Norway for most of the period between 1945 and 1965, once claimed there were two principal lessons he had learned from his time in government. …there will always be conflicts in a democratic society: between workers and employers, between the majority and groups who view themselves as marginalized, or between…
Generosity Should Hurt a Little
They all gave out of their wealth; but she, out of her poverty, put in everything–all she had to live on.” – Mark 12:44 In the above verse, Jesus is basically defining generosity by examining the effect the gift had on the life of the giver. The gifts of the rich people were meaningless in…