Creatively Advancing into Novelty
“Corporations don’t have values; they have an image…Their main objective is to make money.” —Merry Mahaffey It’s not uncommon for corporations to espouse “corporate values.” We’ve all heard this phrase before. But it should be obvious to anyone that these “values” are little more than meaningless slogans or tag-lines; they’re not meant to be taken…
“By introducing possibilities of such action that go beyond what the situation would otherwise allow, God expands our freedom. Violence as we ordinarily understand it restricts the freedom of its object.” –John B. Cobb, Jr., process-relational theologian Most of us have a decent understanding of what freedom is, or at least we think we do….
“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…
“It is arguably the single most important concept in the entire logic of capitalism: commodification, more specifically the commodification of labour. A commodified world is one in which the vast majority of the population is dependent for their economic survival on the sale of their labour power as a commodity in the form of wage…
“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…
“[Relaxation and rigidity are at opposite ends of the spectrum], and the rigidity of our quantitative way of understanding our world has boxed things and set up very complicated, but still linear, relationships. This is a product of industry, of mechanization, [and] this kind of thinking goes way back. And the problem with this thinking…