Creatively Advancing into Novelty
“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…
“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…
In the economy we have constructed, more importance is placed on the invented world of products and currency than on the real, natural world. In this system our value as humans is determined by how much stuff we have. But no natural systems function this way. Natural systems do create greater abundance as they develop,…
“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…
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…
“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….
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…
“The ideas of economists and political philosophers, both when they are right and when they are wrong, are more powerful than is commonly understood. Indeed the world is ruled by little else. Practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influence, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist.” –John Maynard…