The only consistent market anarchist position: dynamic price signals coupled with looting.
And really, the only way markets could ever even approximate their claims of efficient distribution in societies with poverty is if some people get things for free.
Pete Davis talks to Josh Davis of the newly-founded Institute for Christian Socialism. Together, they talk about the intertwined history of left movements and Christianity.
This book review was helpful for someone like me who has heard of MMT but can't quite distinguish how it differs from standard Keynesian theory.
Riot is the recourse of surplus populations: both Marx's "industrial reserve army" and the lumpen, the excluded — those who are "chronically outside the formal wage, or 'structurally unemployed.' "
If someone were to make a movie about neoliberalism, there would need to be a starring role for the character of Paul Volcker. As chair of the Federal Reserve from 1979 to 1987, Volcker was the most powerful central banker in the world. These were the years when the industrial workers’ movement was defeated in the United States and the United Kingdom, and third-world debt crises exploded. Both of these owe something to Volcker
"Basic income is a real shot at utopia. Basic jobs takes that energy and idealism, and redirects it to perpetuate some of the worst parts of the current system. It’s better than nothing. But not by much."
Wayne Price's review of Kevin Carson's "Studies in Mutualist Political Economy"
Tim Barker's very good review of a book that seems interesting (especially the COST proposal) but that I'll probably not read.
"By doing away with single-family zoning, the city takes on high rent, long commutes, and racism in real estate in one fell swoop."
Kapitalism101's Law of Value series (I've not read/watched all of these yet).
"Mutualism is an economic theory and anarchist school of thought that advocates a society with free markets and occupation and use property norms. One implementation of this scheme involves the establishment of a mutual-credit bank that would lend to producers at a minimal interest rate, just high enough to cover administration. Mutualism is based on a version of the labor theory of value holding that when labor or its product is sold, in exchange it ought to receive goods or services embodying "the amount of labor necessary to produce an article of exactly similar and equal utility". Mutualism originated from the writings of philosopher Pierre-Joseph Proudhon."
"It is obviously true that one cannot understand the complexities of contemporary geopolitics and imperialism simply by reading Lenin and Bukharin. But it is equally true that if one ignores their key insights, it is not possible to make much sense of the otherwise bewildering set of events that is currently being played out on the international chessboard and, just as importantly, to come up with a coherent political strategy to oppose militarism, war, environmental destruction, and all the other horrors that capitalism creates. The framework Lenin and Bukharin developed a hundred years ago, taken as a methodology and not as a set of dogmas, retains its relevance for activists today."
Library Genesis has a PDF of the Penguin Classics version (translated by Ben Fowkes) of Marx's Capital.
"Ricardo was followed by two able and well-trained pupils — Marx and Marshall. Meanwhile English history had gone right round the corner, and landlords were not any longer the question. Now it was capitalists. Marx turned Ricardo’s argument round this way: Capitalists are very much like landlords. And Marshall turned it round the other way: Landlords are very much like capitalists. Just round the corner in English history you see two bicycles of the very same make — one being ridden off to the left and the other to the right."
"Keynes says the crisis comes about through a lack of ‘effective demand’, namely an unaccountable fall in investment and consumption and this causes profits and wages to fall. Marx says: let’s start with profits. If profits fall, then capitalists would stop investing, lay off workers and wages would drop and consumption would fall. Then there would be a lack of effective demand, as Keynesians like to put it, but this would not be due to a drop in ‘animal spirits’, or ‘confidence’ (we often hear that phrase from economists: ‘a lack of confidence’), or even due to ‘too high’ interest rates, but because profits are down. The problem lies in the nature of capitalist production, not in the finance sector."
It's still good.
The first randomized trial of industrial employment on workers reveals that people DON'T like being coerced from their land to work in sweatshops. Surprise!
The frustrating thing is that capitalists like Kevin Crissey and Jamie Baker have more class-consciousness than most workers.
Dyer Lum argues that the motivational force behind the Edmunds Anti-Polygamy Act is to crush the cooperative economy set up by Mormons in Utah.
"The spirit of Caesar, rendered powerless in religious systems, castrated of divine right in forms of political government, is entrenching itself in the economic system of the age. British and German empires, Spanish and Italian kingdoms, French and American republics, are but dead forms; the animating soul in each is the same. A common (economic) feeling has made them all akin. Statecraft exists for the furtherance of economic interests; forms of government are recognized as of secondary importance to "vested interests." Harrington's apothegm: 'Empire follows the balance of property,' is no longer disputable."
A handy collection of verses.
I thought this video was a good presentation of something that sounds so silly on its face ("anarcho-monarchism"). I'll always have a fondness for Distributism because it was reading GK Chesterton in high school that first got me interested in anti-capitalist thought. I've since realized that the libertarian socialist traditions make Distributism superfluous. But while I'd rather they keep their bourgeois families, kings, and popes to themselves... I'd be happy with three acres and a cow.
Eric Garner’s murder is not only about the justice system. It’s about how capitalism creates racialized categories of “surplus” people.
Some animations narrated with Libcom.org's "An Introduction to Capitalism"
"There are a myriad of ways one can object to the LTV, but the idea that is is nonsensical and incoherent is simply based on misunderstandings. One may well disagree with the premise that labour is the source of value (I do, simply because I have no positive reason to believe it). One may also endorse alternative theories over the LTV. But, based on a clear understanding, there is no a priori reason not to develop a comprehensive understanding of Marx’s theory, and treat it in the same way one would treat any other theory in economics."
"This website is a work in progress. The aim is to create a more-or-less comprehensive index of claims that are made in defense of capitalism and a brief but thorough debunking of each."
It's like a cooperative which prices to cost... only with unpaid employees. Interesting.
Piketty's "Capital" has been getting a lot of attention. It sounds interesting and like he has done the tedious empirical work that I would never do. I'll have to read it... after I finally read Graeber's "Debt".
This is a link to the first of a four-part review. Find the next three parts immediately following it in Wolff's weblog archives.
Michael Hudson defines some terms.
"The harmonious vision of higher wages in general benefiting both capital and labour is a mirage."
"This 80-minute documentary focuses on the growing 'wealth gap' in America, as seen through the eyes of filmmaker Jamie Johnson, a 27-year-old heir to the Johnson & Johnson pharmaceutical fortune."
Worth watching if only for the people he was able to get interviews with. And also if you'd like to lose any respect you might have had for Milton Friedman.
I know the mutualism->collectivism->communism narrative is a simplification, but I think this is a good overview.
By Iain McKay. "This is an introduction to Proudhon’s economic ideas and their influence on revolutionary anarchism. It is a chapter from the new book The Accumulation of Freedom: Writings on Anarchist Economics (AK Press)"
An explanation of the Transformation Problem by mikus at the libcom forums.
Wendy McElroy on Georgism
Part II: http://dailyanarchist.com/2012/06/21/the-single-tax-a-refutation/comment-page-1/
What we need more of is cooperatives.
Haha. Oh, rich people, you so rich.
An easy to read introduction to the theory of firms. Of course firms do not need to be ‘hierarchical organizations that are internally directed by command and control.’ They could be cooperatively owned and operated by the workers.
While I obviously disagree that economic rent is ever a good thing, this is a well presented introduction to rent-seeking. I also liked the same author’s (Dr. Ross) article presenting the classical-liberal view of the state (http://www.friesian.com/freestat.htm). There seem to be many interesting articles on this website.
He describes the movement by five main values: Distributed network architectures, transnationality, economic democracy, hacker ethics, and devolutionism (returning all products back to the commons). Sounds about right.
Mike Leung and David Ellerman’s page about wage slavery and worker cooperatives.
Looks like a good introduction to Georgism
The game of Monopoly has its origins in a game meant to demonstrate the principles of Georgism.
“Veblen put forth a basic distinction between the productiveness of ‘industry’ run by skilled engineers, which manufactures real goods of utility, and the parasitism of ‘business,’ which exists only to make profits for a leisure class which engages in ‘conspicuous consumption’. The only economic contribution by the leisure class is ‘economic waste’, activities that contribute negatively to productivity. By implication, Veblen saw the US economy as being made inefficient and corrupt by men of ‘business’ who deviously put themselves in an indispensable position in society.”
Free trade is not free, money is debt, and people do not prefer to be wage labourers.
Nice short introduction to neomedievalism. The rest of this weblog is fun to read, too.
Expanding on Tucker’s four monopolies of the state
James Grimmelmann’s fascinating condensed history of Sealand, a micro-nation on a platform in the North Sea, and the attempt to run a data center there.