Marxism

Created
Sat, 26/10/2024 - 08:21
by Prabhat Patnaik* In his remarkable work The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money, John Maynard Keynes said that “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.” His putting only […]
Created
Tue, 15/10/2024 - 07:00

Both of us are researchers who are deeply influenced by the work of French philosopher Louis Althusser. Responsible in large part for a vigorous approach to Marxism in the 1960s and 1970s (dubbed “structural Marxism”), Althusser the scholar was always controversial.

The post Althusser, “levels” and a scholarly dialogue appeared first on Progress in Political Economy (PPE).

Created
Tue, 16/04/2024 - 06:00

The latest movie adaptation of Frank Herbert’s classic novel Dune, Dune: Part Two directed by Denis Villeneuve, has set truly intergalactic box office records, and been globally exalted by movie critics. Dune: Part Two has, of 24 March, hit over US$220 million in the United States domestic box-office, and worm-holed its way to over US$520 million globally. Villeneuve’s latest foray into the harsh world of Arrakis has been critically acclaimed as a masterpiece, with the film compared favourably to the brilliant Star Wars sequel The Empire Strikes Back, while it currently enjoys near-perfect popular and critical reviews.  

Created
Tue, 02/04/2024 - 12:28
Whoever keeps posting Karl Marx quotes on the breakroom bulliten board needs to stop.– Management Engage yourself with consequential reflections about labor and class struggle in the 21st century with these (not just thought but also action-provoking) five superb books: — Anderson, Elizabeth. 2023. Hijacked: How Neoliberalism Turned the Work Ethic against Workers and How Workers […]
Created
Tue, 24/10/2023 - 06:00

Marxists tend to like the labor theory of value because it provides a vivid account of exploitation and highlights a basic antagonism at the core of capitalism: capitalists and workers are locked in a battle over the appropriation of the surplus that workers produce. But many commentators assume it is either internally inconsistent or hopelessly outdated. The theory is thus hotly contested, but arguably poorly understood by both critics and advocates alike. The debate has also sometimes been mired in arcane mathematical issues. As a consequence, interesting philosophical and empirical questions have received less attention. We put a number of these questions to Duncan Foley, author of Understanding Capital: Marx's Economic Theory.

The post Reconstructing the Labour Theory of Value: An Interview with Duncan Foley (Part 1: The Commodity Law of Exchange) appeared first on Progress in Political Economy (PPE).

Created
Tue, 18/04/2023 - 20:03

By Paul Street / CounterPunch The Capitalist Democrats… The Democratic Party is a militantly capitalist entity and always has been – and not just in the neoliberal era. The much beloved New Deal Democratic president Franklin Roosevelt, himself a wealthy member of the capitalist establishment, boasted that he had saved the US American profits system by overseeing […]

The post Why the Republi-Fascists Can’t Stop Calling the Capitalist Democrats ‘Marxists’ appeared first on scheerpost.com.

Created
Wed, 11/01/2023 - 03:00
“It is clear enough that McCarthyism and its legacy were sufficient to make life hard for a particular strand of opposition to the analytic mainstream, characterized by its general adherence to empiricism and liberalism: those who were broadly Marxists.” So writes Christoph Schuringa a philosopher at Northeastern University London, in an article in Jacobin. He continues: But its power in cementing the analytic mainstream went beyond this. The whole tendency of the period was to block out alternatives to a paradigm that stretched across disciplines. This paradigm, which consisted of methodologies developed for the purposes of Cold War research and development such as rational choice theory, operations research, and game theory, functioned to reinforce a vision of society, and of inquiry, reliant on the classical liberal idea of the autonomous rational individual as the fundamental unit of society. The article includes accounts of some philosophers called before the House Un-American Activities Committee or persecuted by the FBI.