Part of the World Socialist Movement
April 28, 2024
That was the word used by Chris Weston, the CEO of Thames Water, to describe how the business was regarded by its shareholders in the absence of the water companies’ regulator, Ofwat, allowing an increase in the price charged to customers (Times, 29 March). It’s an odd word, not to be confused with ‘uninvestable’ (with …
April 26, 2024
On the First of April the Guardian seemingly pulled off a good April Fool as many people wouldn’t have recognised it as such. They published an article by a ‘Stuart Kells’ who argued that banks can create money out of thin air and that governments don’t need to tax or borrow money. ‘Stuart Kells’ begins …
March 26, 2024
In the November/December issue of the Skeptical Inquirer, Benjamin Radford dealt with a question ‘What do you make of the memes going around comparing billionaires to hoarding dragons and monkeys? Are billionaires hurting the world by hoarding their obscene wealth?’ He answered that billionaires were not like the dragon Smaug in The Hobbit who slept …
‘Pet care rip-off is a case of bad capitalism’ ran the headline of Emma Duncan’s column in the Times (15 March), subtitled ‘Profiteering by vet chains and children’s homes will only bolster appeal of socialism to the young’. Let’s hope so. Earlier that week the Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) had announced that it had …
Read more “Cooking the Books 2 – What would ‘good’ capitalism be?”
February 28, 2024
Last month the BBC released a podcast of Laurie Taylor discussing capitalism with two authors of books on the subject. The first was Michael Sonenscher, author of Capitalism, The Story Behind the Word (reviewed in the January 2023 Socialist Standard). He told Taylor that the word originated in the 18th century (in France as capitalisme) …
Read more “Cooking the Books – What does ‘capitalism’ mean?”
February 27, 2024
An enquirer from Vietnam has asked us (and others) a couple of questions on Marxian economics. Here they are with our reply. Does the commodity value come mainly from demand, market evaluation and utility, not from labor? (explain labor theory of value v/s marginal value theorem) A commodity (as a product of labour produced to …
January 23, 2024
In an article in the Sunday Telegraph (2 December) appealing for Tories to vote Labour, subtitled ‘My party extends the hand of friendship to those who voted for the Tories but feel let down by their failure to act’, Sir Keir Starmer praised Thatcher for having ‘set loose our natural entrepreneurialism’. Entrepreneurialism, what’s that? One …
To promote his book, Mute Compulsion, A Marxist Theory of the Economic Power of Capital, Søren Mau contributed a piece to the publisher’s blog last July in which he asked ‘What should the communism we fight for look like’? He starts by defining communism (what we call ‘socialism’): ‘The fundamental condition of communism is that …
December 24, 2023
In an article entitled ‘Austerity in Europe has huge consequences for its politics’ Mehreen Khan, Economics Editor of The Times, cited research by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology which suggested a link between the severity of austerity and votes for ‘extreme’ parties: ‘An MIT study covering more than 200 European elections between 1980-2015 found that …
Read more “Cooking the Books – Does austerity breed extremism?”
December 23, 2023
‘Few ideas are more unshakable than the notion that the rich keep getting richer while ordinary folks fall ever further behind. The belief that capitalism is rigged to benefit the wealthy and punish the workers has shaped how millions view the world, whom they vote for and whom they shake their fists at.’ So began …