Part of the World Socialist Movement
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 …
November 28, 2023
In his interview with Rishi Sunak on 2 November Elon Musk speculated that the widespread application of AI would usher in an ‘age of abundance where any goods and services that you want, you can have’. People would only need work for ’personal satisfaction’. Clearly, this wouldn’t be capitalism. It couldn’t be as it would …
November 27, 2023
Elon Musk supports capitalism. Well, is the Pope a Catholic? In a tweet on 23 October he recommended a new book called The Capitalist Manifesto. ‘This book’, he tweeted, ‘is an excellent explanation of why capitalism is not just successful, but morally right’. We are not concerned here with the contents of the book, by …
October 27, 2023
‘Productivity — the amount we produce per worker or per hour worked — is very important’, wrote David Smith, the economics editor of the Sunday Times. ‘It is the ultimate driver of living standards, a key determinant of real wages and a vital component of competitiveness’ (Times, 20 September). On the face of it, this …
At last month’s Labour Party Conference Starmer’s rhetoric went so far as to promise that a future Labour government would be ‘totally focussed on the interests of working people’. A Labour government, he said, would remove what ‘the age of insecurity [had] loaded onto the backs of working people’ but that it was going to …