Search Results for: Material World

Marcuse: professor behind 1960s rebellion

May 11, 2011

Herbert Marcuse was born in Berlin in 1898. As a Jewish academic he had to leave Germany when the Nazis came to power and has been in America since 1934. He then became professor of political thought at the University of California.

For a short while after the first world war, Marcuse was a member of the German Social Democratic Party but left after the murder of Luxemburg and Liebknecht. He became an unattached left-winger with hopes and sympathies pro-Russia. In the 1930’s, in Germany and then later in America, he was associated with a group of left-wing thinkers known as the Frankfurt School. They called their highly philosophical and Hegelian version of Marxism “The critical theory of society”.

Oscar Wilde: the soul of man under socialism

Oscar Wilde was a well known critic of many aspects of the nineteenth century writer Britain in which he lived. Especially interesting from a WSM point of view are the views that he expressed in his essay, The Soul of Man Under Socialism. Wilde’s description of socialism was as a world without private property. He clearly favoured this kind of society, commenting that

“It is immoral to use private property in order to alleviate the horrible evils that result from the institutions of private property”.

He does not state that socialism is a world without money. His criticism of charity, however, does imply that the capitalist system should not be reformed but abolished:

“Their remedies do not cure the disease; they merely prolong it. Indeed, their remedies are part of the disease”.

Although written just over one hundred years ago it is remarkably apt for the contemporary world. Wilde continues:

Money screws you up

Everyone thinks they can control money until it starts to control them

In the sphere of ideas one of the more fruitful results of May 1968 was the spread, in France and elsewhere, of the criticism of the commodity as representing the reduction of useful things to objects of commerce and of social and personal relationships to commercial ones. With commodity production, work ceases to be the creative activity of people producing needed useful things and becomes mere labour turning out articles of commerce for sale on a market. People cease to be related to each other as members of a community, whether democratic or hierarchical, and become mere economic units related to each other only through money as buyers and sellers of some object or other of commerce.

An introduction to Marxian economics 2: the rate of profit

What is the rate of profit?

The rate of profit measures the return on invested capital over a given period and is usually expressed as a percentage. So, if a capital investment of £ 100,000 turns over in a year and the profit is £20,000 then the rate of profit is 20,000/100,000 or 20 per cent per annum.

If a capitalist was starting from scratch he would have to use some of his original £100,000 to buy a factory building and to equip it with machines. He would then have to buy raw materials and pay for electricity to power the machines. Finally he would have to use some of his capital to hire workers and pay their wages. Let us assume that the factory, the machines, the raw materials and the electricity cost him £80,000 and that his wages bill comes to £20,000.

An introduction to Marxian economics 1: the labour theory of value

The Labour Theory of Value is a theory in the science of political economy to explain how the working class are exploited under capitalism and how capitalist society works. This article also explains such phenomena as wages, prices, and profits.

Why is the labour theory of value important?

Capitalism is the stage in the development of human society characterised by class monopoly of the means of production, with wage-labour and commodity-production. (Also see What is Capitalism? and Why there are two classes.)

Where do profits come from?

The Sultan of Brunei is the one of the very richest men in the world. The vast amount of land, technology and other property that he owns yields a huge profit. But where do his profits and the wealth of others like him come from?

Where do profits come from?

So, profits play a key role in the operation of the market system (Why Profit Gets Priority) but where do they come from? What is their source? For a business, profits are the difference between its total sales, revenue and its total costs of production.

The costs of production are:

Economists – not on this planet

Most modern textbooks will contain a variation of the following famous definition of economics as: ‘a science which studies human behaviour as a relation between ends and scarce means which have alternative uses.’

This makes economics the study of the logic of choice in conditions of scarcity. This is not how most people would understand the term, but check for yourself and you will see that the word scarcity occurs again and again in textbook definitions of economics. Paul Samuelson in his Economics, in a very widely studied economics textbook, speaks of a “large scarcity” and says that if goods were not scarce then there would be no role for a science of economics. So, on these definitions, economics is seen as the study of the production and distribution of scarce goods.

Beyond cynicism

The battle against capitalism seems to me to be an impossible task.

You say socialism can only be established by the majority wanting it—this is true but capitalism will never let that happen. They control television, media and education and they are experts in propaganda tactics. Leaflets, posters, talks, meetings, etc. are not powerful enough. The capitalists know this and that is why they let you operate.

If socialism did spread here in the capitalist western world and the capitalists saw it as a real threat they would stamp it out immediately, by any means necessary, remember they have everything to lose. But they wouldn’t even need to take any drastic measures, it would only take a few propaganda programmes on TV and a few articles in the tabloids anyway. The majority are easily manipulated, conditioned and controlled.

Co-operation makes sense

Are you a sucker? Do you cheat? Or are you one to bear a grudge? For biologist Richard Dawkins, author of The Selfish Gene (1978), such questions impinge on a subject of great importance: what is the most effective behavioural strategy to ensure survival in evolutionary terms?

By the title of his book, it seems that, for Dawkins, it was a foregone conclusion that natural selection would tend to favour, above all, behaviour that was nasty and ruthlessly competitive. As he says himself:

Government or Democracy?

Should we vote in a new government? Or should we link up with the struggle to usher in a democratic society?

We are being asked to elect a new government through what is said to be a democratic process. It is true that the vote, together with other hard-won rights such as the rights of assembly, political organisation and free expression, are most important. But can the act of electing a government result in a democratic society?