DJP
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A nice potted history of the rise of marginalist economics is in Ben Fine & Dimitris Milonakis ‘From Political Economy to Economics’But neo-classical economics is possibly on the way out, there’s a lot of text being produced within the field itself which criticize it and suggest a move to more ‘heterodox’ approaches. But as well as Marxian approaches this heterodoxy includes everything from Austrian economics to behavioral economics.My Open University textbooks for this year include a lot of hetrodux stuff, but no Marx.
Not sure if you’re confusing profits with super profits?Don’t have my textbooks to hand right now. Is this what you’re talking about?It remains to be seen how you can achieve perfect competition in the real world.
Excellent. Just a slight modification of your idea. Instead of commentary on news items, which may go out of date, why not short FAQ type answers? We could film a bunch together then gradually release them on the youtube channel. I think there a lot you can do with 5 minutes…
gnome wrote:I think you’ll find Mark has already been nominated…………..and has accepted
One step ahead. I like it!
Without wanting to throw a damper on your enthusiasm. What the party suffers from is not a lack of ideas but a lack of people who are willing to put them into practice. So perhaps you should seek nomination to the AV dept and put your ideas into reality.
Brian wrote:But I was hoping Darren would reply to my question because it appears he’s assuming that a needs based society will not be producing wealth or value through default.Sorry Brian, I think you’re getting confused somewhere. I said:
Quote:Wealth and value are not the same thing, like as has been said a non-market economy would be governed by need, not socially necessary labour time.‘Value’ in the Marxian sense is the amount of abstract socially necessary labour time represented in a commodity.Wealth, is any use-value. So to say that a needs based society would not produce wealth is a like saying a needs based society would produce square circles, it’s a logical contradiction. That’s not what I said.Watch my talk here
At the risk of repeating some that has been said above…In capitalist society workers, in acting on the materials provided by nature produce all the wealth of society, yet not all workers actually produce ‘value’.It gets rather technical here, some sectors do not directly produce ‘value’ but siphon it off from other value producing sectors. This is not to say that the labour of non-value producing sectors is useful (though some of it may only be useful in the context of a capitalist system). In common usage the word ‘value’ means something different than it does in the Marxian sense.It is also worth noting that (intrinsic) ‘value’ and ‘exchange-value’ are not the same thing. To also further complicate things, as far as I know Marx did not use the term ‘labour theory of value’ to describe his theory, the labour theory of value really belongs to Smith and Ricardo. Some people think that Marx’s theory implies that commodities exchange at their ‘value’ equivalents according to necessary labour time, in fact this is what Ricardo not Marx claimed.If I’ve got it right Marx’s theory would not hold IF commodities exchange at value, in a capitalist society they generally exchange at price of production + average rate of profit, which is what Marx said. Marx’s theory is more to do with how labour is regulated in an economy governed by the law of value.Wealth and value are not the same thing, like as has been said a non-market economy would be governed by need, not socially necessary labour time.Clear? As mud
Had a look through this, nice looking video but the charter falls down on the first hurdle.1. “The highest concern of humanity is the combined common good of all living species and biosphere.”If that where true perhaps they should be starting a campaign to bring the small pox virus from extinction and tell people to stop using bleach as it kills micro-organisms…That said from point 3 onwards it’s not too bad, shame they trip themselves up early on.
J Surman wrote:I’m not good with labels and don’t like attaching them but I suppose this one is anarcho-communist. Please put me straight if I’m wrong.Not sure, but you’re definitely in the right ball park. They / she / he might instead use the label ‘libertarian communist’ the site libcom.org uses artwork from the same artist, not that that necessarily means anything. The pamphlets on the site are from a variety of people / positions.
I’m not sure if I’ve made my mind up about this but maybe starting from the point of ‘abolishing money’ is the wrong way to go. It’s like your presenting the conclusion first when really you should be explaining the arguments that led to it.There’s a common cause to all the problems you mention, perhaps showing this in an accessible manner is the way to go. There’s a new book out called ‘The Housing Monster’ this starts from looking at the process of how houses are constructed then spreads out into a full description / critique of capitalism, now the book will have it’s faults no doubt (I’ve only read exerts as yet) but perhaps this is a good angle to adopt. Start from a commonly experienced social problem and show how the causes run back to the same thing…Anyway, just throwing some ideas around.
OK. I’ve been having online discussions with some ‘Occupy’ people about this recently. I think the danger of saying that problems are caused by money (or the lack of it) is that that the most logical conclusion following on from this statements would be to just have more money.I agree we have to put our arguments forward in a way that can be easily understood. But over simplifying things always runs the risk of being misunderstood.
J Surman wrote:…More and more people struggle to or can’t get by because of the reduction in buying power for the world’s majority – it’s MONEY (or lack of) that’s the problem….This all seems a bit cart before the horse to me. The problems you mention are the result of private ownership of the means of production and production for profit. Money is the RESULT of such an exchange economy and likewise the rendering obsolete of money will be the RESULT of common ownership and production for use.The solution is not to ‘remove money from the system’ but to transform the basis of the system itself, one of the effects of which will be the end of exchange value and money.We need to be really careful and precise in our expressions. “Abolish money” isn’t a meaningful phrase (though on the other hand “abolish the money SYSTEM” is to me ok since it emphasizes the systematic aspects of it all)
OK, I hear you better now.
I guess the question is “for a socialist society to operate does it require a majority in the technical sense (50%+1) or a vast majority?”
I’m thinking it’s the latter.Seeing as 97% of the people share the same position in society do you really think it conceivable that the amount of people favouring socialism would reach the 50% mark and then suddenly stop? It seems to me they’d be some kind of ‘tipping point’ that would be much lower perhaps 20% or less…The european murder rate is currently 3.5 per 100,000 and fascist parties are marginal, so where you get the idea that half the population are potential racist murderers is beyond me.I do not share your judgmental outlook on the world, there are no such things as ‘cretins’ or ‘thugs’ or ‘shitheads’ just people and circumstances.Feeding the world is a problem that technically has long since been solved. Racism and other mistaken beliefs can only be solved by education.
