by Jeff Noonan
Sharing is an unambiguous good only when it stems from caring, and what is shared is life-valuable, i.e., it meets a real need. Continue reading The sharing economy: an alternative to capitalist exploitation?
Frantz Fanon: The Wretched of the Earth: Violence Continue reading Frantz Fanon: The Wretched of the Earth: Violence
by Tanya Golash-Boza
Despite the tremendous risks and obstacles, thousands of migrants venture out from their countries of birth every day in attempts to improve their lives. Others flee their home countries due to death threats or in the aftermath of personal violence. Continue reading Taking notes 55: how mass deportation sustains global apartheid
Michael Hardt is a literary theorist and political philosopher. Continue reading Michael Hardt: On the right to the common
by Jeff Shantz Sabotage! the word conjures images of damage and destruction. In his chapter “On the Nature and Uses of Sabotage,” anarchic sociologist Thorstein Veblen notes that the sinister meaning attributed to sabotage, which predominates American usage, appears and … Continue reading Taking notes 46: Reflections on sabotage: theirs and ours
by Zoltan Zigedy Imperialism, expressed as a nation’s securing economic dominance of, influence over, or advantage from other nations, remains much as Lenin characterized it in his 1916 pamphlet, Imperialism. Its uninterrupted persistence, from the time well before the pamphlet’s … Continue reading The ‘new’ Imperialism
by Ismael Hossein-zadeh There is now a widespread consensus that mainstream/neoclassical economists failed miserably to either predict the coming of the 2008 financial implosion, or provide a reasonable explanation when it actually arrived. Not surprisingly, many critics have argued that … Continue reading Taking notes 41: Ideological foundations of neoclassical economics: class interests as “economic theory”
by Ismael Hossein-zadeh Many liberal economists envisioned a new dawn of Keynesianism in the 2008 financial meltdown. Nearly six years later, it is clear that the much-hoped-for Keynesian prescriptions are completely ignored. Why? Keynesian economists’ answer: “neoliberal ideology,” which they … Continue reading Keynes is Dead; Long Live Marx!
by Shimshon Bichler and Jonathan Nitzan Preamble Over the past few years, we have written a series of articles about the global crisis.[1] These papers try to break the conventional constrains of liberalism and Marxism, examining the crisis from the new theoretical viewpoint of capital as power. Capitalists and corporations, we argue, are driven not to maximize profit, but to ‘beat the average’ and increase their differential power. In this approach, the redistribution of income and assets is not a ‘societal’ side effect of the economy, but the central conflict that propels modern capitalism. And the main weapon in this … Continue reading Taking notes 34: The enlightened capitalist
by Jeff Noonan The basic principle of historical materialism is that all complex socio-cultural systems and institutions are rooted in and ultimately depend upon reproductive and productive labour. Reproductive and productive labour connect human beings to each other and the sustaining natural environment. “The production of life,” Marx wrote in The German Ideology, “both of one’s own in labour and of fresh life in procreation… appears as two-fold relation: on the one hand, as a natural, on the other, as a social relation—social in the sense that it denotes the cooperation of several individuals.”[1] The second principle of historical materialism … Continue reading Sociality, solitude, and the struggle for socialism
Philosophers for Change 