Relevant and even prescient commentary on news, politics and the economy.

Labour power as a common-pool resource

Labour power as a common-pool resource: in memory of Paul Burkett Human mental and physical capacities to work have elastic but definite natural limits. Those capacities must be continuously restored and enhanced through nourishment, rest, and social interaction. Over the longer term that capacity for labour also has to be replenished by a new generation […]

Is Redistribution the Solution?

Toward the end of a very interesting and worthwhile conversation about how right-wing “populism” co-opts righteous anger at established institutions, Vincent Bevins asked Naomi Klein how she would counter that co-optation. Her answer was to advocate a “real left that has a political program that is actually redistributive,” which sounds good until you realize that […]

The Unbearable Tightness of Peaking

– Sandwichman @ Econospeak The Unbearable Tightness of Peaking Sandwichman came across a fascinating and disconcerting new dissertation, titled “Carbon Purgatory: The Dysfunctional Political Economy of Oil During the Renewable Energy Transition” by Gabe Eckhouse. An adaptation of one of the chapters, dealing with fracking, was published in Geoforum in 2021 As some of you may know, […]

This Life: faith, work, and free time, part two

This Life: faith, work, and free time, part two At the beginning of this year, I posted a response to Martin Hägglund’s This Life: Secular faith and spiritual freedom. In October I learned of a conference next May in Belgium at which Hägglund will be one of the keynote speakers. So I submitted an abstract to present a paper. […]

The Audition Commodity

The Audition Commodity Richard Serra and Carlotta Fay Schoolman produced the video, “Television Delivers People” in 1973. It manifests a critique of television mass media that was subsequently defined by communications scholar, Dallas Smythe as the “audience commodity” but the outline of which had already been presented by him in 1951 in the Quarterly of Film, […]

Happy 155th Birthday to volume one of Capital

Happy 155th Birthday to volume one of Capital! In his 1965 farewell lecture at Brandeis University, Herbert Marcuse read a long passage from the Grundrisse’s “fragment on machines” and then observed: “But Marx himself has repressed this vision, which now appears as his most realistic, his most amazing insight!” In Time, Labor and Social Domination, published 28 years later, Moishe […]

Abraham Lincoln quoting Thomas Jefferson on judicial despotism and oligarchy

Abraham Lincoln quoting Thomas Jefferson on judicial despotism and oligarchy At Springfield, Illinois, July 17, 1858 Now, as to the Dred Scott decision; for upon that he [Douglas] makes his last point at me. He boldly takes ground in favor of that decision. This is one-half the onslaught, and one-third of the entire plan of […]

The Cultural Marxism – Conservative Christian Consensus on America’s Culture of Violence

The Cultural Marxism – Conservative Christian Consensus on America’s Culture of Violence Gun Culture and the American Nightmare of Violence by Henry Giroux, January 10, 2016: Mass shootings have become routine in the United States and speak to a society that relies on violence to feed the coffers of the merchants of death. Given the profits […]