Cheap trips to the lakes We are experiencing climate change with a vengeance in British Columbia. For the past four summers, we have had horrific wildfires that send smoke all the way from the interior to the west coast of Vancouver Island. Last summer, we had a record-breaking “heat dome” that killed over 600 people […]
Disposable time, surplus population, and the limitation of the hours of labour I’m on at 5:35 of the video. A little hoarse at 4 a.m.!
Disposable time, disposable population, disposable products DISPOSABLE TIME, DISPOSABLE TIME, DISPOSABLE TIME, DISPOSABLE TIME, DISPOSABLE TIME, DISPOSABLE TIME, DISPOSABLE TIME… Did I mention “disposable time”? Marx repeated disposable time seven time in paragraph (three paragraphs in the complete works) I’ve taken the above excerpt from. In English. In capital letters. That, and the fact that his theory […]
Infrastructure week: organs of the human brain, created by the human hand Who owns general social knowledge? Who owns the general intellect? Alf Hornborg pointed out that without the fuel to run it, a tractor is simply a piece of sculpture. It is not even a sculpture, though, if there is no one to design it […]
Capital itself is the moving contradiction The phrase quoted in the title is probably the most well-known in the Grundrisse. It has been cited in books and journal articles at least a hundred times, an order of magnitude more frequently than the alternative translation found in the collected works, “capital itself is a contradiction-in-process,” It is […]
Theft of alien labour time is a miserable foundation In the early 1980s, I was riding home from work on a bus and looked out the window at a Toyota pickup truck alongside. I was overwhelmed by the realization that I could never in my life make such an object by hand, even if I […]
(Hence the correctness of the theory of surplus population and surplus capital…) Marx mentioned, “the theory of surplus population and surplus capital,” parenthetically, in the Grundrisse and “surplus population and surplus capital” in his 1862-63 draft of Capital. Although it isn’t certain what theory exactly he was referring to, the phrase reappears, in reverse order, in chapter 15, […]
“Lump” and “labor” are two words… From: Tom Walker Sent: October 27, 2021 3:49 PM To: scott.a.wolla@ Subject: Lump of labor fallacy Dear Scott, I just came across your article, “Examining the Lump of Labor Fallacy Using a Simple Economic Model,” from November of last year on the St. Louis Fed website. I have done quite […]
À la recherche du socially necessary labour temps perdu How many Trained Marxists™ know there is no “socially necessary labour time” in the Grundrisse? I didn’t. When researching the provenance of the term, I was surprised to discover that it was present in neither the Grundrisse nor Marx’s Contribution to a Critique of Political Economy. The latter book had a lot […]
Does economic growth cause unemployment?, Econospeak, Sandwichman, October 24 Usually, a question in the title of an article is a teaser and the answer is almost always “no.” Not in this case. The standard argument is that economic growth is necessary to create jobs and that unemployment results from the slowing or interruption of growth. […]