capitalism
Capitalism is the system based on exchange of commodities, private ownership by a few of the means of production and the exploitation of wage workers. Wage workers are paid less than the value of our labour; our "surplus value" is expropriated from us and turned into profit and expanded capital.
Capitalism, Technology and the Environment
A (non-orthodox) Marxist critique of technology under capitalism as inherently antagonistic towards the environment as well as labor.
Goldacre: 'Argument is about capitalism, not food '
Ben Goldacre points to the analogies between the 'organic' food argument and the BigPharma vs homeopathy/'alternative medicine' - mainly that all niches will be filled under capitalism.
Ben Goldacre, of Bad Science fame, reports on the Soil Association's response a recent Food Standards Agency (FSA) report on organic food. Goldacre says the FSA's report shows "that organic food is no better than normal food, in terms of composition, or health benefits".
Antisemitism and the (modern) critique of capitalism
The paper argues that modern antisemitism is the ‘rumour about Jews’ as personification of hated forms of capitalism. I will first look at some contemporary expressions of antisemitism, and theses IV and V explore Adono’s and Horkeimer’s (1989) and Postone’s (1986) understanding of Nazi antisemitism.
I
The Nazi ideologue Rosenberg (1938) formulated the modern essence of antisemitism succinctly when he portrayed it as an attack on Communism, Bolshevism, and Jewish capitalism, a capitalism not of productive labour and industry, but of parasites - money and finance, speculators and bankers.
Murdering the dead: Amadeo Bordiga on capitalism and other disasters - Antagonism
Antagonism's introduction to a collection of articles by Amadeo Bordiga, looking at how capitalism both exacerbates, and creates, supposedly 'natural' disasters.
Capitalism and other disasters
Open letter to Lenin - Sylvia Pankhurst
Open letter from Sylvia Pankhurst and the Workers' Dreadnaught to Lenin, accusing the Third International parties of abandoning communism.
To Lenin, as representing the Russian Communist Party and the Russian Soviet Government.
Modern capitalism and revolution - Paul Cardan
Paul Cardan (Cornelius Castoriadis) attempts to describe and analyse the features and dynamics of the fully-industrialised capitalist societies of the early 1960s.
About the text
Absolute Property - G. Kay & J. Mott
An analysis of the nature and development of private property in relation to the state in class society, and the political prevention of the abundance that modern productive capacities make possible.
"[i]If the productive capacities already deployed were oriented towards need, necessary labour would be reduced to a minimum, so that nothing would stand between men and what they need to live. Money and the law of labour would lose their force, and, as its foundations crumbled, the political state would wither away.
The new world order - Noam Chomsky
Noam Chomsky discusses the New World Order - tri-polar economically, three major economic powers, the United States still the biggest, but declining, relatively, but uni-polar militarily, one military force.
The following is a transcript of a speech given at a benefit for The Middle East Children's Alliance (president, Barbara Lubin) and KPFA radio (manager, Pat Scott).
The topic, as you saw, is The New World Order with primary concern for the Middle East.
Whither the world - Gilles Dauvé & Karl Nesic
Gilles Dauvé & Karl Nesic of the Troploin journal discuss the changing nature of capitalism and class struggle in the globalised 'post-Fordist' era.
WHAT? WHY? HOW?1
- 1. This is a slightly modified version of G.Dauvé and K.Nesic's Il va falloir attendre I Bref rapport sur l'état du monde, troploin, 2002 (also available on our site). We've left out nearly all notes that refer to French language books and magazines.
Re-visiting the east ... and popping in at Marx's - Gilles Dauvé
Apart from North Korea and Cuba, no country calls itself socialist any more. So why bother about old debates on the nature of the USSR? Since capitalism rules the world, what else is there to know?! A great deal.
It’s crucial to understand why Russia was capitalist in 1980, or 1930, or 1920, if we wish to understand what capitalism really is, and what can and must be revolutionized in Russia as well as in Britain in the XXIst century.
