- Bastani claims scarcity is the central question in economic thought. This is a neo-classical formulation, and is not in line with the central questions of political economy that Marx's writings (who Bastani obviously references liberally) grapple with. This leads to some theoretical and historical errors
- Bastani does not have a strong grasp on the labour theory of value, or at least doesn't subscribe to it in Marx's formulation. Bastani believes you can have profit without human labour input, where, under the labour theory of value, the exchange of labour is _the_ source of all profit.
- treats the move from late-capitalism to communist utopia as inevitable, and doesn't really grapple with strategic concerns, building class-consciousness, etcetera
- The project is part of a long line of Marxist 'technologically deterministic' theories and proposals. Basically that capitalism will lead to its own demise through the internal contradictions that define it.
- the reviewer is skeptical of technological solutions to climate change, and Bastani's work relies on this heavily
I like the line at the bottom of the second review that describes this book as 'soft science fiction'. Something to shift the Overton window, but not something that provides much actionable insight.
I’ve been enjoying Karl Widerquist’s “Independence, Propertylessness, and Basic Income: A Theory of Freedom as the Power to Say No”, which notes that access to natural resources is an important input as well. That is, one form of freedom is a freedom to use a proportion of Earth’s natural resources to meet one’s own needs. While many may contract into a system to provide e.g. defense or luxuries, the lack of choice in the “social contract” as regards property rights can nonetheless be interpreted as a regrettable loss of a form of freedom.
In other words, while labor is required to sustain human life, different forms of labor should not be considered fungible — I am happy to labor to directly feed and shelter myself, but may be less accommodating to serving others in exchange for a form of these benefits.
Marx begins to deal with this in his theories of rent; a more accurate criticism of Bastiani would be that he believes one can have profit without surplus. It is obvious, and was so when Marx was writing, that not all profit is due to exploitation of labour.
But the exchange of labor has nothing to do with profit, since financialization. There have been many smart people for decades now, making this be so. It's very important today to come up with profit scenarios that don't depend on labor in any way.
'nothing to do with profit' is a pretty strong claim. I think Marxists (and others) would argue that the two are stochastically linked. Decreases in the value of a good (the amount of labour-time used to generate it) roughly tracks with a decrease in the price (and thus amount of profit that the producer gets for each item) over longer time frames. I think that's what the author was implicitly referring to but I may be wrong!
As for financialization and profit: I think contemporary labour-value theorists, and even Marx, talk about fincancialization as 'fictitious capital'. The 'value' of financial instruments comes from the claim on future labour-time, and is thus generally parasitic for a well-functioning economy. Cedric Durad is a recent example of this. I'm stepping into territory I know very little about though, so take what I'm saying with a grain of salt / generously.
It's worth adding to this: even if the LTV would not hold in its "quantitative" form, which it is often only taken to be, even given the power of financialization in the last century there is reason to believe it would hold at least qualitatively. Several leading Marx value-theorists argue that the theory does not work (or could not work) on the level of the individual commodity, as illustrated by Marx, but only on an aliquot representative of the lot.
Next, theories of exploitation regarding labour are going strong; they don't feel challenged by the idea of the financialization of social labour. For example, there is the theory of unequal exchange (UE) exploitation in which one agent (the exploiter) among other factors contributes less labour than the exploited, but receives the same or greater amount of labour back (i.e in the form of goods and services). There are two principles at work by which analytical Marxists have analyzed exploitation: the Profit-Exploitation Correspondence Principle and the Class-Exploitation Correspondence Principle. I'd recommend looking at the work of Roberto Veneziani and Naoki Yoshihara (both academic economists) on this matter.
Finally, there is some work arguing for the fact of exploitation or the status of the LTV in financial capitalism[0][1][2]. I would not say that financialization poses a serious problem to Marx's value theory, which is primarily a social theory of production - any society must reproduce itself through labour, which forms the material basis of survival of all within that society. There is disagreement as to how the LTV works regarding "non-freely reproducible" commodities, which in today's capitalism come in the form of goods protected by copyright and trademarks. The theory Marx proposed was never meant to deal with this, so I wouldn't say it's a defect in the theory, only that the theory lacks some explanatory power. But neoclassical theories of value also lack the ability to explain the price of such goods.
While there might be some puritanism in there, I think the implication is these theoretical errors lead to erroneous conclusions. I.e: Bastani is using certain conclusions from Marx, while changing certain premises, and not doing the work to then argue the conclusions still hold. I didn't read the piece closey enough (and my Marx isn't strong enough) to really go in-depth there though.
I didn't take OPs comment as a 'snipe' -- America has a relatively weak left wing political base / history. Most of the canonical left wing thinkers, events, and successes have occurred outside of America, so it's always nice (and a little surprising) to hear about little tidbits of history like this.
This isn't true at all. The USA has a strong left-wing history and events. These are forgotten in America but remembered by the rest of the world. It's just that nowhere has this history been more "erased" than in the USA. The rest of the world remembers.
- An example is May 1st, international workers day which was inspired by the Haymarket Massacre in Chicago.
- Another example is the Republican party! which was started by Socialists in Wisconsin.
- Or the fact that Abraham Lincoln corresponded with Marx (most Americans read Marx at the time) and one of his army generals distributed the communist manifesto to the public during the civil war.
- The writings of Thomas Paine were incredibly popular in the USA and abroad.
- Russian Anarchists like Tolstoy was inspired by American Quackers, who later inspired Gandhi.
- Influential thinkers like Chomsky and David Graeber are alive and American.
While there were a few midwestern socialists that joined on the newly formed (past tense, at this point) Republican Party, it was very much committed to limited governmental intervention. The idea that there are socialist ideas at the bedrock of the Republican Party is misleading. Those are a much later development.
Read Tolstoy. He was chiefly inspired by the Quakers' nonviolence. In reality, the Quakers themselves were a heavily Republican group (insofar as they identified with government force at all).
While there are left-wing inspired (and somewhat developmental) incidents throughout US history, I wouldn't characterize the situation as either "strong" or "erased." On the contrary, the U.S. has accepted many people fleeing from failed or failing socialist states, which may affect the local popular understanding of true left-wing ideology.
There are still American Quakers. Though there have been many schisms, they are not now a heavily Republican group by any stretch. They were when Lincoln was in office, of course, but party identification underwent a well-known realignment over the past 150 years, so if 19th century Quakers are who you have in mind, this is more a misleading than an enlightening observation.
Full disclosure: I grew up Quaker. The Quakers I knew were more like this fellow than Herbert Hoover or Nixon:
Maybe your understanding of socialist ideas is a little bit simple. Limited government (and even no government, like anarchism) is at the bedrock many strains of socialism. There is no "one socialism" just as there isn't "one capitalism". To attribute a big government to socialism is simply ignorant.
Yes, that's a completely fair point, especially given the time period being discussed. What I was getting at, though was that the Republican Party was simply not formed by "socialists from Wisconsin."
I think you may be picking up on a but of a cultural difference here. In America, people are identified, both by themselves and by others, in a large part by there job. It's a huge part of personal and cultural/societal identity.
As another reply mentioned, it seems like hand-written notes are good because the limitations on writing speed force you to synthesize information as it is relayed to you.
Outside of mathematical lectures, I find writing notes in something like notepad++ more fruitful. I can attempt mirror the structure of the speakers' argument using tabs/indentations, and quickly reformat the document as the logical structure becomes clearer.
The critiques are similar insofar as they are both critiques, but differ vastly in their content.
Mark Fisher, and the 'traditional left's' critique of neoliberal identity politics calls for a centering of class -- that is the power relations inherent in capital modes of production. This, many would argue is not an identity, but a _material position_: a specific stance or relationship to the productive forces in society.
The Alt-Right tends to believe societal conflicts arise from 'culture wars' between ethnicities, nationalities, religions, etcetera. In this way, they share an 'identitarian' analysis of political force with the liberals they aim to critique!
In total agreement, and I would add that Fisher's position is only acceptable in the left because it is founded in 'class reductionism' - which is sometimes used derogatorily - the idea that capital is the root struggle, because it is in part or in whole the cause of all other struggles.
It is also possible to try to position yourself on the traditional far left while also simply being racist or sexist, but that would be Third-Positionism, which is seeming more and more common in the alt-right. A Third-Positionist would find nothing that they could agree with in EtVC, because they would assert that "comradeship" across a 'cultural boundary' is a communist ideal.
If you look at the history of Stalinism, the Khmer Rouge, and Maoism, the horseshoe theory begins to look appealing again, unless you consider Stalin to be Fascist.
Really? I've never heard that before and I've spent a not insignificant portion of my life in hard left circles.
People will often say that Stalin's USSR was not communist, but was rather in a pre-communist phase. In the USSR this stage was known as the dictatorship of the proletariat, which according to Lenin, would eventually fade allowing a state-less, class-less society to flourish. Obviously they never got to that stage, but honestly even arguing this is semantics. Communism vs precommunism is a real time waster of a political debate, but I've never heard anyone describe any stage of the USSR as "capitalist".
Perhaps state capitalism, if you really want to stretch that definition, but that's still a very different thing.
Generally lefties will distance themselves from Stalinism and Maoism by describing those forms as "authoritarian socialism", as opposed to "libertarian socialist" ideologies like what they had in socialist Catalonia, or Anarcho Communism as it's described in The Conquest of Bread.
Not him, but... Microsoft nailed it with the Sculpt ergonomic keyboard imho. Detached numpad so you can put the mouse closer to the keyboard, gentle sloping, nice key travel. It's a good split starter keyboard. This one is cheaper than the combo version because it doesn't include the mouse. Don't get the grey bluetooth one. It has a numpad and weird feel along with bt issues. https://www.amazon.com/Microsoft-Ergonomic-Keyboard-Business...
It's a kinesis freestyle 2. It doesn't have slick trendy features aside from being split, and I am not madly in love with it. Instead I would say as it's mostly invisible to me, which is exactly what I want out of a keyboard. So, I would recommend it.
I also have a Microsoft 4000 at home for light/occasional usage and it's struck the point of being good enough for that purpose, and it was quite inexpensive.
(If your wrists are straight on a regular keyboard and your shoulders are not scrunched you probably don't need a split board)
they begin the article by saying pasture raised, organic meat is better for the environment than single-crop, fertilizer grown crops, through a reduction in emissions and and increase in biodiversity and health of the soil. It does not compare it to the obvious alternative of more sustainably grown crops, using crop rotation, cleaner sources of energy for farm equipment, etcetera.
It's a common argument I've heard against vegan/vegetarian diets to compare the best possible scenario of meat production, no matter how uncommon, to the average case of plant production.
I see it as equivalent to trying to discredit the value of college by pointing out Bill Gates.
Cultivated land, regardless of how it's cultivated, is generally way worse for habitat conservation than pasture land because you are by definition destroying the native flora to plant food crops.
Here in the Canadian prairies, the ranches are by far the best conservators of native ecosystems because cows can graze on the same plants that bison did for the last millenia.
My province of Saskatchewan is one of the biggest producers of pulse crops in the world (chickpeas, lentils, etc..) but has also some of the worst habitat destruction worldwide (less than 3% of native grasslands remaining) precisely because so much land was plowed under to produce those crops.
Much like the author, I am skeptical of the role that 'fake news' has in the current political crisis in the united states (and, I would argue, globally). There's something about that critique that seems to a)lack a broader historical context b) lack any 'material' grounding.
I'm still waiting for the article(s) that incorporate these ideas successfully.
In some way's, I'd be willing to entertain the idea that all of the people who voted Trump, all still use AOL.com email addresses, browse the internet on Gateway 2000 tower desktop computers, and click every email attachment and read every chain letter forwarded to them.
I'd like to believe that, because if it's not true, something weirder is afoot.
My thinking is really that the organic Trump voter wasn't hacked, and that, to them, the upset is only such that Pepsi won the election, and not Coca-cola. That if they weren't supposed to vote Trump, he wouldn't have been an official party candidate. That having a TV show made him as qualified as being a movie star qualified Reagan. That being a TV star, and a billionaire qualified him in ways that simply being married to a former president would not qualify his opponent. That his opponent would be less historic for having been a first lady (a presidency in her husband's shadow), and that, shockingly, the perceived charisma of one opponent represented the mirror reflection of how the other was perceived by their rival.
If Trump won organically, it means so many people really are "like that" and that many at-large voters are simple-minded, easily lead astray, and thus all democratic votes are suspect, and that putting the levers of control, and vesting democracy in them is a complete mistake.
That it's okay to override their choice, because their choice is dumb.
If you accept that narrative, other consequences become rational.
But, if it was a cheat, a hack, a derailment, sabotage. If removal is legal and based on rational facts. That the people you meet, who openly admit to voting for Trump are discredited for other reasons, then an override of this outcome is just a speed bump, a pot hole, an ordinary defect, a SNAFU and a tire change.
https://marxandphilosophy.org.uk/reviews/17006_fully-automat...
- Bastani claims scarcity is the central question in economic thought. This is a neo-classical formulation, and is not in line with the central questions of political economy that Marx's writings (who Bastani obviously references liberally) grapple with. This leads to some theoretical and historical errors
- Bastani does not have a strong grasp on the labour theory of value, or at least doesn't subscribe to it in Marx's formulation. Bastani believes you can have profit without human labour input, where, under the labour theory of value, the exchange of labour is _the_ source of all profit.
- treats the move from late-capitalism to communist utopia as inevitable, and doesn't really grapple with strategic concerns, building class-consciousness, etcetera
https://theecologist.org/2019/may/29/climate-communism-and-a...
- The project is part of a long line of Marxist 'technologically deterministic' theories and proposals. Basically that capitalism will lead to its own demise through the internal contradictions that define it.
- the reviewer is skeptical of technological solutions to climate change, and Bastani's work relies on this heavily
I like the line at the bottom of the second review that describes this book as 'soft science fiction'. Something to shift the Overton window, but not something that provides much actionable insight.