Abstract The 2023 war between Hamas and Israel elicits many different explanations. As with previous regional hostilities, here too, the pundits and commentators have numerous overlapping processes to draw on – from the struggle between the Zionist and Palestinian national movements, to the deep hostility between the Rabbinate and Islamic churches, to the many conflicts […]
Continue ReadingHow trade secrets swallowed your right to know
Originally published at pluralistic.net Reproduced under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license Cory Doctorow If you’ve never had a fight over the phrase “intellectual property,” count yourself lucky, you normie, you. In the land of Free Software and Free Culture, “IP” is fightin’ words. Not unreasonably, mind you. “IP” was a deliberately ploy, undertaken by […]
Continue ReadingThe political economic roots of Hollywood strikes, Part 2
Originally published at notes on cinema James McMahon Missed Part 1? You should start here. Author’s note: Around the time of this post, the WGA and the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers (AMPTP) produced a tentative agreement in their 2023 negotiations. The WGA Negotiating Committee, the WGAW Board and WGAE Council all voted […]
Continue ReadingThe Costly Betrayal of Cost-Benefit’s Promise
Jerry Cayford Originally published here A conversation, eighty-some years ago, shaped our world today. The conversation was among three papers in economics. In 1939, Nicholas Kaldor and John Hicks published papers that steered economics through a major crisis, one that threatened its legitimacy as an advisor on public policy. With the Great Depression still raging […]
Continue ReadingInstitution Size as a Window into Cultural Evolution
Originally published at Economics from the Top Down Blair Fix One of the challenges of studying the past is that time has a maddening way of erasing evidence. Take the origin of life — the ultimate cold case. Had the first organisms been wise enough to fossilize themselves, we would know exactly how life began. […]
Continue ReadingBichler & Nitzan, ‘Manuscripts Don’t Burn’
Manuscripts Don’t Burn SHIMSHON BICHLER and JONATHAN NITZAN September 2023 Keywords censorship, ideology, marxism, neoliberalilsm, peer review, plagiarism Citation Bichler, Shimshon, and Nitzan, Jonathan. 2023. ‘Manuscripts Don’t Burn’. Review of Capital as Power, Vol. 2, No. 2, pp. 175–189. Download PDF 1 Flat Reality The French Revolution changed the world. In the new order, the masters […]
Continue ReadingBichler & Nitzan, ‘The Capital as Power Approach: An Invited-then-Rejected Interview’
The Capital as Power Approach An Invited-then-Rejected Interview with Shimshon Bichler and Jonathan Nitzan SHIMSHON BICHLER and JONATHAN NITZAN September 2023 Keywords capital accumulation, capitalization, interview, Marxism, modes of power, stagflation, systemic fear, value theory Citation Bichler, Shimshon, and Nitzan, Jonathan. 2023. ‘The Capital as Power Approach: An Invited-then-Rejected Interview with Shimshon Bichler and Jonathan […]
Continue ReadingMoney is power
Originally published at pluralistic.net Reproduced under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license Cory Doctorow “Political economy” may sound like an obscure technical matter, but it’s a really very simple (and incredibly important) idea: That the economy is inevitably political, and there is no way to depoliticize economic theory. That is, every aspect of economics – […]
Continue ReadingBichler & Nitzan, ‘Regime Change and Dominant Capital: Lessons from Israel’
Abstract Israel’s ongoing crisis – or ‘judicial coup’ in popular parlance – has elicited two opposite responses. The first comes from global rating agencies, economists and investment strategists who see Israel’s country risk rising. The opposite reaction, by Prime Minister Netanyahu and his acolytes, insists that the ‘coup’ is much ado about nothing, and that […]
Continue ReadingAlberta’s Rockefeller Coups, Part 5: Canada is an American Protectorate & Alberta is an Imperial Bezzle
Regan Boychuk Green Party of Alberta energy critic Author’s note Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. The suggestion that a semi-secret conspiracy of racists transferred imperial control of Canada from the British to the Americans on the eve of the Second World War seems well worth skepticism. But doubt will melt as we meet the elite […]
Continue ReadingA Modern Anarchism (Part 1): Anarchist Analysis
Daniel Baryon Originally published at libcom.org Author’s Note The following is the script of the video I published on my channel Anark. If you would like to watch that video, it is here Minor edits have been made to the script to instead refer to itself as an essay instead of a video. Other than […]
Continue ReadingDi Liberto, ‘Differential Harm: Patterns of Uneven Destruction’
Abstract This essay opposes the idea that contemporary critical events like pandemics, global warming, environmental deterioration, et cetera, are to be considered as affecting humanity in a uniform way. Instead of seeing these phenomena like abstract universal threats, I propose to look at them through the lens of my concept of differential harm. By drawing […]
Continue ReadingSuaste Cherizola, ‘Estudiar el precio, olvidar el valor. Una alternativa al pensamiento económico tradicional’
Abstract Este artículo intenta sentar las bases para una comprensión de los precios radicalmente diferente a como los entiende el pensamiento económico tradicional. Tras revisar algunos aspectos relevantes de la crítica a la teoría del dinero como mercancía, se muestra que el pensamiento tradicional es incapaz de captar las propiedades irreductibles de los precios y […]
Continue ReadingWhy Consumption Taxes (VATs) are Insanely Regressive
Originally published at Wealth Economics Steve Roth Following the community of Socks (?s) or “social democrats” out there on the interwebs (this is definitely my economic tribe), in articles, and in books, there’s a particular stance on a particular issue that I find perplexing, even anti-progressive. They’re generally quite keen on using “value-added” consumption/sales taxes […]
Continue ReadingThe political economic roots of Hollywood strikes, Part 1
Originally published at notes on cinema James McMahon On May 2, 2023, the Writers Guild of America (WGA) went on strike after failing to reach an acceptable agreement with the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers (AMPTP), the trade association that negotiates for the film and television interests of the major Hollywood studios. While […]
Continue ReadingHow the Labor Theory of Value Emerges from Egalitarianism
Originally published at Economics from the Top Down Blair Fix Download: PDF | EPUB … the value of a commodity is determined by the quantity of labour spent on it … — Karl Marx In the 1860s, Karl Marx declared that all value stemmed from labor. A century-long firestorm ensued. On its own, Marx’s claim […]
Continue ReadingMcMahon, ‘Star Power and Risk: A Political Economic Study of Casting Trends in Hollywood’
Abstract This paper builds an empirical and theoretical model to analyze how the financial goal of risk reduction changed the insides of Hollywood’s star system. For the moviegoer looking at Hollywood cinema from the outside, the function of the star system has remained the same since the 1920s: to have recognizable actors attract large audiences […]
Continue ReadingHow elite hobbies let billionaires pay no tax
Originally published at pluralistic.net Reproduced under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license Cory Doctorow When you hear that a billionaire has bought a horse or a newspaper or a sports team, you might think it’s just dilletantish dabbling by a member of the parasite class with nothing better to do with their time – a […]
Continue ReadingEnvironmental conflict, capital as power … and a nice trip to London
Originally published at Manchester Metropolitan University Adam Marshall In recent years, as governments and corporations have intensified their efforts to locate, extract and monetise oil, gas, and various other biophysical resources, the world has simultaneously witnessed a proliferation of social resistance to these efforts. While such resistance can take many forms, it is invariably motivated […]
Continue ReadingAll you need to know about climate change
Originally published at Asimmetria Yuri Di Liberto What if I told you that they knew everything? And that they have known it for a very long time? On January 13 of this year, 2023, in the journal Science, perhaps the most important article to date on climate change was published. In political, social, and ethical […]
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