Nèdeem Elmahjoub's blog

A short video about COVID19 crisis, its origins and its remedy (more details in the synopsis below). Video is produced by the North African Food Sovereignty Network and has English subtitles (settings: caption ON). Synopsis Capitalist production penetrates brutally to the depths of the earth and disturbs the balance that allows society to live in harmony with its environment. This is the concern of the North African Network for Food Sovereignty as it works towards alternatives to agribusinesses which have aggravated food dependency but have also caused major disruptions in our ecosystems, ultimately leading to epidemics such as Covid-19.

Socialist Strategy and the Capitalist Democractic State I added a comment at the end of the blog.

Capitalism's crisis of care and an excellent analysis here From progressive neoliberalism to Trump — and beyond

"What gets dismissed or ignored here are Marx’s arguments that the people who happen to be running the system at any particular moment are not really in control of the situation. What are really in control are the “laws of capitalist production.” Individual personifications of capital––and this includes atypical personifications such as individual state capitals and worker-run enterprises––must submit to these laws or relinquish their “control.” The most important law is the “law of value,” the determination of value by labor-time. It compels a business, whoever owns or “controls” it, to minimize costs in order to remain competitive, and therefore to lay off inefficient or unnecessary workers, speed up production, have unsafe working conditions, produce for profit instead of producing for need, and so on." On the Relevance of Marx's Capital for Today

"The vulgar economists of capitalism have tried to deny this contradiction of capitalist production ever since it was hinted at by the likes of Sismondi, and logically suggested by the law of value based on labour, first proposed by Adam Smith and David Ricardo. The apologists dropped classical theory and turned to a marginal utility theory of value to replace the dangerous labour theory.  They turned to equilibrium as the main tendency of modern economies and they ignored the effect of time and change.  Only the market and exchange became matters of economic analysis, not the production and exploitation of labour." Grossman on capitalism's contradictions

Capital.150 part two: the economic reason for madness

David Harvey's new book  Marx's Capital and the Madness of Economic Reason Event