Nèdeem Elmahjoub's blog

So long as we persist in our tendency to hive off the study of economics from politics, philosophy and journalism, Marx will remain the outstanding example of how to overcome the fragmentation of modern social thought and think about the world as a whole for the sake of its betterment. — Mark Mazower, FT, 05 August 2016

"The expropriators constitute a tiny percentage of the population, and they control what happens with that surplus value. It is this relationship of production, Wolff insists, that has thwarted the democratic promises of the American, French, and other bourgeois revolutions. And this system of minority rule over ownership of assets and people’s labour power is also the cause of the staggering inequality that afflicts the world now." Understanding socialism Related: The works of Eric Olin Wright

I would say Political Economy + [International] Sociology. Economic Crisis and the Crisis of Economics

Summary: An argument for better taxation to reduce inequality. A couple of arguments refuting myths. However, there is no word about exploitation, the real source of inequality, which is also, paradoxically, the source of human advance. The argument that huge inequality is a consequence of bad taxation is a myth that the author reiterates. Inequality already takes place and is reproduced through property ownership and during the relations of production, i.e. before taxation itself. Consent and acquiescence play a role in accepting inequality. Agreed. And that is the power of ideology to legitimate inequality and gloss over exploitation. "The idea that rising inequality is inevitable begins to look like a convenient myth, one that allows us to avoid thinking about another possibility: that through our electoral choices and decisions in daily life we have supported rising inequality, or at least acquiesced in it. Admittedly, that assumes we know about it. Surveys in the UK an...

"So long as we persist in our tendency to hive off the study of economics from politics, philosophy and journalism, Marx, will remain the outstanding example of how to overcome the frangmentation of modern social thought and think about the world as a whole for the sake of its betterment."  — Mark Mazwoer, Columbia University,  reviewing Gareth Stedman Jones's book  Karl Marx, Greatness and Illusion , the Financial Times, 5 August 2016.

"In Britain, there was more emphasis on the language of economics, specifically the ‘supply side’ idea that the interests of investors and entrepreneurs were paramount. As the theory behind Thatcherism had it, government services shrink everybody’s incentives to produce, compete and invest. They reduce the motivation for businesses to deliver services, and ordinary people’s desire to work. Toughness, even pain, performs an important moral and psychological function in pushing people to come up with solutions. Pain  works . Only pain forces people to adapt and innovate. In practice that may mean all sorts of things: migrating, reskilling, sacrificing weekends or family time, selling property, the ‘gig economy’ and so on. The productiveness of pain is a central conservative belief, whose expression might be economic, but whose logic is deeply moralistic." — William Davis

Back to university Verso student reading list

Marx, Capital, and the madness of economic reason

Why the labour theory of value is true

Why left-wing economics is not the answer to right-wing populism

 “PPE is seen as part of the apparatus of the state … privilege connected to public service” – at a time when fewer and fewer voters believe such a thing is possible. Once widely regarded as “highly qualified people with good intentions”, as Davies puts it, PPE graduates are now “bogeymen”. How did a mere undergraduate degree become so important? The Oxford degree that 'runs' Britain

" Mainstream economics is not fatally flawed — but would achieve much more of its potential by questioning itself and listening to other fields." Of course it is not flawed. It just teaches and trains students how to manage capitalism. Yes, there are some malfunctions of the system from time to time, but mainstream economics should justify that and find solutions not to question the functioning itself. Does mainstream economics teach students that there are intrinsic relationships between profit-making as a driving force of capitalism and how 8 people own more than half of the world population, uneven-development, wars, and other crimes? Or, does it teach how to have entrepreurial spirit and business ambition, i.e. individualism, promoting NGOs to massage power relations rather than challenge them, "free-market" as a universal recipe, and "balancing the relationship between labour and capital to serve capital"?

"Chesnais finishes his book with two themes. One is a lament on the lack of Marxist study in universities and the lack of journals in which Marxist studies of capitalism can be published. This is true enough, and I am glad not to have been an undergraduate university student in the past few decades! Even apparently radical journals such as the UK’s  Cambridge Journal of Economics  are basically rather conservative in outlook, and are dominated by a facile Keynesian approach that dismisses a Marxist perspective out of hand if it upsets their advocacy of ‘progressive’ policies for the capitalist state to consider. Repeating radical consensus nonsense will get a pass; revealing the imperial mechanism of power has to jump a hundred hurdles to be an acceptable journal article. Such is the almost universal climate in academia today, despite the evidently destructive outcomes from the system they claim to be analysing. [6]  Ironically, this is why the most trenchant and incisiv...

Labour’s new economics – not so new