Nèdeem Elmahjoub's blog

This is very stimulating and requires focus, and the exchanges are also very engaging. I couldn’t read everything although the topic is so important to most of us. 

I am at the end of this book. I recommend it. You just need some updated figures while you are reading. The Globalisation of Production, Super-Exploitation and the Crisis of Capitalism Two major factors cause capitalist crisis: declining profitability and overproduction. I am not convinced that the latter is a major factor. The problem is not that capitalism produces too much, but that what it is produced is not provided to the global population. Half of the world population is unable to buy what is produced or buys too little of what is produced because it is too poor. That means that lack of investment in large swathes of the world–Latin America and South Africa, Africa, parts of the Middle East and Asia–unemployment, precarity, etc. deprives half of the world from getting access to what is produced. Those who produce get little or almost nothing from what they produce.  According to the WHO “around 45% of deaths among children under 5 years of age are linked to undernutrition. ...

 How unscientific is the labour theory of value?

 A review of A People’s Guide to Capitalism

Knowledge Commodities

Empiricism, because it takes its evidence from the existing order of things, is inherently prone to accepting as realities things that are merely evidence of underlying biases and ideological pressures. Empiricism, for Marx, will always confirm the status quo. He would have particularly disliked the modern tendency to argue from ‘facts’, as if those facts were neutral chunks of reality, free of the watermarks of history and interpretation and ideological bias and of the circumstances of their own production . The financial system in its current condition poses an existential threat to Western democracy far exceeding any terrorist threat. No democracy has ever been destabilised by terrorism Marx and 'capitalism' by John Lanchester

"was there nothing wrong with capitalism before finance (and ‘financialisation’) emerged after the 1970s?  Were there no crises of overproduction and investment, no monopolies and rent-seeking before the 1970s?  Was there a wonderful productive, competitive, equal capitalist mode of production existing in the 1890s, 1930s or even in the 1960s? And why did finance suddenly emerge in the 1970s, leading to the GDP measure being altered to account for it? Mazzucato offers no explanation of why capitalism became increasingly ‘unproductive’ and ‘rent-seeking’.  But Marx’s value theory does.  From the mid-1960s to the early 1980s, there was a sharp fall in the profitability of the productive sectors of all the major capitalist economies. Capitalism entered the so-called neoliberal period of the destruction of the welfare state, restriction of trade unions, privatisation, globalisation – and financialisation.  Financialisation (looking to make profit from the purc...

Did Marx have a labour theory of value?

Crucial. A debate between Michael Roberts and David Harvey

It is mot about stating the obvious; it is about how you state it beautifully and succinctly. Do we get paid what we "deserve"?

How Global Entertainment Killed Culture  From Notes on the Death of Culture by Mario Vargas Llosa Llosa is one of Latin America's best novelists, who moved from the left to become an advocate and enforcer of neoliberal policies in Peru.

Why the labour theory of value is true

The value of Capital