Date: September 5, 2019 Author: Paul Cockshott Since various economics professors noticed that Marxists had been publishing articles showing, from empirical data, that the labour theory of value was right[ 5,3,4,6,1 7,2 ], they have felt the need to come up with objections. Whilst in the past the objections economists raised to the labour theory […]
3 Bad Objections To The Labour Theory Of Value Read More »
We know that the share of wages in national income is relatively stable in the range 40% to 60% If follows from this that the share of surplus also is stable in this range. It also follows that the magnitude of surplus must be strongly correlated with the size over time of the workforce The
Short Note On The Rate Of Profit Read More »
Date: July 4, 2019Author: Paul Cockshott 1 Introduction Louis Althusser is a controversial figure: murderer, one time communist philosopher, massive guru to generations of cultural studies authors. His key paper on ideology[2] has, according to Google Scholar, been cited over thirteen thousand times1. He is clearly a very influential philosopher. But here is the paradox.
Critique of Althusser’s Theory of Ideology Part 1 Read More »
Paul Cockshott July 6, 2019 Introduction This is the second part of my critique of Althusser’s theory of ideology. It is a bit more technical than the last since Althusser gives a very abstruse definition of ideology and it needs a fair bit of formal and pictorial analysis to pick it apart. What is the
Critique of Althusser : 2.1 Definition of ideology Read More »
Socialist calculation: the computer engineering problem. In the same year that Allin Cottrell and I published Towards a New Socialism(TNS), I also brought out a couple of computer science books. The two CS books might seem to have little to do with the book on socialism but they are linked by an intellectual history of
Socialist calculation: the computer engineering problem Read More »
Date: May 14, 2019Author: Paul Cockshott In corresponding with readers it has become clear that in TNS we did not perhaps do a good enough job of explaining the relative roles of input-output techniques and the Harmony planning technique which we proposed. The input-output method is defined in terms of flows. If you look at
Input-output or Harmony planning Read More »
Date: July 28, 2017Author: Paul Cockshott In my last post I repeated Marx’s phrase the the hand mill gave you the feudal lord the steam mill the industrial capitalist. One reader objected that this overstated the role of technology and that steam power was already known to the Romans. I concede that Marx over simplified.
Why no Roman industrial revolution? Read More »
Date: September 1, 2016Author: Paul Cockshott Were fossil fuels necessary? Did capitalism itself generate its own technical advances? Why was energy so vital to the development of capitalism? Fundamentally it is because by substituting inanimate energy for human muscle, the amount of human time and effort required to make things was reduced. A powered machine
Energy, Science and Capitalism Read More »
Date: April 18, 2017Author: Paul Cockshott n the social production of their existence, men inevitably enter into definite relations, which are independent of their will, namely relations of production appropriate to a given stage in the development of their material forces of production. The totality of these relations of production constitutes the economic structure of
Fossil fuel and the ebbing of globalisation Read More »
Date: July 25, 2018Author: Paul Cockshott I have been producing a series of videos explaining materialism. Most of these have been accepted without controversy, but predictably enough, the last one, which was on quantum phenomena and materialism raised a number of critical comments. The gist of my argument had been that the dominant Copenhagen interpretation
Materialism and delayed choice quantum eraser experiments Read More »