Date: September 4, 2019Author: Paul Cockshott A recent article made comparisons between the ‘atonement’ of the German state for Nazi crimes and the issue of reparations to the descendants of slaves in the USA There seem to be a whole mass of confused issues being put forward in this reparation demand. The first point is that …
Reparations to Slave Descendants in the USA and Germany Read More »
Date: August 27, 2019 Author: Paul Cockshott Anyone familiar with the Communist Manifesto will remember that one of its demands is for the nationalisation of land and the allocation of land-rent to fund public purposes. The objective was spelt out in more detail in the Demands of the Communist Party In Germany of the same …
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 …
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 …
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 …
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 …
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 …
Date: September 9, 2019Author: Paul Cockshott Last week I discussed the issue of slave reparations in the USA in the abstract. I now want to look at it more concretely, to put figures to it. I will be analysing just how much surplus labour was plausibly extracted from slaves in the USA from shortly after …
Date: March 10, 2019Author: Paul Cockshott 1 Capitalism Class society The most important thing about capitalism is that it is a class system. It is a society based on class hierarchy dominated by a rich upper class. Like any class system it is unequal. Like any class system it is based on exploitation, on majority working …
Date: August 29, 2017Author: Paul Cockshott It is today taken as almost axiomatic that the left supports the LGTB cause. It came therefore, as a surprise to me to find a communist journalist Gearoid O Colmain arguing that homosexuals, far from constituting a persecuted minority, are in fact key protagonists of the ruling class and …