Keynesian economic policies don’t work, but fighting for these policies will? Guglielmo Carchedi’s essay on the so-called Marxist multiplier has me bugging. He is handing out bad advice to activists in the social movements and telling them this bad advice is based on Marx’s labor theory of value. The bad [...]

Based on what I have described of Bernanke’s policy failure so far, is it possible to predict anything about the future results of an open ended purchase of financial assets under QE3? I think so, and I share why in this last part of this series. Author: Jehu Eaves Visit [...]

I stopped my examination of Bernanke’s approach to this crisis and the problem of deflation after looking at his 1991 paper and his speech in 2002. I now want to return to that series, examining two of his speeches this to discuss the problems confronting bourgeois monetary policy in the [...]

The world market had been shaken by a series of financial crises, and the economy of Japan had fallen into a persistent deflationary state, When Ben Bernanke gave his 2002 speech before the National Economists Club, “Deflation: Making Sure “It” Doesn’t Happen Here”. Bernanke was going to explain to his [...]

So I am spending a week or so trying to understand Ben Bernanke’s approach to this crisis based on three sources from his works. In this part, the source is an essay published in 1991: “The Gold Standard, Deflation, and Financial Crisis in the Great Depression: An International Comparison”. In [...]

As part of my continuing occupation of the Marxist Academy, I have been looking at various Marxist theories of the crisis of neoliberalism. I am now reading the late Chris Harman’s “The rate of profit and the world today”, written in 2007, just prior to the big crash. This is [...]

As part of my continuing occupation of the Marxist Academy, I have been looking at various Marxist theories of the crisis of neoliberalism. I am now reading the late Chris Harman’s “The rate of profit and the world today”, written in 2007, just prior to the big crash. ***** Harman [...]

As part of my continuing occupation of the Marxist Academy, I have been looking at various Marxist theories of the crisis of neoliberalism. This is the final part of my critique of Andrew Kliman’s “Neoliberalism, Financialization, and the Underlying Crisis of Capitalist Production” (PDF). ***** As can be seen in [...]

I have been reading David Harvey’s “Organizing for the Anti-Capitalist Transition” (2010). Harvey’s theory of the current crisis differs somewhat from the other Marxists I have been following. I actually rather enjoyed reading Harvey because he is simple to read without being simplistic like Wolff’s and Resnick’s piece. Harvey gave [...]

The modern state, no matter what its form, is essentially a capitalist machine — the state of the capitalists, the ideal personification of the total national capital. The more it proceeds to the taking over of productive forces, the more does it actually become the national capitalist, the more citizens [...]

So, I got feedback from three people who, in one way or another, say they don’t understand my last post on my conversation with Andrew Kliman. One person posting on Reddit, complained it was too dense; another wondered if I was advocating a return to the gold standard; a third [...]

Well, I have just about had enough of my conversation with The Andrew Kliman, so I thought I would try to assess what it accomplished, instead. My ‘tin-ear’ with Andrew began after a conversation with @skepoet on twitter about the odd divergence between gold and dollar measures of economic activity [...]

(Or, more importantly, why should anarchists, libertarians and Marxists be as well) So, has any reader of this blog heard that economists have conceded Marx was right after all? Have you at any time during the past 40 years heard an economist admit that Marx was correct in his transformation [...]

In my previous post, I stated: In reality, there was nothing in Bohm-Bawerk’s argument to be disproved. Bohm-Bawerk had indeed cited the essential contradiction at the core of capitalism. His problem, however, was to imagine the contradiction to be a defect of Marx’s theory, and not a fatal flaw laying [...]

In the previous blog post, I argued that in each of the three great capitalist catastrophes of the 19th and 20th Centuries — the Long Depression, the Great Depression and the Great Stagflation — economists scurried to bone up on Marx in an effort to understand practical problems of state [...]