Marxism - Science topic

Good Day, Douglas, I appreciate you took the time to react.

Take a look at the article when you have time and you will be able to imagine the nature of such an animal if it existed and think beyond and away from the economic animal, then you may be able to see that some perfect animals taught at schools/universities are not true perfect animals after all and why not, and then you may be able to link this thinking with general GOLDEN PARADIGM thinking that applies to true perfect market thinking be it social, economic, environmental, and any combination of them system.

Have a nice day

Respectfully yours;

Lucio

Aimad, given your comment and the article shared, the following article takes those issues to the next level, you may find it interesting:

Yadav, thank you for taking the time to comment.

If you take the time to read the article you may see your comments fall out of place with respect to the nature of perfect red market theory/circular red markets and implications.

But I appreciate your try.

Muhammad, thank you for taking the time to write.

I am focused right now just on sharing new ways of looking at the same development or methodological issues from the true sustainability angle. If you see some ideas you find interesting feel free to come up with either different way to expand them or to apply them.

Respectfully yours;

"Far left countries are more likely to have heavily related social and fiscal issues. Far right countries are more likely to have heavily related social and fiscal issues." ????

You may find the following article interesting:

All history is the history of class struggles," a fundamental principle of Marxist theory, posits that the driving force behind historical development and societal change is the conflict between different social classes. According to Marxism, this conflict arises from the inherent inequalities in the modes of production, where the ruling class (bourgeoisie) exploits the working class (proletariat). This struggle for economic power and control over resources shapes the social, political, and economic structures of society. Marxists believe that history progresses through a series of stages, from feudalism to capitalism, and ultimately to socialism and communism, each characterized by a distinct class struggle that drives transformation and development.

Sure, if Jesus had come as a billomaire, salvation would have been for the rich and not for all. Alexander Ohnemus

It exists. Study it: https://la.utexas.edu/users/hcleaver/357k/357kDallaCostaSubversionTable.pdf

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caliban_and_the_Witch

Alexander Ohnemus Economics is the basics of life. I like the idea of the analogy with binary in computer science except parameters can be changed to suit.... food for thought.

Hi Alex. I do not believe Researchgate would help you to get money as such. And by asking this question, the probability of your doing that is getting even lower. The best advise for you would be to make a serious research proposal about the subject you like the most.

Not enough. Best course is the wonderful biography, "Thomas Sankara: A Revolutionary in Cold War Africa", by Brian Peterson. But I am still hoping to find something based on fieldwork in villages.

You may be interested in the article I ended up writing, which has a big section on the CDRs. In my list of articles on this site.

The question is what does the notion “poor” mean. To me conditions matter.

Best regards,

Kamil.

Dear Trung thank you for commenting. Linear economy based capitalism/traditional market thinking had a social sustainability gap and an environmental sustainability gap, but since in 1848 when Karl Marx came out with the red marxism idea the environmental issue was not a critical issue so he used the social sustainability gap as a point of entry to flip capitalism thinking from economic freedom without equality to social equality without freedom.

In 1987 when the WCED advised us to go sustainable development thinking to leave fully socially and environmentally unfriendly economies behind.....we are now back to instead of linear traditional economies circular economies, with social and environmental sustainability gaps still embedded in them as going from linear to circular does not fixed the embedded sociall and environmental unfriendliness as social issues and environmental issues ARE EXTERNAL FACTORS to traditional economic thinking, be it linear or circular.

The existence of social and environmental sustainability gaps means that the circular economy will face red marxism treats or green marxism threat or yellow marxism threats each using the specific sustainability gap they need as point of entry and flip.

So if going circular is part of pretending to be socially and environmentally friendly and the social and environmental sustainability gap get worse and worse as the circular market expands as expected, then the threats will become if not really, real pressure point for paradigm shift to higher level models like green market, red markets, or sustainability markets.

Time will tell.

Thank you for commenting

Lucio

Do you want to have a formal debate with me with profound dialogue and nuances? If so, we need a moderator and an institution to host us. My rhetoric is only so deep.

Harry thank you for commenting. If you know that capitalism puts the economy first and only, you can state is market structure, both in terms of supply and demand or in terms of market equality and freedom. If you know that red socialism puts society first and only, then you can indicate its market structure, if you know that green marxism puts the environment first and only, you can express its market structure, if you know that yellow marxism puts society and environment first and only, then you can state its market strucrure....If you know that ecomarxism aimes at protection society and environment, you can state its market structure.....

This question is about only ECO-SOCIALISM and GREEN MARXISM, and the question is a very specific one and the answers are simple and short ones: Is Eco-socialism Green Marxism? Do they have the same model structure?

I assume the kind of dictators you have in mind are those running regimes such as the USSR and its client states. They were Marxist-Leninists for whom Marxism was an analysis of capitalism and Leninism concerned the organization of "socialism". But Lenin's template for "socalism" was German state-capitalism - he said so himself. Neither Lenin nor his successors were ever out to build "Marxism"; they were busy building state-capitalist regimes dedicated to the generation of surpluses, their investment and the subordination of life to work - just like their Western counterparts. Only the mix of planning, markets and police state methods varied. Confusing Marxism with Soviet-style state capitalism & its police state was a Cold War ideological myth perpetrated by Western capitalists and their spokespersons to facilitate the repression of Marxist critics of capitalism in the West. The USSR had its own myths about Western-style capitalism for parallel purposes.

Sorry, but who says "Marxism and Libertarianism dislike bureaucracy" ? Given the early ideological history of Soviet Union, I find this difficult to understand. Thanks!

Marxism is necessary in a pluralist society because multiple ideas are better than one.

Marxism fails of course when authoritarians insist it is the only system acceptable.

Maxim, good day, Could you please read the context provided under the question to be able to guide you into the nature of this question? You need to know what is a green market and what is a dwarf green market as they are not the same, and you need to be familiar with the current 2023 green marxism threat to dwarf green capitalism.

About green markets and dwarf green markets

Dear Ange, good day, Thank you for writing and see you are familiar with related material by me. My goal this year is to expand those ideas in terms of equality and freedom.

I have written and share several articles on how to give structure to all possible dominant component based development models, and link those structures to paradigm shift and paradigm shift theory from the point of view of dominant component equality and freedom.... For example, red socialism as you know it is a social equality without freedom model so you can represent it by a social dictatorship structure. Democratic capitalism is an economic freedom without equality model so you can represent it as a liberal economy model. Non-democratic capitalism is an economy without freedom and equality so you can represent it as an economic dictatorship.

Once you know how to write or express those structures in terms of dominant component equality and freedom, then you can provide analytical support to all the things you listed in your comment as well as be able to answer the current question using this freedom and equality thinking.

One of my goals this year is to expand these ideas and apply them for example to state the paradigm evolution path of red socialism had it had been able to win the cold war by going economy friendly and what would have come next and what is at the end or to state the paradigm evolution path of non-democratic capitalism if it were to outsmart democratic capitalism and what would come next and what is at the end or what is the paradigm evolution path of democratic capitalism if it loses to non-democratic capitalism and what comes next and what is at the end.

Attached I shared the figure 3 of a paper I am working on to present the theory on where to base and complete those goals of the year mentioned above, notice that democratic capitalism(DC), red socialism(RS), and non-democratic capitalism(NDC) are not yet represented there in terms of equality and freedom yet:

How the models needed to answer the relevant question here can be stated in terms of equality and freedom and how paradigm evolution in this case is expected to work can be found at:

En las zonas rurales de sur de Tucumán, el oeste de Ccatamarca y el sur de la Rioja, se desenvolvió un modo de producción denominado "comunitarismo rural" que se basó en el uso compartido de tierras, aguadas y bosques por parte delideres rurales que acuerdan un eticidad común en el manejo de manadas y "bañados"....

"marxism targets only flawed forms of capitalism" This statement makes no sense to me at all. Marxism provides a critique of capitalism in ALL its forms; there are no "unflawed" forms of capitalism in Marx's analysis. Furthermore, I don't read those talking about taking Nature more into account than Marx did - what I assume you mean by "green Marxism" - as juxtaposing that (as you are doing) to some preoccupation with " saving society". Even in Marx's own analysis society and nature are analyzed as interwoven and part of his critique of capitalism was a critique of how capitalism ruptures the natural metabolism of human/nature inter-relations. So your "yellow Marxism", defined as "saving society and nature at the same time from capitalism" has been there from the get-go, in both Marx and Engels' writings. The neglect/exploitation of Nature by what you are calling "red" Marxists, which I take to mean Soviet-style Marxists, flowed from their abandonment of Marxism as anything other than a convenient ideology serving to hide their pursuit of the same goals as Western capitalism, i.e., maximum exploitation of workers AND nature via increased management by the state, which resulted in a new form of "state capitalism". Lenin, after all, was frank about following the German model of state capitalism, with the Soviet Union differing only in the ASSERTION (but not the reality) that the state would be controlled by workers instead of capitalists. Result: the same kind of exploitation of both humans and nature as the rest of capitalism.

You are an original thinker and researcher; I have taken your works on sustainability into account. Astronomy replaced astrology, chemistry replaced alchemy; the same process is currently in the making, with respect to social science: what is now understood as economics (mainly a mathematized derivate of private wealth accumulation and subsequent management practices) will be replaced by a more scientific model of human economic action, cleaned up from ideological wishlists. I do regard the profound study of other authors as a precondition of learning, dear Lucio Muñoz Most of my articles and books, i.e. my own work and views, are on my RG account (e.g.

).

Kapoor's answer has nothing to do with Marx's analysis of alienation. To understand Marx's analysis read his 1844 Manuscripts. There you will find discussion of four kinds of alienation/estrangement (basically the same thing), all produced by capitalists imposing and controlling work. Here's a passage on these four from my book 33 Lessons on Capital: Reading Marx Politically (2019) pp. 207-8.

1. The alienation of workers from their labor: living labor becomes an alien means for controlling them rather than fulfilling them [What they do on the job is determined by their bosses who set the objective, what will be produced, determines the tools/machines they will use and the division of tasks among them.]

2. The alienation of workers from their product: the products they create become alien to them. Owned by the capitalists, they are separated from them and then used for dominating and controlling them.

3. The alienation of workers from each other: the stripping away of their self-realization within their species means the “estrangement of man from man . . . What applies to a man's relation to his work, to the product of his work, and to himself, also holds of a man's relation to the other man . . .”[1] Thus capital ruptures the interactions between people and forces them to exist and to act according to its directions. First, the domination of their lives by work means that they have, effectively, very little time and energy available for relationships with each other. They are alienated from each other in the simplest sense: being separated. Second, the capitalist imposition of competition and hierarchy pits them against one another, estranges them from one another precisely in so far as their lives are defined only in terms of their relation to capital and not in terms of unmediated relationships between each other – thus the loneliness and separateness of life in capitalist society portrayed in the songs above.

4. The alienation of workers from their “species-being”: therefore work, which was one means of human interaction, one way of fulfilling human species-being as a collectivity, becomes merely a means to insure individual existence. “In tearing away from [humans] the object of [their] production [the product] estranged labor tears away from [them their] species-life, [their] real objectivity as a member of the species.”[2]

Absent are the positive phenomena associated with the interaction of humans with each other in their work and in the sharing of their products such as Marx imagined existing in some society free of capitalist domination:

In your enjoyment or use of my product I would have the direct enjoyment both of being conscious of having satisfied a human need by my work, that is, of having objectified man's essential nature, and of having thus created an object corresponding to the need of another man's essential nature. I would have been for you the mediator between you and the species . . . in the individual expression of my life I would have directly created your expression of your life, and therefore in my individual activity I would have directly confirmed and realized my true nature, my human nature, my communal nature. Our products would be so many mirrors in which we saw reflected our essential nature."[3]

Thus, capital undermines not only our individual self-realization through the transformation of nature, but also our mutual interactions as we carry on these activities communally.

[1] Marx Engels Collected Works (MECW), vol. 3, p. 277.

[2] Ibid.

[3] MECW, vol. 3, p. 228. Note the evocation of reflexive mediation analyzed in Chapter 1.

I think the crisis of overproduction is being met by increasing the rapidity of transactions (multiplying the transactions) by a small percentage of the global market under the impact of internet connections and increased commodification of delivery and home services, basically, rather than expansion of the number of buyers in the market. If you consider the African continent (home to about 25% of the world's population) and much of Latin America, and India, most of the world's people are not in the capitalist labor force. Most are in the so-called informal sector - organized by domination/oppression, not wage labor.

I would agree with Marx, the cost of labor is determined by the cost of reproduction of the worker - by cost of subsistence - so not a direct relationship between value realization and wages. Lots of value does not mean wages will go up unless a certain type of worker must be reproduced and temporarily if a shortage exists. Today, only a relatively small number of fully developed capacity workers are needed, and their lifestyle costs a lot, so their cost of reproduction wage is way above subsistence. However, a large portion of the existing workforce is struggling to maintain subsistence level, so much so that a guaranteed income in the U.S. capitalist core, is conceived to prevent political crisis as wages generalize across the global system stagnant in the face of inflating prices.

With respect to "How labor and overproduction is related to the value crisis?", since the secular trend to replacement of workers by technology creates the change in the "organic composition of capital," whereby more materials are passed through (higher capitalization) with less added labor (variable capital), huge amounts of good with tiny amounts of value added must be sold to realize the same amount or comparable amount of surplus value as when more labor was utilized. Conditions of surplus labor and labor paid at the global average endanger realization of value as they cannot pay even low market prices.

It seems to me that as the amount of surplus labor in the form of the informal sector grows globally, the key for America and Europe is to keep the starving masses away from them (don't report on them in the media) and to take over feeding their own surplus populations, using taxes to provide income which they can then spend. But sometimes the middle-class high paid workers revolt against paying taxes to feed the poor. Militarism helps because the middle-class understands that armed domination is necessary and are willing to feed the people as armed forces.

In other words, since the workforce is global, only a few leading functions require core sector workers, and the rest of the workforce wages across the system, are declining in relative terms. Perhaps the system will reach crisis change when the surplus level reaches enough people with some skill who will refuse the labor for wages and demand their right to capital (to "own" it, i.e., control it according to their needs not profitability) in the form of land, natural resources, market places like Amazon, as well as productive capacity, and share it for self-reproduction, in an arrangement absent the pressure of market competition or forced centralization of capital.

Steven, nobody is accusing anybody here. When you say that an entity has more power than another in the market and that is why there is no equality and freedom, by definition you are not talking about Adam Smith's perfect market...

If you look carefully at the pareto efficient and optimal point/conditions of the perfect traditional market, you can not be there without freedom and equality, but if you assume equality away you can be there only with freedom.

Let's leave it here. I am here to exchange ideas, not to impose ideas.

Respectfully yours;

I fully agree and to rephrase the question to encompass Russia is perfectly fine. So you think the issue of which structure we are born into matters more than the individual him or her self? Do you believe our reality is socially constructed? Interesting. You touched on the issue of strata and stratification, Perhaps being born into the right family can compensate for the lack of cognitive ability and conscientiousness .

It helps your research reading Bruce R. Scott, The Concept of Capitalism (Heidelberg-London-New York: Springer, 2009) that explains capitalism as a "system of governance" rebuilding the concept from the classic Fernand Braudel "Civilization and Capitalism" (the original French has a very different title). More recently Scott published "Capitalism. Its Origins and Evolution as a System

of Governance" (Heidelberg-London-New York: Springer, 2011). These are the arguments and problematic stressed by Scott after, he told us, a visit to China:

" After the trip and the readings, one book stood out for its influence on my thinking: Fernand Braudel’s three-volume History of Civilization and Capitalism, 15th Century to the 18th Century. In the third volume, Braudel noted something that was completely new to me, to wit that average incomes circa 1500 were relatively equal across the most settled areas of the world at the time, which I took to mean Japan, China, India, present-day Turkey and Iraq, and Europe. The spread between the high- and low-income areas was estimated to be about two-to-one. Yet by the time I was doing my reading in Braudel, that spread had broadened to approximately thirty-to-one because of growth in the high incomes. This increased spread in relative incomes and therefore economic performance raised some immediate questions; for instance, what was it that had led to the rise of Europe, in relative terms, from circa 1500 onward? In hindsight it seems supremely ironic that Braudel was never able to ask if what he was searching for might have been hidden right in front of him, in the title of his book, i.e., in the European creation and adoption of an early concept of capitalism as a system of governance for many, but by no means all of their respective economies. Braudel was never able to define capitalism, as he readily admitted in his second volume, and, perhaps as a consequence, he never considered the possibility that the key to the relative rise of European incomes might have lain in the creation of that capitalist model of governance. Indeed, Braudel did not go looking for a model of governance; instead, he seems to have been looking for some natural force or forces that would explain the relative progress of Europe" (etc., p. XIII).

Interesting question Henrik. The trouble is that the term 'post-modernism', when used by people who are neither philosophers nor sociologists, has become an empty term used to deride critical social science. It reminds me a little bit of the way that the term 'Marxist' is now used by the American Centre-Right media to designate any politician with a strong redistributive platform - including people like Corbyn and Sanders, whose policies in no way propose to dismantle the Capitalist economy.

In a similar way, people like Jordan Peterson use "post-modernism" as a slur. Peterson's online lectures on the "damages" of postmodern academia clearly show that he does not really understand what the concept really means. He just throws Marxism, cultural Marxism, critical theory, structuralism, post-structuralism, and postmodernism, into the same bag.

I haven't read Bloom and I didn't quite understand in your previous post what he defines as post-modernism. I suppose that most detractors of so-called post-modernism object to one or more of the following broad approaches in social science (all of which have at best a loose connection with actual postmodernist philosophy):

1. The notion that contemporary societies are fundamentally shaped by, and continuously reproduce, dynamics of domination, exploitation and repression. Language is an important vehicle for this (see below).

2. The idea that people's behaviours, preferences and notions of what is True largely derive from deeply rooted narratives and linguistic structures that (mostly) unconsciously shape people's minds. These narratives and other linguistic structures are socially constructed - i.e. they do not reflect some fundamental truth of 'human nature'.

3. The idea that racism and other malevolent forms can inhere not just in individuals' consciousnesses, but also in institutional structures and collective representations that are ostensibly value-neutral.

4. Methodologically, the belief that knowledge about society is found through qualitative forms of social analysis, like for example discourse and narrative analysis, grounded theory, ethnography, etc. Social analysis relying on logical-positivism and mathematical inductivism are viewed with suspicion.

Now the funny thing is that Most/all of these elements existed in social science decades before postmodernism as a social theoretical movement came to the stage. I also suspect that real postmodernist thinkers would probably object to the first element in the above list, since postmodernism is at heart an approach to knowledge that questions any inherent connection between belief systems and the world as is. Be that as it may, the point I'd make here is that the "Leftist takeover" of some social science has little to do with the (mostly imagined) popularity of "post-modernism". Many social scientists are Left Wing not because they discovered postmodernism but for a variety of reasons.

LIkewise, I would question whether your colleagues in social psychology and Business studies manifest a "post-modernism"-inspired Lefty-ism. As a discipline social psychology remains firmly moored to logical-positivism and statistical inductivism. And similarly, I don't see how your Business studies colleagues could be Left-Wing. There's some good research on business school curricula and teaching that actually shows the opposite. Perhaps you meant to say that your colleagues are Left wing and/or influenced by postmodernism in a purely private capacity? This is definitely the case in economics - the discipline in and of itself is criticized by sociologists for being methodologically uncritical and right-wing; yet the majority of American Economists in the US are actually on the Left side of the political spectrum. See for example:

So I guess one would need to understand what you are concerned about more precisely.

- Is it the feeling that most social scientists (or specific disciplines therein) are politically Left-Wing?

- Is it the feeling that most social scientists are specifically 'postmodernist' Lefties?

- Is it the feeling that social sciences DISCIPLINES tend to reflect/defend Left-wing views of the world?

- Is it the feeling that social science DISCIPLINES tend to reflect so-called POSTMODERNIST epistemology?

More generally, methodological and epistemological pluralism is generally a good think, so to the extent that there is a "takeover" as you say, that's probably bad. That said, from what I see in sociology, which perhaps is the most "non conformist" discipline in the social sciences, the "take over" by "postmodernism" is far from reality. The top journals in the discipline mostly favour articles employing standard statistical methods. The arguments in such studies do not usually take serious account of narratives, hermeneutics and historicity - all of which would be amply found in so-called postmodernist research. What IS true, however, is that the vast majority of sociologists have Left-wing political views. And I'd guess that most research does seem to align itself with Left-wing concerns (e.g. women's rights, equality, racism research, migrant issues, etc). I'm not sure what the consequences are of this on the general state of the discipline. The damages I've seen have to do with the harshness of debates taking place between more radical social thinkers and their less radical (though still largely left-wing) colleagues. Perhaps the answer to your question is that politics and the media in most countries already give disproportionate space to Centre-Right and Right-wing thinking, without ever allowing serious discussion of more genuinely left-wing stances. Hence, the Left positioning of social sciences is kind of a corrective.

That's a good question

and this:

Hama, H. H. (January 01, 2019). A comparison between Marxism and Islamic State’s Salafi Jihadism. Asian Journal of Comparative Politics.

"Every place on our planet affords its own unique experience ", Baatarzorig Batjargal

https://onartandaesthetics.com/2019/12/21/every-place-on-our-planet-affords-its-own-unique-cognitive-experience-baatarzorig-batjargal/

I think that Lenin was selective in his departure from the inevitability imposed by Marxism for the socialist transformation, especially through the revolution. He said that Marxism is not a rigid doctrine, and on this basis he is adding what suits the Russian peasant environment.

Jacob,

My response was that the mathematics make no sense; the only thing to understand is that some Marxists have tried to turn Marx into an economist, have interpreted his theory as economics and therefore see it as susceptible to being restated in terms of modern mathematics. For some critiques of what you call "modern Marxian scholars", see https://www.akpress.org/rupturing-the-dialectic.html (which is also available as a pdf here on RG). BTW to write, as I did, of "the centrality of technological change in accumulation (growth)" is not the same as seeing technological development as a "driver" of economic growth as you have rephrased. That's a very Solowesque way of putting it. In Marx, technological change is central to the dynamics of class relationships because capital's relative surplus value strategy involves manipulating technology in its efforts to retain control over workers. Because accumulation is the accumulation of antagonistic classes, the "driver" of accumulation is class struggle. Sometimes the dynamics of that struggle generates growth, sometimes it generates recession and depression. When and where and under what circumstances is the subject of "crisis theory" understood in terms of crises in the class relationship.

Dear Kashif,

This is certainly an interesting question.

Marxism can provide a solid theoretical critique of today's 'development studies'. At its core, 'development studies' was created as a post-colonial interdisciplinary field of studies--one which aimed aimed to examine and address the developmental gap between Global North and Global South.

For the most part, development studies is bifurcated. On the one hand, there are those who advocate for state-led development. On the other, we have the stern believers in market-led development. The Marxian contribution here is that it brings to the fore the fact that, despite their core ideological discrepancies, both economic models are grounded on surplus value as a means for capital accumulation. That is, despite their methodological and theoretical differences, state-led and market-led development is exploitative at its core. Workers under both economic models are subordinated to the needs and desired of the capitalist/bourgeois class.

In this sense, I think Marxism is particularly useful not only in helping us understand the ways in which global capitalism perpetuates uneven development in the Global North and South but, most importantly, draw attention to the inherent flaws of capitalism, helping us, as scholars, to move forward in re-thinking new global political scenarios.

In terms of literature, I would recommend the following:

1. Murat Arsel & Anirban Dasgupta, "Critique, Rediscovery and Revival in Development Studies" Development and Change. 2015. Vol 46(4).

2. Benjamin Selwyn, "Karl Marx, Class Struggle and the Labour-Centred Development" Global Labour Journal. 2014. Vol 4(1)

I hope you find it useful.

Regards,

Hi Jiyau,

As a physical geographer I can't give you scientific evidence, but as I am quite familiar with Central Asia I can attest that the general differeniation you have given seems to be accurate.

On the science and cooperation level Russia is the traditional partner - has always been there (well, at least since the late 19th century) and is well connected through Academy of Science institutes and Universities. And I guess that there are also close ties between Russian and Central Asian ministries.

China on the other hand is the new kid on the block and is trying to push into the region quite aggressively (and I do not mean this in a negative way). China invests greatly into public infrastructure (building roads, mountain passes, tunnels, petrol station networks etc.) - probably with two main goals in mind - building goodwill with the Central Asian governments and with developing the rural regions of Central Asia (e.g. the Pamir and Tian Shan mountain regions) for resource exploitation (China also buys mining rights left and right). But China also invests heavily into the scientific infrastructure - e.g. financing laboratory equippment and research projects. Much (most?) of what China is doing in Central Asia seems to be focused on the economic benefit (securing markets and much needed resources) and you might want to look into the "One Belt One Road" Initiative which is the overarching framework for China's policy in Central Asia.

I hope that helps a little bit.

All the best,

Michael

It is a very interesting – and still underexplored – research topic. Generally, the Soviet taxonomists were rather hostile towards cladism (= phylogenetic systematics). Hennig’s classical book on foundations of cladistics is still not translated into Russian, and the first benevolent surveys of this taxonomic phylosophy did not appear in the USSR until the late 1980s. Of course, now the situation is quite another. Cladistic methodology is accepted by anybody who wants to use it, and it is almost impossible to find a theoretical paper written in Russian to reject cladism as a ‘wrong’ methodology. However, most taxonomists of old generations are still working within pre-Hennigian paradygm. But I would like to place your question in a wider context. Generally speaking, any attitude towards cladism concerned with a problem: “should phylogeny be taken as a foundation of the system?” I have to note that there was a long tradition of decoupling taxonomy and phylogeny on theoretical basis in the Russian taxonomy. As long ago as in the 1920s, some prominent systematists of Russia insisted that the phylogeny cannot serve as the basis of a system. I mean chiefly zoologists since I am not very familiar with the works of Russian botanists on this subject. Some of these Russian authors who rejected phylogeny published not only in Russian. I’d recommend you to read two papers of Eugene Smirnov, a very interesting Russian theorist of taxonomy:Smirnoff E.S. 1924. Probleme der exakten Systematik und Wege zu ihrer Lösung. Zoologischer Anzeiger, 61: 1-14.

Smirnov E.S. 1925. The theory of type and the natural system. Ztschr. indukt. Abstannmungs- und Vererbungsiehre, 37: 28-66.

These texts contains explanation why the ‘phylogenetic taxonomy’ is wrong (according to Smirnov).

Another prominent Russian author of that time, Vladimir Beklemishev, also insisted that systematics must not use phylogenetic data at all. Unfortunately, his theoretical views were not published in language other than Russian.

Concerning the post-Hennigian time, the most articulated theoretical work aimed to bring arguments against cladism is:

Skarlato O.S., Starobogatov Ya.I. 1974. Phylogenetics and the building of a natural system. Trudy Zoologicheskogo Instituta AN SSSR, 43: 30-46. (in Russian only).

Discussing Hennig (1950), the authors conclude that his attempt to reform taxonomy “leads to a complete elimination of taxonomy as a scientific discipline” (Skarlato & Starobogatov, 1974: 32). I may add that Starobogatov was among the most influential theorist of taxonomy in USSR, and his methodological views have been read widely.

Well, it is a top of iceberg, of course. If you like to get more information about the Russian theoretical taxonomy (very peculiar and very interesting if to view it in comparison with the Western European thinking), please ask me more. I am sure that the hostility towards cladism in the Soviet taxonomic community has deep philosophical roots and cannot be viewed as a over-simmplified picture of ideological confrontational between ‘East’ and ‘West’.

Dear Claudio,

You might be interested in this article by Stéphane Legrand. I don't think you will necessarily find names that "fit" Foucault's definition, but the author proposes interesting approaches to Foucault's relations to marxism and marxists.

Best regards

Denis

Thank you very much philip.

Mathew Sharpe and Geoff Boucher: Žižek and Politics: A Critical Introduction may be of some help to you.

Lucio and Giulio,   A fundamental issue here is how the word "efficient" should be defined.  Capitalist economics defines an efficient outcome as "Pareto optimal," which means no further mutually beneficial exchange is possible.  It measures value according to exchange value or market price. 

Socialism defines "efficient" in terms of an entirely different type of accounting, but it is presumably based on physical input-output relationships (maximum physical output per unit of physical input).  This is the way engineers in most countries think of efficiency.  It is my impression that an engineering concept of efficiency is still the standard method used in China,

An extreme example of how these competing ideas of efficiency affect actual decisions would be the "ghost cities" in China: entire cities of tall buildings with only 1% occupancy.  It is quite possible that these buildings were constructed efficiently from an engineering perspective, even though they are not efficient from a market value perspective.

Bob, I think you are getting this right. One problem in the history of sociology in the West is that during the first half of the 20th century, sociologists were struggling to establish sociology as an independent academic discipline. This was in part to create sociology departments at the universities and thereby income opportunities for sociology professors. One effect of this was that the study of human societies had to be separated from the study of human nature and psychology, with which it had been linked in earlier times. Suddenly, sociology and human biology were not only different disciplines, each with its own set of methods and theoretical frameworks, but they were hostile.

In the second half of the 20th century there were big controversies about sociobiology, which used concepts from evolutionary biology to explain sociological phenomena. Sociologists considered sociobiology an illegal encroachment of biology on their turf. There was equally strong hostility of many sociologists to behavioral genetics. Somehow, sociologists had forgotten to include individual differences into their theories, or had adopted theories that did not quite match reality. Today there are efforts under way to remedy this, again not without hostility from those who pursue old-fashioned 20th-century sociology. The most dramatic recent development are massive genome-wide association studies that relate genetic variation to educational attainment. In a recent paper by Okbay et al. in Nature, variations in 74 different genes have been described for this outcome. Together they explain up to 9% of the variance in educational attainment (correlation of up to 0.3 between educational attainment and polygenic score). What sociologists call "family advantage" can be explained in large part by familial transmission of these genes. This means, the traditional division between sociology and human biology is collapsing. It is a paradigm shift that is unfolding right under our noses. This scientific revolution is still in its early stages. You may still have to wait a few years before a genome-wide association study finds "suicide genes", but it's going to come.

In that case, what is the next step? Engineer genes for school failure and suicide out of the human genome? If we try to eliminate environmental disadvantages with social welfare, public health care and education, why not eliminate genetic disadvantages with embryo selection and genome editing? Some people may prefer a "meritocratic" society in which we maintain genetic disadvantages but not environmental disadvantages, so that those with good genes can rule over those with crappy genes. But this is not for sociologists to decide. People have to make up their minds in what kind of society they want to live. 

It is astonishing that nobody mentions Kōzō Uno. See the discussion that followed after him.

Makoto Itoh: The Basic Theory of Capitalism: The Forms and Substance

of the Capitalist Economy, Macmillan, Basingstoke, 1988.

  ☆See its bookreview: http://homepages.warwick.ac.uk/~syrbe/pubs/itoh.pdf

Robert Albriton and Thomas T. Sekine (1995) A Japanese Approach to Political

Economy: Unoist Variations, New York: Macmillan.

Elena Louisa Lange (2014) Failed Abstraction – The Problem of Uno Kōzō’s Reading of Marx’s Theory of the Value Form. Historical Materialism, 22(1): 3-33.

　☆Lange's paper is critical to Uno's theory of value form but provides useful refenreces.

Hello Vishal,

I would say that social anarchism is not a political ontology, but rather, a political philosophy. Political ontology has a place in the overall ontology of human life and some ontologies are bound to include political concepts. I have been out of that business for several years so I cannot direct you toward current events.

Best regards,

Marion

The book below contains a number of relevant case studies:

Laverack, G (2013) Health Activism: foundations and strategies. London. Sage Publications.

Thank Omar,

it was interesting to know how the Islam scholars are thinking about international trade.

Yoshinori

Yes and no. "Treadmill" thinking comes out of Molotch's work on urban growth machines. O'Connor's insight, gradually elaborated -- and in 1973 only glimpsed -- was that social reproduction was being internalized by capital. Of course that's a fraught process, but it helped us to understand how social reproduction -- health care, education, etc. -- has become one of the great battlegrounds of the class struggle in the Global North. And notwithstanding neoliberalization, reproduction costs continue to rise -- and state spending as a share of GDP with it. 

@Arjun,

Indeed, by definition.  

To David's question, I am sure Marx would have been amazed and enthralled by Stephen Marche's piece http://lareviewofbooks.org/essay/literature-second-gilded-age/

 David,

I would suggest a conceptual approach: profit is related to an economic concept, while interest is linked to a financial one.

You have a profit (or margin) by making the difference between the price of the product or service you sell and the cost  related to the production, and transaction, you make.

When you do it, there is the creation of "economic value".

You have an interest when you refer to the financial side of your balance sheet..

If you borrow money you have negative interest in favour of your Bank or financial system.

If you have excess money and you borrow it to others (e.g. bonds) then you get a positive interest. 

In both cases (positive or negative interest situation) there is not  a creation of economic value but only of financial one. 

I wonder, in the case of a Company, if the shareholders would be satisfied of having the excess money utilized by the Company to generate financial "profits" in absence of a clear and well structured investment plan and strategy!

I deem not!

In fact, the excess value created (in excess to the one related to the necessary or planned investments) should be returned to the shareholders in my opinion. Financially "fat" Companies are not necessarily healthy or safe,  from the competitive and strategic point of view.

Ending my answer to the question, I would see a contraddiction  then, only if there is confusion between the two concepts: economic and financial.

Finance is related to funding a business (assets - liabilities equilibrium), while profit (and loss) is the dinamic result of a business.

The gross profit  should be capable of financing the Company development, the interest  cost on liabilities and (after Tax) , hopefully, the shareholders equity.

These are the relations I see and the contraddictions would materialize, in my opinion, only neglecting,  or failing to satisfy properly, the need of  :

Structuring competitive Company development and related  Investments

Leveraging wisely the investments (risk factors on Company financial structure)

Rewarding the equity investment of the Company Shareholders

My kind regards

Alberto

The EKC hypothesis - formulated 1992, partly as an antithesis to the sustainable development concept discussed in Rio, has long and intensively been discussed in the economics literature. It was found to be true for certain pollutants in certain places, but generally not for energy and overall material flows. So the changing of economic structures as well as the changing composition of environmental pressures have to be taken into account. Doing that, little remains of the hypothesis, and that explains why the once dense sequence of publiucations on the issue has died down the last half decade or so.

Alienation, according to Marx, involves a structural relationship in the mode of production defined by the alienation of the worked from nature, society, the products of labour and, ultimately, from the self.

Loose use and abuse of the term has allowed it to be "psychologized" and turned into a simple descriptor of anything from issues of personal identity, employee morale, moderate mental disease and disorder, depression, negative attitudes towards one's boss (ya think?) and vaguely related issues from Facebook "addiction" to rampant consumerism.

In short, the term has been captured by "bourgeois" sociology and organizational psychology and made into a symptom of individual "angst" when it is, in reality, an essential part of capitalism ("late" and/or "state").

Returning to the source would be a good first step toward reclaiming a meaningful academic understanding and forming the intellectual basis for something called "praxis."

Hi. I try to give my perspective on this issue. The problem with socialist calculation problem is not related with the kind of currency or crypto-currency in use. The problem is first of all related with the existence of prices. In fact, in a socialist economic system, there cannot be prices. Value is subjective. Subjective evaluations are dispersed in the minds of economic actors. Market is the place where such evaluations find a synthesis and become objective prices. Generated in this way, prices can act as information transmission vehicles (objective information about subjective evaluations). Without the mediation of market, such evaluations could not be transformed in prices and therefore the information transmission could not happen.

In a socialist economy, market functions is abolished by definition. It means that prices cannot arise. Of course, we can find numerical representations of the assumed value of goods. But such figures would be simply numeraires, decided by the central planner, without knowing the structure of preferences (preferences are the root of values).

Socialist calculation is thus not possible because the information synthesis contained in prices cannot arise. Prices, in order to be generated, need market. This because they are synthesis of millions of evaluations. Information related with such evaluations is dispersed in millions of minds. No central planner can, in a moment, possess all the dispersed information.

As economic process happens in time, personal evaluations are continuosly subjective to revision. Economic plans are individually and continuosly revised in order to take in account the new information acquired through previous economic actions.

With central planning, such a revision, brought out by  the never-ending discover of new information, cannot be accomplished. In fact, central planner is not really an economic actor and in general, without the market, cannot know the intertemporal structure of preferences.

In the same way, salaries are related with the existence of prices, are prices in themselves. Without the market, objective salaries cannot be paid, in any currency or form. Simply because the value of labour in a certain industry cannot be known.

The only way to admit the socialist calculation is to accept an objective theory of value, according to which personal evaluations plays no role in the formation of price. But to admit this would mean to deny the essence of economic action: the choice, execution and revision of ends-means frameworks though plans generated by individual preferences and expectations.

Dear Emiliano,

The model of Lowe, Adolph, "The Path of Economic Growth," (Cambridge, U. K.: Cambridge University Press, 1976) can do that for you. Before you get into Lowe's original work, which I think can be programmed with a spread sheet, I recommend that you look at some smaller hand applications as in the two references,

Halevi, Joseph, “Lowe, Dobb and Hicks,” Eastern Economic Journal, Vol. 10, No. 2 (Apr. - Jun., 1984), pp. 157-167.

Halevi, Joseph, Employment and Planning, Social Research, Vol. 50, No.2 (Summer 1983) pp. 345- 358.

And, to add to the points made so far, Laclau and Mouffes analysis is not only analytical, but political itself. It is situated in the hjstorical period at the end of the 1980s when discussions in the political left were felt by many to be stuck. Thus, they do not mean to say that Marx' analysis in the 19th century was wrong or that his understanding of capitalism was faulty, but that in the given social situation, political struggles could neither theoretically nor politically be understood as a single, essentialist opposition. Instead, social struggles are fragmented and dispersed, and one goal of the left has to be to actively construct new "chains of equivalence", i.e. discursice coalitions.

The class approach proposed by Wright the classes allows an empirical approach through the notion of the three types of control that determine the class position:

- Control over the means of production

- Control over the work process

- Control over the work of others

In particular, it is possible to reconstruct a class structure based on these three dimensions through household surveys.

Our approach can be found in the Argentine case:

Féliz, M.; López, E. y Fernández, L. (2012). “Estructura de clase, distribución del ingreso y políticas públicas. Una aproximación al caso argentino en la etapa post-neoliberal”, Más allá del individuo. Buenos Aires: El Colectivo.  

To Aimee's question: "Will the capitalist economic system sustain?" I'm tempted to answer simply, "God, I hope not. Sustainable capitalism is a nightmare!" - in whatever form. As Elias has pointed out Western and the Soviet variants of capitalism have proved devastating to both humanity and to the Earth more broadly. To Aimee's sub-query "in terms of efficiency/performance", I would say the usual measures of "efficiency", i.e., productivity, or output per unit of input, are commonly so narrowly defined as to ignore the myriad negative externalities (or byproducts, or consequences) that accompany all capitalist production and infect all of capitalist society. As long as capitalism does "sustain" or "persist", so will those negative externalities - which is why I hope we can figure out how to transcend it sooner rather than later.

In a separate thread, in answer to a similar query by Nematullah Haidari of the UN Development Program, I wrote:

"Capitalism = a social order based on the endless subordination of life – human and non-human – to commodity production. In the case of human life, subordination means the organization of society such that the vast majority of individuals have the vast majority of their time and energy sucked up, vampire-like as Marx wrote, in work producing commodities, either commodities produced for profit – which is then reinvested to impose more work – or the commodity labor power – the willingness and ability to work. In the process, they suffer exploitation, alienation and a host of other ills. In the case of non-human life, it means being converted into the raw materials of commodity production. In the process, they and their life-worlds are poisoned, bulldozed, consumed and destroyed. As a result of these characteristics vast numbers of beings (both human and non-human), naturally struggle to avoid or escape this fate, so capitalism is a system fraught with antagonism and conflict. Sustainable capitalism is, therefore, a nightmare."

As for "existing alternatives", Elias, your own characterization of Soviet-style systems as "state capitalism" implies that they are NOT true alternatives but merely variations. To find "existing alternatives" we must look elsewhere, in the many grassroot, bottom-up efforts to create real alternatives to capitalist ways of organizing various human activities. THOSE are everywhere; in virtually every dimension of society there are those experimenting with non-capitalist alternatives. While capital seeks to either demolish or absorb them (thus ending their character as true alternatives), we should support, defend and contribute to those we think worthwhile. Only through the elaboration and spread of viable, real alternatives can we build other worlds, different from and better than capitalism.

Fine Henry! Now I think we agree. I never said that welfare effects are enough to study the effects of the enclosures. They are crucial however.

Michael,

So much for "ought". Your recognition of how your own notion of "self-interest" includes the welfare of your family and your ability to imagine how clergy may have notions of self-interest that include the welfare of others, makes it hard to understand your apparent inability to to see how yet others might define their self-interest to include the welfare of their fellow workers, comrades or larger social groups - and in the process redefine themselves as "social individuals". The blinders of ideology?

As for the rest, there's no such thing as "free economics" or "free markets" and the juxtaposition of "market economies" to "planned economies" (which I guess is what you want to propose) is a Cold War relic that hid both extensive markets in the East and extensive planning in the West. The usual notion of "market" - as some kind of automatic interaction of autonomously determined supply and demand - hides the extensive planning of both supply and demand carried out by (often antagonistic) participants as they strive to obtain their desired results. This is most obvious in the case of supply - production doesn't just happen, every element of it is planned, only the institutions of planning differ. In the case of demand (and the "need" that lurks behind it), the same is true as any competent advertizing executive, many policy makers, and organizers of boycotts know well.

To return to the question that launched this thread of discussion, I would be interested in Leandros' reactions to what the rest of us have written in response to his initial question.

Plenty of museums in Eastern Germany - and a very lively debate on the merits and demerits of their approach.

Just to quote a few:

Stasi Museum - Berlin http://www.stasimuseum.de/en/enindex.htm

Stasi Prison - Berlin http://www.stiftung-hsh.de/

Stasi Prison - Bautzen https://www.stsg.de/cms/bautzen/startseite

DDR Museum - Berlin http://www.ddr-museum.de/

Zeitgeschichtliches Forum - Leipzig http://www.hdg.de/leipzig/ausstellungen/dauerausstellung/

Very controversially, new sections on post-1945 prisoners in former Nazi death camps, e.g. in Buchenwald - http://www.buchenwald.de/612/

You can find a lot of academic critical discussion of these themes in the German language, for instance:

Ruge (2005) http://books.google.it/books/about/Der_Kommunismus_im_Museum.html?id=A6vaAAAAMAAJ&redir_esc=y

Zuendorf (2009) http://www.zeithistorische-forschungen.de/Portals/_ZF/documents/pdf/Zuendorf_2009.pdf

Sabrow (2009) http://books.google.it/books?id=unmp468mnccC&printsec=frontcover&hl=it&source=gbs_ge_summary_r&cad=0#v=onepage&q&f=false

this is quite an old thread so I'm happy to see folks still interested in it. Makes me wish I could sit down over a couple beers with you folks and learn more. Till that day...

Marx thought that organised religion is used as opium - it is used tocalm the anger of the people against the exploitative economic system hence is harmful. religion breeds fatalism.

Do you read German? Here are some titles that might interest you:

Dahmer, H. (1972). Wilhelm Reichs Stellung zu Freud und Marx. Psyche - Z Psychoanal, 26, 208.

Laska, B. A. (1981). Wilhelm Reich. Reinbek: Rowohlt.

Nitzschke, B. (1991). Psychoanalyse als 'un'-politische Wissenschaft. Zsch. psychosom. Med., 37, 31–44.

Nitzschke, B. (1992). '… im Interesse unserer psychoanalytischen Sache in Deutschland'. In J. Wiesse (Ed.), Chaos und Regel. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht.

Peglau, A. (2010). Verbrannt und beworben. Psychoanalytische Schriften im Nationalsozialismus und das Beispiel Wilhelm Reich. Psychoanalyse - Texte zur Sozialforschung, 14, 334–366.

Puscher, U. (2001). Die völkische Bewegung im wilhelminischen Kaiserreich. Sprache - Rasse - Religion. Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft.

Rubin, L. R. (2002). Wilhelm Reich and Anna Freud: His Expulsion from Psychoanalysis. Intern. Forum of Psychoanalysis, 12, 109–117.

Zepf, S., & Zepf, N. (2010). Wilhelm Reich - ein blinder Seher? Ein verspäteter Nachtrag zu seinem 100. Geburtstag. Forum der Psychoanalyse, 26, 71–86.

Zweig, M. B. (1971). Wilhelm Reich's Theory: Ethical Implications. American Imago, 28(3), 268–286.