I don’t have a dog in the Russia-Ukraine thingy and couldn’t possibly care less where the decades-long ongoing collapse of the Soviet Union is headed next, but this is getting messy now and needs to end. So I have a suggestion: Accelerate the disintegration of Russia. Not because Russia are wrong — you don’t get wronger than the fascists, imperialists…

M. Heinrich: Marxol…uh, Mixupologist. I meant to ask you: How can you in good conscience call this buffoon an academic, when he clearly doesn’t know the difference in Marx’s labor theory of value between production based on exchange value and production of surplus value? When he mixes them up constantly and/or treats them as the equivalent categories…

It might have been better for his case if Edwad had kept silent about our previous interaction and continued to write on his blog in quiet anonimity. I would likely have never read any of his nonsense there. But he didn’t. Instead, he baited me to read another of Heinie’s useless 2013 diatribes against Marx’ fragment: this one in that cop shop…

Edwad wuz lizznen … I guess. But I don’t think he heard me. A Critique of the Blog-Form Nearly a year ago, everyone’s least favorite semi-notable Marx blogger, Jehu, made a passing swipe at me (for reasons I still don’t really get) in a piece where he was attempting to offer a critique of Michael Heinrich’s comments on Marx’s value theory…

A statement has been issued and signed on to by a number of communist parties and organizations condemning “the imperialist conflict in Ukraine, which constitutes one of the consequences of the tragic situation for the peoples shaped after the overthrow of socialism and the dissolution of the Soviet Union.” According to the statement, the conflict…

I’m reading Adam Tooze’s book on the Nazi economy and the story is even more bizarre than I thought. As Tooze sees it, the Nazi’s tried to develop and mass produce a number of important new technological breakthroughs — synthetic fibers, oil, rubber, improved combat aviation — and advanced national autarky, all to produce a world-class, state…

Nicolas D Villarreal maintains a blog, Pre-History of an Encounter over at Substack. I subscribe to his blog and try to catch his new posts on economic subjects. In December, he updated his research on the secular Rate of profit. About the same time as Nicholas was publishing his work on the secular rate of profit, I was publishing a blog post, “Rate…

The United States plus its NATO allies (effectively, the EU): Population: 900 million GDP: $40 trillion Russia: Population: 145 million GDP: $1.5 trillion CONCLUSION: I think the outcome of this conflict was determined before the first shot was fired. This is not about who is right. It is about who has might. No national capital today can survive long…

A preview of “Jim Crow” Joe’s State of the Union speech…

“The value of a thing”, says Butler, in a quote provided by Marx in a footnote to Capital, “is just as much as it will bring.” The ‘thing’ Andrea Ricci wants us to consider is the total direct labor time expended on the production of commodities sold in the market. The ‘value’ under consideration is the money price this total direct…

Let the bombs decide. Is it Vladimir or Volodymyr? Apparently, this linguistical difference has now brought the two post-Soviet gangster regimes to blows — with the United States and its NATO allies pouring armaments, mercenaries and political consultants into the mix. People are taking sides in the greatest faux conflict since the Hutus slaughtered…

We come now to Ricci’s concept of the monetary expression of value (MEV), from his monograph, “Value and Unequal Exchange in International Trade”. As we saw in the previous post, Ricci has disposed of Marx’s category of value. In place of this critical category of Marx’s theory, Ricci has introduced us to his peculiar value-form school innovation…

“Shut up and get back to work” –The Mods After a trying interview at the hands of professional right-wing provocateur and bomb-thrower, Jessie Watters, the Reddit subrredit, r/antiwork, suffered a bit of internal discord fomented by what appears to be an alliance of Democrat and Democrat Socialist operatives. (Really, how can you tell the difference?)…

Anthonie van Leeuwenhoek (1632-1723) I felt that this comment from Tony Leuwenhoek deserved a fuller reply that i gave it in a previous post: Thomas, dude, give it up already. Everybody is back to fascist business as usual since summer. Omicron was a couple weeks of work from home and delayed school return from xmas. Nothing more. The only thing this…

Biden’s robot-like Surgeon General is “working from home” after he and his entire family were hit by the Covid-19 virus. By all accounts, the General and his fam were fully vaxxed up and boosted, well-masked and studiously avoiding the filthy unvaxxed masses — as he recommends constantly. This follows a much-touted interview where he stated…

There is no question that Deng Xiao Peng will go down either as the greatest Marxist innovator of the 20th century… … or just its biggest asshole. Today, the People’s Republic of China is the second largest, and, by several measures, the largest, national capital in the world market. It is a remarkable achievement for a Communist Party that was…

Redditors got their panties all in twist over this segment from Jessie Watters’ show. I see nothing wrong with it. If you don’t think laziness is a virtue, keep trying the alternative — wage slavery.

So, let’s look at a peculiar element of Ricci’s argument and compare it to Marx’s original formulation: To begin with, Marx makes this important argument: We have seen that when commodities are exchanged, their exchange value manifests itself as something totally independent of their use value. But if we abstract from their use value, there remains…

This week the Biden administration, through its mouthpiece and long-time cable-tv-based stenographer, CNN, warned that Russia was preparing, “‘fabricate a pretext for an invasion’ of Ukraine by creating ‘a very graphic propaganda video’ that would depict a fake attack by Ukraine against Russia.” Acting as faithful stenographer for “Jim…

The value-form school have some difficulty explaining how a value-less scrap of paper, even a screen of dancing electrons, can perform the functions said by Marx to be fulfilled by money. This is true although most of the heavy lifting has been done by Marx himself. Pardon me, as I briefly cover Marx and Money 101. I promise this will only hurt a lot…

On February 4th, Hunter Biden will be celebrating his 52nd birthday. Will his daddy give him his very own  war in Ukraine as a present? We can’t wait to find out.

“I ain’t Joe Mama, bitch! Put the ballot box down and back off!”