Cheap Motels and a Hot Plate

Below is an excerpt from Naming the System. The Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC is the Spanish acronym) is the oldest revolutionary army in Latin America. Since 2002, it has been under some of its severest attacks by the Colombian government under the right-wing president Álvaro Uribe, aided by considerable U.S. military aid and personnel, who are in Colombia allegedly to eradicate the drug trade, but really to contain and defeat the FARC. The FARC has suffered many blows in the past few years, including the death of its founder and leader Manuel Marulanda in 2008 and the murder of several of its top leaders. Yet, it continues to fight, and it still controls large areas of the country and maintains its capacity to disrupt the Colombian economy. An update on FARC, with an overall negative view of its future, can be found at http://www.coha.org/farc-a-perilous-future-a-grim-recent-past/. All things considered, I do not think the FARC can overthrow the government, and I think it is likely that the FARC has lost a good deal of its initial revolutionary trajectory. Read More

 When I first began to teach, I had many veterans from the war in Vietnam in my classes. Between my first year in 1969 and the revolutionary victory in 1975, tens of thousands of soldiers returned home.  The college in which I taught was in the steel-mill town of Johnstown, Pennsylvania, and like most working class cities, Johnstown had more than its share of veterans. Read More

My mother turned eighty-five years old on January 26.  She’s a small, grey-haired woman with plenty of wrinkles.  When she was young, she had long brown hair and a pretty Italian face.  She and my dad were a handsome couple.  We used to laugh a lot together, and I can still get her laughing.  Wordsworth said that the child is the father of the man.  And so too the child is the mother of the woman.  You never really conquer what you were.  A poor girl in a poor town, with a poor mother and no father, breathing in the coal smoke, beset by worries, finds it hard to be happy as a woman.  You always jump when the phone rings.  Anyway, what my mother was and is helped make me, for better and worse, what I am.  Here’s a story I wrote.  My mother has read it.  I think she had mixed feelings about it.  It is from my book, In and Out of the Working Class.    Read More

The State  Today there are many social scientists who believe that capitalism is gradually transcending the government, meaning that governments can no longer regulate and control capital accumulation. This view is incorrect. Capitalist economies developed alongside of strong central governments and cannot exist without them. Capitalist production and distribution occur within markets marked by intense competition and extreme individualism. Without some sort of central control, markets would devolve into chaos as rampant cheating and violence erupted over market control. A central government is needed to make laws and rules for the smooth operations of markets: laws to compel contracts to be honored, laws to ensure minimal product purity, a bureaucracy to enforce laws and rules, and so forth. Governments are also necessary for the production of certain outputs essential for capitalist production but which the markets themselves will not cause to be produced. Either because no capitalist could be sure of reaping the reward of a particular investment or the investment is beyond the means of any single capitalist, the state must undertake certain investments. It must provide for the national defense, build roads, bridges, lighthouses, port facilities, airports, railroad lines, and provide for the general education of the work force. Read More

Why Is Neoclassical Economics So Pervasive?  When capitalist economies were new, the writers who attempted the first analyses of these economies were, for the most part, driven by a desire to understand things. They did not stand to gain anything by their studies, such as academic appointments, government commissions, or money. They weren’t trained as economists and thereby subject to the prejudices of their teachers; indeed there was no such person as an economist nor a field of university study called economics. Adam Smith was a professor of philosophy, and David Ricardo was a financial speculator and businessman. Because they were relatively objective, they could learn some fundamental truths about capitalism. Smith could see clearly the tendency, inherent in the normal operation of the new system, for employers to find ways to destroy their competitors and monopolize markets. Ricardo could see clearly that profits are not a cost of production but a surplus. Read More