Apologies Dear Reader....For my Absence and for my Return. And...Apologies dear Capitalist, You Remain the Root of the Problem.

I am attempting a return to the world of blogging, and to some degree a return to the world of intellectual existence. After a long break during which I learned more about myself than I ever cared to know, I am once again ready to engage the world.  What limited world I will be engaging is a question that can only be answered in time.  For now, the time feels right, as right as it has felt in a long time at least, to return to caring about problems and questions of the mind and the world around me.  After my break the world still needs to be changed, and I am again ready to actively contribute.  The passivity of post-modern change aside, it feels good to be back.
This brief paragraph of masturbation aside...I welcome you all...and more importantly (in so far as these things are important) myself...back to Marx, Baseball and Rum!

To paraphrase Gordon Wood: As a result of the revolution Americans changed from being subjects to citizens, and the difference is vast.  My problem with this type of statement is what has driven me back to writing.  Although we are free in political realm of our existence (sigh), we remain subjugated in our working lives. As long as the life of the average American remains not their own on the job, the reality remains, that in our economic existence we are nothing but subjects to the man who signs the check.  We, my working American brothers and sisters are not free, we are not citizens of an economic republic, but rather we toil for the enrichment of a select few.  Systemic change remains the goal! The Hope! The Reason to Get Out of Bed!.

Looking Forward to the Next Eight Weeks: Teaching "Intro to the Economics of Crime and Social Problems" (again)

I am pleased to be wearing my adjunct professor hat again this summer for John Jay College of Criminal Justice (part of  CUNY... the City University of New York system).  I am teaching a course that existed in the John Jay economics department before I started teaching there as an online adjunct (almost 3 years ago now), but I have made it my own.

The course is Economics 170 "Introduction to the Economics of Crime and Social Problems" (online).  I started out teaching this course as a hybrid between the syllabi of the chair of the economics department at John Jay who used mainstream methods with a liberal twist, and a John Jay professor who is a recent UMass PhD and radical economist.

Although still containing elements of both of these professor's syllabi, over the past three years the course has morphed into something uniquely my own.   I record video lectures in my home office and blend these with a non-mainstream into economics text (Understanding Capitalism) , and a large amount of discussion responses and supplementary readings throughout the semester.  For those interested, you can get a better feel for the course in my introductory video for this summer's students. (This will be the only material for the course that I will link to directly from my blog, as I don't want to get into intellectual property issues with John Jay).

I realize that this post is self serving as most of my readers will never take an economics course at John Jay (if you are interested in signing up I have three or four spots left this summer, but the course starts today...so get on it asap!). That said, I think it is important to share what I am trying to do, in this world dominated by neoclassical economic thought and teaching.  My goal when teaching Intro to the... this summer is to have the students study the interaction of economic, political, cultural (and criminal) processes not as something given, requiring the memorization of tools to analyze, but as a collection of fluid and changing ideas.

The question "what is a crime?" is in a state of rapid change in our society as we re-make and re-define while we re-build American capitalism after this most recent systemic crisis (recession).  The growing inequality in the United States in both wealth and opportunity for material advancement is going to require people to rethink many aspects of our criminal justice system.   The US criminal justice system has been, and remains, notoriously biased against certain classes of people, but as a larger and larger portion of the country becomes "working poor", how the definitions and ideas of what is criminal change will have vast impacts.  Will we allow the criminal justice system to continue as it has been operating, allowing affluence to buy justice when fewer and fewer people will be able to afford it?  Possibly growing economic inequality might finally force society to address issues of inequality in justice that should have been resolved decades ago during the civil rights movement?

 I am incredibly excited about the opportunity to draw a paycheck (albeit a relatively small one) while engaging with this type of question again this summer (especially considering the positive experiences I have had teaching the students of John Jay College in the past)

3D Printing: Possibly a Fundamental Change to the Economy?

Both NPR in general and their podcast Planet Money (story here) have had numerous stories recently about the newish technology of 3D printing.  These printers are essentially duplicating machines a la Star Trek that use raw materials (matter) to create objects by running computer programs and essentially assembling complex objects by combining raw materials based upon computer programs.  The hope for development is that this technology will eventually be able to make organs, bones, etc. as well as complicated manufactured goods.

Health and well being implications aside, I found something remarkable in the Planet Money podcast.  They  mentioned that the 3D printing technology will dramatically lower barriers to entry in manufacturing, as the machines are not terribly expensive.  They of course (and are still in their early stages) cost thousands of dollars, but no millions of dollars. Even more remarkable in the story there was an open, honest and unabashed reference to Karl Marx.  The argument made is that in modern manufacturing the steps from prototype to producing for the market will no longer require massive capital investments just to start out. It could become possible to start a manufacturing firm with just the investment in a 3D Printer.  I couldn't believe my ears hearing Planet Money openly state that "to some degree this innovation of modern capitalism has the potential to put ownership of the means of production into the hands of the masses".  Essentially manufacturing capital could become accessable to a "middle class" member of society.  Using another definition of class, members of the proletariate may be able to afford high technology capital for manufacturing start up.  

I'm not suggesting that there is a major shift in class structure coming immediately out of 3D printing, there will still be owners and workers, and exploitation  present,  I don't think this means the end of capitalism or anything that dramatic, in the world of 3D printing, but the key point made in the story, was one common in  classical Marxism: Ownership of the means of production in highly developed manufacturing could become much more wide spread, thus less concentrated in the hands of the very wealthy.

If nothing else, I see some potential here for a reduction in the massive (and worsening) wealth inequality problem in the developed world. Our massive inequality problems stem in part from a system in which massive amounts of capital are required to start any kind of new product launch.  Is it possible that with 3D printing  that capitalism entrepreneurship  has innovated a product that will put ownership of the means of production into the hands of the masses?  Probably not...but it is a very intriguing idea!