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!.

One Thing Popa Marx Got Dead Wrong!....A Late Night Musing on the Rate of Profit in the US.........

Just started reading a book I bought a few years back that has just sat on the shelf.  "Wobblies & Zapatistas". Wishing I had picked it up sooner...The first chapter already has me worked up!

The book is interesting so far, but there is a major error in the application of Marxian theory in the first chapter.  When discussing "globalization" in the lens of the Zapatista movement, the book cites the rising Organic Composition of Capital in the 1970's leading to a falling rate of profit for U.S. capitalists and thus the need for expansion.  The result, of course, is NAFTA, and all the ramifications for the Mexican people*

What has not been adequately explained (at least to my mind) is that the profit rate did NOT fall during this period.  It is beyond the scope of what I am going to undertake for a blog entry to find data to prove this but I would direct my reader to a lot of Rick Wolff's semi-recent work for evidence.

This common misconception that globalization was caused by the American capitalist looking for ways to increase a falling profit rate (due to a raising OCC) is just a simple case of finding results where the theory predicts they should be.  The OCC rose, resulting in globalization, read Marx, the profit rate must have been falling???  I think Marx got this one really wrong!  Globalization is a rusult of too much profit, not a falling rate, and the necessity to stick all of this surplus somewhere.

What is at stake in this argument?  A valid question dear reader....please help me with it.


*As an aside, an interesting something cited in this book that I have never come across in my own NAFTA work (albeit years ago now).  The Mexican government removed a line from their constitution allowing land to be held communally by a village at the request of the U.S. government as a precondition to NAFTA.  Perhaps more on this another night.

Spending, The Millennial Generation, and Life (Retirement) Goals, Some Bourgeois Consumption Commentary

Last night I had a discussion with my wonderful mother (Beth Miehls) about an article she had recently read about the millennial generation.  This is the generation that started with my birth in 1981 and encompass everyone born up to the early 2000s.  Thus there are hipsters, young business types, and a lot of over-educated bartenders.  

The point of the article that Beth read was that The Millennial Generation (Gen Y from this point on) has spending patterns that favor experiences over accumulation of material wealth.  Basically she was making the point that Gen Y'ers spend more of their money on travel and high end food and drink than on houses and cars, etc. because we have some type of conscious or subconscious economic preference for living well rather than owning well.  This concept is causality in neoclassical preference theory rearing its ugly head in the hegemonic bourgeois culture yet again.

I am not arguing with the basic premise here.  Gen Y has lead spending in the microbrew, localvore, eco-tourism, etc. movements.  But are we making a choice to do these things rather than spend on accumulation?

It is quite possible that Gen Y'ers are spending their money in ways other than accumulation of long term material assets such as property because these things are not available to us.  The baby-boomers (to their credit) have a higher life expectancy than any American generation before them and already own much of the property, and hold most of the high-paying jobs.  Life expectancy for American males was in the low 60s in the period leading up to the Golden Age of Capitalism (pre and durnig WWII) and has steadily increased post war.  The average American male can expect to live into their mid 70s today.  Living until 75 means that the average baby boomer (our parents) will hold their property for 15 years longer than their parents did.  This, combined with many other economic factors means that the mean property sale price in the US has increased from $19,300 in 1963 to  $272,900 in 2010 (US Gov. Census), far faster growth than the rate of inflation during this period.  *



Is my generation choosing to pay for experiences? or has the longer lives of our parents (thankfully I might add in the case of my parents, as we get along well and love each other) priced Gen Y out of the ability to buy land, houses and cars and forced us to spend our money on good beer and travel instead to give us a reason to get out of bed in this bourgeois culture of consumption?




*I haven't even started to discuss the collapse of credit markets as a factor here, which will deserve its own post when I return to this topic.

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)