Iranian Students Call for Mass Demonstration in Tehran to Support Egyptian People

Ed. Note:  We received the following call from the Union for Advancement of Secular Democracy in Iran (UASDI). MHI members had demonstrated against the executions and torture of Iranian dissidents along with UASDI and other Iranians in Times Square, New York, on Jan. 29, an international day of condemnation of the Iranian regime. We wore black tape across our mouths and carried photos of jailed Iranians labeled “in imminent danger of execution”–some of whom had already been killed. The pictures were heart-breaking, yet one young Iranian woman told us, “Iranians have hope when they see what is going on in the Middle East.”

UASDI Supports the February 14^th Call for a Mass Demonstration in Tehran

in Solidarity with the Egyptian Peoples Movement Against Dictators;

Mubarak and Khamenei Should be Deposed

UASDI strongly supports all movements for democracy, particularly the current uprisings in Egypt and Tunisia and the freedom movement in Iran. We strongly support the call by various student groups in Iran for a solidarity demonstration in Tehran on February 14th. Read More

Value and Crisis: Bichler & Nitzan versus Marx

By Andrew Kliman, author of Reclaiming Marx’s “Capital”: A refutation of the myth of inconsistency

This article responds to recent works by Jonathan Nitzan and Shimshon Bichler, influential radical political-economic thinkers who teach, respectively, at York University in Toronto and at colleges in Israel. Part I, below, responds to Bichler and Nitzan’s (B&N)  “Systemic Fear, Modern Finance and the Future of Capitalism” (Bichler and Nitzan 2010). In this paper, they argue that (1) “systemic fear”–fear of the death of the capitalism–has gripped capitalists during the last decade, but (2) capitalists’ belief that their system is eternal is necessary for its continued existence. So (3) the alleged systemic fear is itself a threat to the system. And thus we have yet another version of the notion that capital itself may be the historical Subject that will bring it down.

B&N claim that fear of the death of the system’s death has gripped capitalists only during two periods in recent history–the Great Depression and the 2000s. Their evidence for this claim consists entirely of the alleged fact that these two periods of crisis were the only periods since World War I in which equity (stock) prices and current profits were strongly correlated, i.e. the only periods in which they closely moved up and down together.[1] However, using the exact same methods and the exact same data as B&N, I show below that that equity prices and current profits were also strongly correlated from the early 1950s through 1973–during the so-called golden age of capitalism!

In Parts II and III of this article, which will appear here later this month, I will respond to the critique of Marx’s value theory that pervades Nitzan and Bichler’s 2009 book, Capital as Power. In this book, they allege that Marx’s value theory is practically useless for the study of accumulation. So my response will show, among other things, that his theory sheds significant light on the long decline in the rate of accumulation (investment) that contributed to ever-increasing debt burdens in the U.S. and helped set the stage for the recent Great Recession. Read More