Verizon Strikers Battle Phone Company and Union
New York City – After two weeks on the picket lines, the Communication Workers of America (CWA) ordered their striking members back to work at Verizon on Aug. 20—without a contract. Three members of CWA Local 1101, which covers Manhattan and the Bronx, talked about the strike at a supporters’ meeting held the same day that the union agreed for them to return to work while bargaining continued.
Discussion at the well-attended supporters’ meeting, which included workers from other New York and New Jersey unions, ranged over many issues: whether public sentiment is for or against so-called middle-class workers (those with relatively decent wages and benefits), the long-lost concept of “no contract, no work,” and whether, as a result of the massive demonstrations in Wisconsin at the beginning of this year, there is now a new dimension to “class warfare” in which private and public sector unions are linked. Private and public workers’ mutual support appears key to reversing the push to break unions and lower workers’ standard of living.
Adventures in the New Economy: The New Home-Work
by Tiffany Goldman
In the “New Economy,” many of the available and newly created jobs require that the employees “work remotely.” The employee is expected to furnish the work environment…be it at the local Starbucks––with blaring music and deafening coffee grinding––or in the social seclusion of one’s home. Typically, the employee provides computer equipment, Internet connection, Smartphone with unlimited calls, e-mailing and texting, general office supplies (e.g., high-priced cartridges), and business transportation, subject to escalating fuel costs. Read More
Value and Crisis: Bichler & Nitzan versus Marx
February 6, 2011 by
MHI
Filed under
Economic Crisis
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
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