There is no Alternative to a Market Economy

David McDonagh

There is no alternative to the market economy!

Or why Karl Marx was a failure [being a reply to Robin Cox who writes in here as Hood1. He was in the SPGB but he is now a statist who thinks he is an anarchist].

The economic calculation argument [eca] that quite phenomenally Robin Cox still does not understand, despite decades of studying it, is what best indicates that there is no alternative to the market economy. Robin imagines that he does supply a way how free access might work but he shows no sign of even understanding that a method of social cost is needed but he does show plenty of ignorant protest against the fact that the economic problem is demanding, that it makes him feel insecure and the like, all of which leads the reader of his posts in here to think that he is merely attempting to wish the economic problem away.

Robin makes a lot of fuss about being an anarchist but he also seems to go along with ideas like democracy that are a form of government and government implies a state.  It is mere chance that consistent pristine liberalism is anarchy, it is the liberalism rather than the incidental anarchy that matters but it is also a mere fact that men like Bakunin were de facto statists.

Karl Marx set off on a tricky premise when he defined a commodity as production for use as well as exchange, as it saddled him with the true idea that production for profit was thereby always for use too, 

Medical Heroics: A Doctor Writes

Note: This is not the most cheerful posting we could make on New Year’s Eve. However, I watched a close friend die of cancer several years ago. He had the best medical care BUPA could provide. He had three big operations, a dose of chemotherapy, and occasional bursts of radiotherapy. He consented to them in the belief that they would extend his life, and even achieve a partial cure of his cancer. I don’t believe any of these interventions extended his life. I suspect they did much to shorten his life. I am certain that every single one of them reduced the quality of his life.

Of course, knowing when the game is up may not be easy. Some terrible conditions can nowadays be cured if caught early enough. Even so, I hope I shall have the courage to face reality when it comes, and choose the palliative care only. SIG

The great and the good?

by Richard North
http://eureferendum.blogspot.com/2011/12/great-and-good.html

He is a Marxist and was a long-standing member of the now defunct Communist Party of Great Britain and the associated Communist Party Historians Group. As such, he has been (and still is) an apologist for one of the most vile regimes this earth has ever spawned, openly justifying a system responsible for the death of 15-20 million people, and denying the extent of its crimes against humanity.

Yet Eric Hobsbawm is president of Birkbeck, University of London and recently president of the Telegraph Hay Festival. He was appointed a Companion of Honour in 1998, a British honour unique in that it is the personal gift of the monarch for outstanding achievement in the arts, literature, music, science, politics, industry or religion. And even to this day, he is fêted by the BBC as a great historian.

This being the case, and quite understandably, Your Freedom and Ours believes we have lost the propaganda war. But it also speaks of an establishment that has lost its way, one that has no true idea of values and one which has demonstrated a complete inability to make sound judgements.

We have no lessons to learn from him or the people who support and applaud him, other than that it is quite possible for the establishment to be totally, completely and vilely wrong.

When Fascism Was On the Left

by Keith Preston
http://attackthesystem.com/?p=12717

The conventional left/right model of the political spectrum holds Fascism and Marxism to be polar opposites of one another. Marxism is regarded as an ideology of the extreme Left while Fascism supposedly represents an outlook that is about as far to the Right as one can go. A title recently translated into English by Portugal’s Finis Mundi Press, Eric Norling’s Revolutionary Fascism, does much to call the perception of Fascism, conceived of as it was by Mussolini and his cohorts, as an ideology of the extreme Right into question.

Libertarianism: Thick and Thin

Article by Matt Zwolinksi.
http://attackthesystem.com/?p=12750

A fairly balanced discussion of “thick vs thin” libertarianism from a generally “thin” perspective.