En Passant

This dark environment at Universities is the consequence of the ongoing and deepening commodification of higher education, a process both major parties have been deeply involved in. When your Grundnorm is profit, ideas which challenge that, however expressed, are a threat to the very essence of the machine that is now the University sector. That machine is destroying the University as the seeming bastion of difference and the dissemination of often currently unconventional and unpopular ideas. To defend academic freedom we must defend Martin Hirst.

The following is a statement by the Victorian branch of the National Tertiary Education Union on La Trobe University’s shocking decision to suspend Roz Ward for a Facebook post that the Australian flag is racist. Roz has been a key person in the Safe Schools anti-bullying campaign for school students. The Murdoch owned Australian newspaper has run a witch hunt against her for her Marxist views, all with the aim of destroying Safe Schools which teaches respect and understanding for LGBTIQ students. McCarthyism is alive and well in Australia and La Trobe University’s decision is yet another example.

This academic article of mine was published on Monday. It is about Marx’s methods and tax. ABSTRACT The aim of this paper is to provide readers with an insight into Marx’s methods as a first step to understanding income tax more generally but with specific reference to Australia’s income tax system. I do this by […]

In light of the Islamophobic rallies on the weekend, and the support socialists give to Muslims in fighting this oppression, Erima Dall looks in depth in Solidarity magazine at Marxism, Islam and religion. Click the link to read the whole informative article, Marxism, Islam and religion.

The aim of this paper is to provide readers with an insight into Marx’s methods as a first step to understanding income tax more generally but with specific reference to Australia’s income tax system. I do this by introducing readers to the ideas about the totality that is capitalism, appearance and form, and the dialectic in Marx’s hands. This will involve looking at income tax as part of the bigger pi…cture of capitalism, and understanding that all things are related and changes in one produce changes in all. Appearances can be deceptive and we need to delve below the surface to understand the reality or essence of income and, hence, of income tax. Dialectics is the study of change. By developing an understanding of the processes of contradiction and change in society, the totality, we can then start to understand income tax and its role in our current society more deeply. To do that, we need to understand the ways of thinking and approaches that Marx and others have employed. Only then, armed with the tools we have discovered, can we begin the process of cleaning the muck of ages from the windows into the soul of tax and move from the world of appearance to the essence of tax.

Jeffrey Boyette in Socialist Worker US considers some of the questions involved in the discussion about how Marxists understand the growing “digital workforce.”

None of this means that there is never anything of interest in academic Marxism wrote Chris Harman. Just as with academic history or economics in general, among the piles of crap there is the occasional nugget of gold that no genuine Marxist can afford to ignore. What is more, even with the rubbish, it is sometimes necessary to make an effort to prove it is rubbish – as Engels did with Dühring.

But before you can do either task, you have to understand that revolutionary Marxism starts from different premises and has different aims to the academic version, and not confuse one with the other.

If Marxism is to live up to its own maxim as a theory to not merely interpret the world but to change it, then it must include strong ecological theory and practice. The stakes are high. We still have a world to win — but we also have a world to lose.

These are notes for a talk Peter Jones did at Marxism 2012 on the ABC of Marxist Economics.

As profit rates have fallen and are up to half what they were in the boom years of the 50s and 60s, across the developed world the state has responded by cutting taxes on capital.