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Socialism Is Dead! Long Live the Commons and Social Accounting!
In his essay, “Degrow or Die?” in the December/January 2011 Red Pepper magazine, John Bellamy Foster criticized degrowth advocates’ proposals for shorter working hours as not “dealing with the unemployment problem directly” and as not being viable on a broad scale unless they were part of a transition to “a post-capitalist (indeed socialist) society.” In […]
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Time on the Ledger: Social Accounting for the Good Society
Abstract: This paper proposes a new kind of “political arithmetic” as a key element of the foundation for a good society. Starting from the premise that the labor process in capitalism developed along lines laid down by double-entry bookkeeping, the paper cites the “wondrous errors and confusion” inherent in performing social accounting while retaining the […]
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Jobs, Liberty and the Bottom Line
Abstract: On May 29, 1871, the engineers of Newcastle, England went on strike for a nine-hour day. “Jobs, Liberty and the Bottom Line” draws on several narratives arising out of the strike and the lives of its participants to frame an investigation of the historical debate over shorter working time and its prime aspiration, disposable […]