Bill Mitchell’s Uphill Battle (Updated).

 

(source)

It’s a good thing that Prof. Bill Mitchell – one of MMT founders – is as tenacious as he has a sense of humour, for he is fighting an uphill battle.

The passage you see above comes from a recent chat he had with Steven D. Grumbine, host of the Macro & Cheese podcast (audio and transcript). By itself, the fact Grumbine decided to make a meme suggests how much commentary that bit must have caused among Leftists.

Unfrequently Asked Questions: Expropriation of Capital?

(source)

 

I must admit that I wrote this post with hesitancy. There are at least two reasons for that.

Firstly, because I was not elected Great Inquisitor and Defender of the Faith by my fellow orthodox Marxists. As readers should know, we members of the All-Powerful Secret Orthodox Marxist Monolith of Fanatical Intransigence are obsessed with repressing a rag tag band of enlightened commentators bravely fighting for the good of humankind against our evil ways. So my self-appointed position is not specially strong: I lack the legitimacy that one such election (particularly a unanimous one, as you would expect from orthodox Marxists) conveys.

The Myth of the Inevitability of Socialism.

The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles.

Freeman and slave, patrician and plebeian, lord and serf, guild-master and journeyman, in a word, oppressor and oppressed, stood in constant opposition to one another, carried on an uninterrupted, now hidden, now open fight, a fight that each time ended, either in a revolutionary reconstitution of society at large, or in the common ruin of the contending classes. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels (1848).

Manifest der Kommunistischen
Partei. [A].

That quote – particularly its first sentence – is rather well known. So much so that compilations of famous quotes seldom fail to include it (three such examples).

But why should that quote, extracted from a work spanning at least 50 thick tomes, be so well-known?

Inactive Government = Student Activism.

After a COVID19-imposed pause, the protests against Australia’s inaction on climate change started again.

(Photo credit: your intrepid reporter, the Magpie)

In spite of unseasonable late-autumn cold (severe only by Aussie standards) and the rain the Sydney School Strike 4 Climate organised last Friday May 21st was a success (media coverage). As it has become common, in addition to the SS4C teenagers and the Extinction Rebellion crowd, old-timers and parents with little children formed the bulk of the attendants. Very welcome were representatives from the First Nations.