Bowery

Reading into the latest news, almost every financial or economic column I have come across is talking about Bitcoin. Its craze has even spread among my peers who are currently installing their own Bitcoin apps (i.e from Bitcoin.co.id and others) to partake in their own trading, hoping to somehow double their pocket money. Rather than simply talking about Bitcoin as another means of investment and speculation to further accumulate our wealth, in this essay, I’d like to contribute to the discussion by analyzing how does Marx’s theory of commodity fetishism could actually apply in the emergence and also rise of Bitcoin as a form of cryptocurrency. What exactly is this latest technological invention that some economist claim would transform current financial and economic system that we know today?             Firstly, we need to clear up some ontological confusion on what cryptocurrency and bitcoin are. Cryptocurrency is a type...

            In his writing ‘ Negotiating with the Taliban’ [1] , Antonio Donini gave an account on how the negotiation with Taliban, as the ruler of Afghanistan throughout 1996 – 2002 took place. He gave a comprehensive recount with several commentaries on the multiple negotiations that happen with various actors and stakeholders involved. His account is very important if one wants to analyze further on how exactly negotiation with a supposedly brutal armed group took place; what went wrong, what went right, what could have done better in terms of strategy. To help us better understand how exactly concepts and strategies that we learn in class actually play out in real life negotiation, in this particular review, I would like to highlight several instances that were described in Donini’s account while trying to analyze it using several concepts outlined by Dean G. Pruitt and Peter Carnevale in their book, Negotiation in Soc...

Estranged Labour, Human Requirements, and Division of Labor Under the Rule of Private Property             Marx’s 1844 Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts contain one of the most comprehensive discussions on the concept that he calls “alienated labor”. Marx mostly sees alienation at work as the most predominant form of alienation that humans have to undergo under the system of capitalism. Marx’s alienation is based on the assumption that human has the ultimate need to engage in free and creative labor as part of his human nature. Since capitalism systematically hinders that needs, it is an alienating system. He claims in the 1844 manuscript that most people in the modern society perceive work as unpleasant and unfulfilling experience. This is particularly true in the modern context of the most capitalistic society like United States and some developing countries who pursues capitalistic mode of production as its means o...