Marx Was Right

[DemocratSinceBirth]

Economics and not politics or great men is the great catalyst of history.

Without a crappy economy the Tea Party would be a fringe group of some isolated kooks with bad hair and fashion sense. But with the economy in the crapper they are moving America into a frightening, xenophobic, and bigoted land where subtle racism, not so subtle classism, and out right bigotry are once again acceptable.

It could happen here...

I am sure many will understand the cryptic reference.

[TBF]

1. I haven't read it yet, but it is on my shelf -

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/It_Can%27t_Happen_Here

and I do remember the miniseries "V" - liked that very much.

[alcibiades_mystery]

2. Economics IS politics

is Marx's point.

[DemocratSinceBirth]

3. Marx Said Economic Conditions Shape History

Hegel said ideas shape history.

I submit if the economy is still in the crapper in 012 it won't matter who the respective candidates are.

[alcibiades_mystery]

6. Well, yes

But for Marx, economic conditions are BOTH the cause and the *effects* of struggle. Economics are the root form of politics, but all that means is that material existence conditions our identities and relationships. There is no "economics" in itself - there are material conditions. Now, surely it's easy to beat up on old Hegel, and Marx was right to do so, but let's not reduce a rich discourse to soundbites.

[Panaconda]

4. Marx was correct

about most everything. Dismiss him at your peril.

3-2-1...

Just a pre-emptive countdown for those who may come along and equate Marx with Stalinism.

[DemocratSinceBirth]

8. I Think His Diagnosis Was Essentially Correct

I differ, strenuously, with his prescription.

[Jim__]

5. "A Companion to Marx's 'Capital'" - David Harvey

This book was talked about in a recent review of the current financial crisis. An excerpt of the review:

The time has come, all of this makes clear, to assess capitalism again from the outside. We should begin by understanding that it is the utter discrediting of capitalism's most basic premises that explains the return of Karl Marx as spectral bogeyman. Not the current president's (staunchly pro-corporate) proclivities, not ACORN and not China's nominal communism. Marx's Capital reached an all-time high in sales in the same season that the Public-Private Investment Program was announced.

Capital is the strangest of books: not a work of political economics but, per its own insistence, a "critique of political economy." It is a concerted effort to understand the faux objectivity of modern economics not as an explanation of a system but as its apologia. At the same time Capital is economics as such; a landmark in materialist philosophy; a theory of history larded with empirical studies. It can be intractable.

David Harvey has been teaching courses on Capital for more than three decades; his seminar is freely available at various sites online. Now it arrives in published form. A geographer by trade, Harvey is particularly brilliant on the spatial dimensions of economics (as in his landmark earlier work, The Limits to Capital). But A Companion to Marx's "Capital" is at once sleeker and more lucid, communicating the theoretical nuances of dialectical thought and the history of struggles over the length of the working day with marvelous grace. It is without a doubt one of the two best companions to Marx's pivotal work (the other is Ben Fine and Alfredo Saad-Filho's Marx's "Capital"). One can glean much of the primary text's character from reading Harvey's companion alone; Harvey is rightly insistent that they be read in tandem.

At our conjuncture, we must ask of these texts one simple question: can they help us tell the story of capitalist crisis better? The answer is, certainly. Perhaps too well. As the old joke goes, did you know that Marxist economists have predicted ten of the last three crises? This is pretty funny.

more ...

[reggie the dog]

7. Das Kapital and Communist Manifesto

2 great reads

[ananda]

9. Sinclair Lewis' It Can't Happen Here

So prescient.