.Karl Marx
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Marxism w/o revolution: Class
I’ve mentioned Erik Olin Wright’s Envisaging Real Utopias a couple of times, and I’ve also been reading David Harvey’s Enigma of Capital and Jerry Cohen’s if You’re an Egalitarian How Come you’re so Rich . In different ways, all these books raise the question: what becomes of Marxism if you abandon belief in the likelihood or desirability of revolution[1]? To give the shorter JQ upfront, there are lots of valuable insights, but there’s a high risk of political paralysis. I plan alliteratively, to organise my points under three headings: Class, Capital and Crisis, and in this post I’ll talk about class The analysis of economics and history in terms of class struggle is the central distinguishing feature of Marxism, and remains essential to any proper understanding.
When watching the last few episodes of US cable TV series The Walking Dead , it struck me that the title has a double meaning, that Sheriff Rick and the other survivors of the zombie apocalypse are also among the dead who roam the planet’s surface. They’re still animated to do all the usual human things — eat, sleep, play, laugh, cry, get jealous, fight with each other, screw up — but really only kept going by the residues of the past and not any sense of a goal or a future. The edginess in the best episodes emerges from watching as human pettiness overtakes the survivors time after time, leaving them ever more vulnerable to being eaten alive; destroying each other over very little indeed.
DR_TAD A response (Part 1)
Marxism w/o revolution: Crisis
I’m writing series of posts examining the question – what is left of Marxism, as a way to understand the world, and as a way to change it, once it is accepted that capitalism is not going to be overthrown by a working class revolution. Last time I talked about class . This post is about crisis. As before, the shorter JQ is “there are lots of valuable insights, but there’s a high risk of political paralysis.”I’ve been writing series of posts examining the question – what is left of Marxism, as a way to understand the world, and as a way to change it, once it is accepted that capitalism is not going to be overthrown by a working class revolution. The first was about class and the second about crisis . Now for the final instalment: capital. By the way, the first post got translated into Spanish, here . It’s one of the things that I still find stunning about the Internet that things like this can happen.
Marxism w/o revolution: Capital
Speaker: Rick Kuhn, on his book, with Tom Bramble, Labor's Conflict: Big business, workers and the politics of class (Cambridge University Press, 2010) Speaker: Nicole Pepperell on the key ides of her PhD thesis and forthcoming book Disassembling Capital (Brill/Historical Materialism Book Series 2011)
Final timetable released.
The circulation of commodities is the starting-point of capital. The production of commodities, their circulation, and that more developed form of their circulation called commerce, these form the historical ground-work from which it rises. The modern history of capital dates from the creation in the 16th century of a world-embracing commerce and a world-embracing market.