Economics as class war
Reading the Chomsky-recommended Political Economy and Laissez-Faire: Economics and Ideology in the Ricardian Era (1986), by Rajani Kanth....
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Sep 25, 20154 min read
On "The Reactionary Mind"
Reading The Reactionary Mind: Conservatism from Edmund Burke to Sarah Palin (2011), by Corey Robin. An elegant and erudite elaboration of...
Sep 13, 20154 min read
Saving Marxism from Lenin
[This is an excerpt from Notes of an Underground Humanist.] You should read Peter Kropotkin’s essay “The State: Its Historic Role.”...
Sep 5, 20154 min read
Thoughts on Marxian economics
According to Karl Marx, capitalism functions in such a way that its appearance differs from its essence. What happens in the...
Aug 19, 20152 min read
"False consciousness"
Leftists are sometimes criticized for being condescending toward the masses, for arguing that they are prone to displaying "false...
Aug 10, 20154 min read
The making of the working class
I'm finally reading [in 2011] E. P. Thompson’s classic The Making of the English Working Class (1963). Query: why was England so...
Apr 5, 20152 min read
Capitalist fratricide (i.e., neoliberalism)
The nation-state and capitalism were born as twins from the fertile, ancient womb of greed and power-hunger. They grew up together, were...
Feb 22, 20152 min read
The coming great depression
The following is a resolution proposed at a Chicago conference of the Communist Party’s Unemployed Councils in 1930, in the context of...
Feb 15, 20152 min read
Christianity updated
One of the many ironies about contemporary Christians is that they tend to be supportive of capitalism. This isn’t surprising: from the...
Oct 29, 20144 min read
Socialism and communism
[Excerpt from a book.] The awesome power of business propaganda is revealed in the fact that most Americans scorn the idea of socialism,...
Oct 21, 20144 min read
"Burn the Constitution!" (to quote Seth Ackerman)
Notes on a classic.— Charles Beard’s Economic Interpretation of the Constitution of the United States (1913) is still worth reading, a...
Oct 16, 20145 min read
Correcting Marx's theory of revolution
From an academic paper. (See my book on worker cooperatives, where this is all fleshed out in much more detail.)-- The Food Wars (2009),...
Oct 11, 20148 min read
Notes on the history of neoliberalism
Reading A Brief History of Neoliberalism (2005), by David Harvey. The inflation of the 1970s, as you may know, resulted largely from...
Oct 3, 20142 min read
Thoughts on socialist revolution
In retrospect it’s obvious that something like socialism couldn’t have happened until the nation-state system had disintegrated (which...
Sep 30, 20143 min read
Thoughts on Marxian common sense
[From this book.] An example of intellectuals’ need to make everything more complicated and difficult than it has to be is the unending...
Sep 27, 20143 min read
Radical human nature
The power of indoctrination is shown by the fact that most people don’t consider themselves radical leftists, socialists, or anarchists....
Sep 10, 20145 min read
Our modern holocaust of individuality
[Note to my first blog post: Much of this blog will consist of excerpts from books and other writings. Here's one of them--a rather grim...
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