Eat the Rich.

It's an excerpt from A People’s Guide to Capitalism: An Introduction to Marxist Economics (Haymarket Books, August 2020), which I'll be purchasing.

Concurrently, I'm trying to make a decision about Thomas Piketty's most recent book, Capital and Ideology. Do I try to read it before the election, or after? It might not seem to matter, but somehow does.

Capital and Ideology is an astonishing experiment in social science, one that defies easy comparison. In its ambition, obsessive testimony and sheer oddness, it is closer to the spirit of Karl Ove Knausgård than of Karl Marx. It alternates between sweeping generalities about the nature of justice and the kind of wonkery that one might expect from the Institute for Fiscal Studies, often in the same paragraph. It is occasionally naive (it will bug the hell out of historians and anthropologists) but in a provocative fashion, as if to say: if inequality isn’t justified, why not change it?

Now, to Thier.

Under Capitalism, There’s No Such Thing as a “Fair Day’s Wage for a Fair Day’s Work”, by Hadas Thier (Jacobin)

We’ve got some bad news for you on Labor Day: your boss is exploiting you. Karl Marx explains how.

... Inequality has long been built into the core fabric of the American business model. Pitting black workers against white workers against immigrant workers has been a particularly potent, tried-and-true tactic of employers to drive down all wages. But the cursory sketch laid out here does not even begin to discuss the very many oppressions — of immigrants, of people with disabilities, of gay people, of transgender people, of Native peoples, of elders, and more — that play an integral role in upholding the profitability of US capitalism.

"Why Marx’s Capital Still Matters."

David Harvey's answers at Jacobin are clear and concise. Readers are urged to read the entire interview. It's very rewarding.

Why Marx’s Capital Still Matters, interview by Daniel Denvir (Jacobin)

David Harvey on why Karl Marx's Capital is still the defining guide to understanding — and overcoming — the horrors of capitalism.

It’s been more than a century and a half since Karl Marx published the first volume of Capital. It’s a massive, intimidating tome — one that many readers might be tempted to skip. Radical scholar David Harvey doesn’t think you should.

Harvey has taught Capital for decades. His popular courses on the book’s three volumes are available for free online and have been watched by millions around the world; they were the basis for his companion books to volumes one and two. Harvey’s latest book, Marx, Capital, and the Madness of Economic Reason is a shorter companion to all three volumes. In it, he deals with the fundamental irrationality of a capitalist system whose functioning is supposed to be anything but.

Harvey spoke with Daniel Denvir for Jacobin Radio’s podcast The Dig, about the book, capital’s simultaneous creative and destructive forces, climate change, and why Capital is still worth wrestling with.

Here are three excerpts, beginning with "bad infinity."

DD
One reason that it’s important is that we need it to understand this dynamic of constant expansion that drives capitalism — what you call a “bad infinity,” citing Hegel. Explain what this “bad infinity” is.

DH
You get this idea of a “bad infinity” in volume one. The system has to expand because it’s always about profit, about creating what Marx called a “surplus value,” and the surplus value then gets reinvested in the creation of more surplus value. So capital is about constant expansion.

And what that does is this: if you grow at 3 percent a year, forever, then you get to the point where the amount of expansion required is absolutely huge. In Marx’s time, there’s plenty of space in the world to expand into, whereas right now we’re talking about 3 percent compounding rate of growth on everything that’s happening in China and South Asia and Latin America. The problem arises: where are you going to expand into? That’s the bad infinity coming into being.

In volume three, Marx says maybe the only way it can expand is by monetary expansion. Because with money there’s no limit. If we’re talking about using cement or something like that, there’s a physical limit to how much you can produce. But with money, you can just add zeroes to the global money supply.

If you look at what we did after the 2008 crisis, we added zeroes to the money supply by something called “quantitative easing.” That money then flowed back into stock markets, and then asset bubbles, especially in property markets. We’ve now got a strange situation where, in every metropolitan area of the world that I’ve visited, there’s a huge boom in construction and in property asset prices — all of which is being fueled by the fact that money is being created and it doesn’t know where to go, except into speculation and asset values.

Then, the "madness of economic reason."

DD
It’s precisely that issue of credit that led you to borrow a phrase from Jacques Derrida, “the madness of economic reason.” Colloquially, madness and insanity are invoked to stigmatize or pathologize individuals with mental illness. But what Marx shows us, and what your book shows us, is that the system is actually insane.

DH
The best measure of that is to look at what happens in a crisis. Capital produces crises periodically. One of the characteristics of a crisis is that you have surpluses of labor — people unemployed, not knowing how to make a living — at the same time you have surpluses of capital that don’t seem to be able to find a place to go to get an adequate rate of return. You have these two surpluses sitting side by side, in a situation where social need is chronic.

We need to put capital and labor together to actually create things. But you can’t do that, because what you want to create is not profitable, and if it’s not profitable then capital doesn’t do it. It goes on strike. So we end up with surplus capital and surplus labor, side by side. That is the height of irrationality.

We’re taught that the capitalist economic system is highly rational. But it’s not. It actually produces incredible irrationalities.

Finally, the amorality of capital.

DD
You wrote in Jacobin recently that Marx broke with moralist socialists like Proudhon, Fourier, Saint-Simon, and Robert Owen. Who were these socialists, and why and how did Marx part from them?

DH
In the early stages of capitalist development, there were obvious problems of conditions of labor. Reasonable people, including professionals and the bourgeoisie, started to look at this with horror. A sort of moral repugnance against industrialism developed. Many of the early socialists were moralists, in the good sense of that term, and expressed their outrage by saying, we can construct an alternative society, one based on communal wellbeing and social solidarities, and issues of that kind.

Marx looked at the situation and said actually, the problem with capital is not that it’s immoral. The problem with capital is that it’s almost amoral. To try to confront it with moral reason is never going to get very far, because the system is self-generating and self-reproducing. We’ve got to deal with that self-reproduction of the system.

Marx took a much more scientific view of capital and said, now we actually need to replace the whole system. It’s not just a matter of cleaning up the factories — we’ve got to deal with capital.

Documentary: "Is Karl Marx still relevant in the 21st century?"

"Today, what most characterizes developments in Marxian theory is the recognition of Marx’s open-ended critique of capitalism, requiring that we struggle once more to probe into the historically specific system of capital accumulation at its deepest level — not simply to understand it, but in order to transcend it."
-- John Bellamy Foster, at Jacobin

Meanwhile, Deutsche Welle again. DW doesn't seem to be taking Foster's side in terms of Marx's relevance to now, but the video is a good introduction to Marx's life, appropriately threaded to present-day developments.

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2018 marks the 200th anniversary of the birth of German philosopher and Communist icon Karl Marx. Is Karl Marx still relevant in the 21st century?

Philosopher, historian and economist Karl Marx is a name that’s back on everyone's lips. The documentary explores the ongoing impact of his writings in Europe and China. How should we approach the legacy of someone who - like few others before or since - not only changed the world, but divided it as well? Even though not everyone accepts his ideas, Marx's analyses and theories motivated many people to take political action. We meet activists, witnesses and experts - individuals who are able to illuminate Karl Marx's impact from the Russian revolution until today. Even in the 21st century, two hundred years after his birth, Marx has lost none of his relevance. After the fall of the Iron Curtain in Europe and the end of the Cold War in 1989 and 1990, the sun seemed to be setting on Marx. But during the financial crisis of 2007-2008, when the contradictions of capitalism were once more laid bare, Marx was resurrected as an icon. His theories and ideas are now enjoying something of a renaissance at universities, churches, and conferences, and in mainstream broadcast and print media. The Chinese have even donated a larger-than-life statue of Marx to the city of his birth, Trier. This thought-provoking documentary does not shy away from controversy. As well providing insight into Karl Marx’s life and work, it investigates what appealed to past and present advocates of his philosophies, bringing the story to life with a rich trove of archive material.

Neither Derby nor Cinco de Mayo be, because it's Karl Marx's 200th birthday.

Karl-Marx-Hof, Vienna.

The same heads explode every time.

Marx's America, by Andrew Hartman (Jacobin)

... Capital unfolded the workings of capitalism in such a profound fashion that people across the planet have been reading it since the Gilded Age, when Marx’s theory that capitalism was a system that pitted capital against labor seemed to have revealed itself as the truth. Marx’s fate, in this way, has been tied to the fate of capitalism.

To read Marx is to wrestle with the modern world that capitalism has made. This includes modern America — especially modern America. Because the US is the nation in world history most committed to capitalism, and because Marx is the world’s most enduring theorist of capitalism, Marx is a veritable American alter ego ...

Who's ready for some history to go along with their mint juleps and lime-laced Corona?

Karl Marx at 200: Aaron Bastani picks five books to understand Marxism, by Aaron Bastani (The Guardian)

The post-crash era, political polarisation and tech revolution have revived big ideas. Marxism is pivotal to leftwing thought, so here are some books to help understand it.

 ... In a world increasingly defined by political chaos, economic volatility and which is short on answers – Marx’s work always implores us to challenge our own assumptions while thinking, and acting, big. He may have been born 200 years ago, but his key insights – a materialist view of history and a grasp of capitalism as an inherently limited system – remain invaluable. And dangerous.

• Aaron Bastani’s Fully Automated Luxury Communism: A Manifesto will be published by Verso.

Keynes, Hayek and Marx: Three thinkers with differing ideas about capitalism.

Masters of Money: A worthy video to spend three hours, either as refresher course or inaugural primer about three veins of economic thought.

BBC economics editor Stephanie Flanders examines how three extraordinary thinkers, Keynes, Hayek and Marx, helped shape the 20th century.

The Guardian's review of the 2012 series is here. Flanders keeps the conversation accessible, without hue and wonk.

Keynes ... capitalism is too important to be left to its own devices. 

Hayek ... capitalism only works when government leaves it to its own devices. 

Marx ... capitalism must die of its own devices.

Marx revisited: "We invented our social arrangements; we can alter them when they are working against us. There are no gods out there to strike us dead if we do."

Berlin.

A long read, but worth the time. Gotta keep those Republicans guessing, natch.

KARL MARX, YESTERDAY AND TODAY: The nineteenth-century philosopher’s ideas may help us to understand the economic and political inequality of our time, by Louis Menand (The New Yorker)

... Marx was a humanist. He believed that we are beings who transform the world around us in order to produce objects for the benefit of all. That is our essence as a species. A system that transforms this activity into “labor” that is bought and used to aggrandize others is an obstacle to the full realization of our humanity. Capitalism is fated to self-destruct, just as all previous economic systems have self-destructed. The working-class revolution will lead to the final stage of history: communism, which, Marx wrote, “is the solution to the riddle of history and knows itself as this solution.”

Your Saturday Radical 2: Chris Hedges, Karl Marx and why everything is not beautiful.

For a broader overview, the interview format here:

“We are in a revolutionary moment”: Chris Hedges explains why an uprising is coming — and soon, by Elias Isquith (Salon)

In recent years, there’s been a small genre of left-of-center journalism that, following President Obama’s lead, endeavors to prove that things on Planet Earth are not just going well, but have, in fact, never been better. This is an inherently subjective claim, of course; it requires that one buy into the idea of human progress, for one thing. But no matter how it was framed, there’s at least one celebrated leftist activist, author and journalist who’d disagree: Chris Hedges.

In fact, in his latest book, “Wages of Rebellion: The Moral Imperative of Revolt,” Hedges argues that the world is currently at a crisis point the likes of which we’ve never really seen. There are similarities between our time and the era of the 1848 revolutions throughout Europe — or the French Revolutionary era that preceded them — he says. But in many ways, climate change least among them, the stakes this time are much higher. According to Hedges, a revolution is coming; we just don’t yet know when, where, how — or on whose behalf.

Recently, Salon spoke over the phone with Hedges to discuss his book, why he thinks our world is in for some massive disruptions, and why we need revolutionaries now more than ever.

A bit more deeply here:

Karl Marx Was Right, by Chris Hedges (Truth Dig)

... Karl Marx exposed the peculiar dynamics of capitalism, or what he called “the bourgeois mode of production.” He foresaw that capitalism had built within it the seeds of its own destruction. He knew that reigning ideologies—think neoliberalism—were created to serve the interests of the elites and in particular the economic elites, since “the class which has the means of material production at its disposal, has control at the same time over the means of mental production” and “the ruling ideas are nothing more than the ideal expression of the dominant material relationships … the relationships which make one class the ruling one.” He saw that there would come a day when capitalism would exhaust its potential and collapse. He did not know when that day would come. Marx, as Meghnad Desai wrote, was “an astronomer of history, not an astrologer.” Marx was keenly aware of capitalism’s ability to innovate and adapt. But he also knew that capitalist expansion was not eternally sustainable. And as we witness the denouement of capitalism and the disintegration of globalism, Karl Marx is vindicated as capitalism’s most prescient and important critic.

The Red Room might yet return to fashion.

Whatever one's opinion of Karl Marx, surely he was correct in presaging the wisdom of the bumper sticker: A working man who votes Republican is like a chicken who votes for Colonel Sanders.

Why Marxism is on the rise again, by Stuart Jeffries (The Guardian)

Capitalism is in crisis across the globe – but what on earth is the alternative? Well, what about the musings of a certain 19th-century German philosopher? Yes, Karl Marx is going mainstream – and goodness knows where it will end.

Class conflict once seemed so straightforward. Marx and Engels wrote in the second best-selling book of all time, The Communist Manifesto: "What the bourgeoisie therefore produces, above all, are its own grave-diggers. Its fall and the victory of the proletariat are equally inevitable." (The best-selling book of all time, incidentally, is the Bible – it only feels like it's 50 Shades of Grey.)

Today, 164 years after Marx and Engels wrote about grave-diggers, the truth is almost the exact opposite. The proletariat, far from burying capitalism, are keeping it on life support. Overworked, underpaid workers ostensibly liberated by the largest socialist revolution in history (China's) are driven to the brink of suicide to keep those in the west playing with their iPads. Chinese money bankrolls an otherwise bankrupt America.

The irony is scarcely wasted on leading Marxist thinkers. "The domination of capitalism globally depends today on the existence of a Chinese Communist party that gives de-localised capitalist enterprises cheap labour to lower prices and deprive workers of the rights of self-organisation," says Jacques Rancière, the French marxist thinker and Professor of Philosophy at the University of Paris VIII. "Happily, it is possible to hope for a world less absurd and more just than today's."