Lots of stuff to say about this week’s events, as the current news cycle seems to be split between international crises (Iraq and North Korea, say) and the parade of remembering-the-year-in-news features. But I wanted to start off the blog with a note on the genesis of it and this site.
While the idea for Marxists for Keynes had been circulating in my head for a while, the 2002 election gave it more urgency. For one, I volunteered for the Reich gubernatorial campaign (here in Massachusetts) and my disappointment in watching the state’s Democratic party machine close ranks behind a wooden, soulless party hack like Shannon O’Brien was matched only by my disappointment in watching the left flank of the electorate support the likes of Warren Tolman for reasons that smacked of special-interest group politics pretending to be grassroots leftism. In the end, neither the centrists nor the lefties got anything of what they wanted.
That political auto-da-fe was echoed neatly by the electoral trouncing of the Democrats in the Senate races. The hand wringing and soul searching is still going on. It is usually framed as a choice between staying true to left/progressive principles (the lesson that The Nation and The American Prospect see in it) and staying focused on centrist positions that ensure electability (the lesson that The New Republic and The Boston Phoenix see). Ideally, the Dems should be able to shift the political center in the way that Bush, Mitt Romney and the neocons have done. But for complicated reasons, that seems impossible at the moment, both nationally and in Massachusetts.
It’s my hope that this blog can be part of the dialogue, at least by providing a voice in Boston politics that’s decidedly left but policy-oriented. We don’t feel we’re the only ones on the left to find the solutions of Jill Stein and the Green Party to be facile and wrong-headed. There’s much more in the Mission Statement and Positions Papers on this site, but the weblog will provide a chance to formulate ideas in relation to current events and news coverage. The Bloomsbury Group weblog will allow us to vent and expound on news in the realm of culture, both popular culture and high art.
All that said, it’s worth noting that the Economist this issue has a feature on Marx and Marxism. (They also had a piece on Keynes by biographer Robert Skidelsky last issue, but the link has expired). Predictably, even the compliments to Marx and Marxian thought are grudging if not back-handed. Still, I have to agree with their summary dismissal of the labor theory of value. Recently I’ve been hoping more and more that lefties would focus more and more on what Marxism does explain well (class, historical change) and not try to construct an alternate economic theory. Which is something even the supposedly wonkish Left Business Observer still does.
That’s enough for today.
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