Riffing off a Michael Berube post, Brad Delong muses the "structural" and "idealist" Marxism of Louis Althusser, and in the process tosses out a great line:
at least one of Karl Marx’s own Marxisms was a "structuralist Marxism" from the very beginning.
I suspect Delong is confusing “structural” with “structuralist” — which doesn’t hurt his main […]
Brad Delong has an excellent discussion of profit margins in big business. It’s moderately technical, but worth reading as a rebuff to voluntarist and culturalist explanations (e.g. Thomas Frank) of why shareholders take a higher share of profits than before.
You will observe that I give 0% weight to the hypothesis that it was a […]
The PBS NewsHour is currently discussing the recent schism in the American labor movement. (See Harold Meyerson’s summary.) If only the representatives of the more established unions could see how tone-deaf they come across. John Sweeney launches into a tirade against the split, but his “that makes me angry” is a thin whine like Marvyn […]
There’s a scene at the start of Preston Sturges’ Sullivans Travels (1941) in which John L. Sullivan, an action star who wants to make “important” social-problem films, describes an action fight scene in his movie as an allegory of Capital and Labor. The joke is now multilayered. It’s funny because Sullivan’s film is simply an […]
Thanks to Adam at Universal Hub for the mention of me/this blog in the Globe yesterday. If you otherwise happened to be flipping though the Sunday paper, perhaps you came across this letter to the editor, in response to an article on Ayn Rand:
America in the 21st century desperately needs more people like Howard Roark: […]
My friend Derek has before asked me if, given my non-Hegelian bent, whether I subscribed to some End of History thesis, the notion that political and economic liberalism has once and for all triumphed over alternatives. I wasn’t very good at answering the question: I felt that a) yes in the medium term liberalism and […]
A friend emails me to take me to task for my comments on trade unionism.
I thought you were a little harsh on trade unionism. Maybe I’m confusing levels here or misunderstanding your argument, but do you think it’s one thing to talk about “not of their own making,” and another to say things like […]
I know that increasingly my political views don’t seem to be all that leftist - at least they don’t correspond to actually mobilized leftism in the U.S., Europe, or anywhere I can think really. If I’m for some mitigated, Third-Way socialist-capitalist hybrid, and if I’m only using Marx as a tool to understand class markers, […]
This week’s Economist has a well-argued - and typically Economist - polemic about the problems facing 21-st century capitalism. Much of it is an argument against protectionism and for expansion of free trade - not surprising perhaps. I can help but take glee, though, in the magazine’s contention that capitalism must be saved from itself, […]
Mark Tran, business editor of the Guardian, has a piece today on the risks that the American economy and empire is on the verge of collapse. “It takes a brave soul to argue that America, the world’s largest economy and by far its most potent military power, is about to go into decline, when it […]
Brian Whittaker has another good commentary piece in today’s Guardian analyzing the cross-identification of the Arab street with anti-war Westerners. One thing that struck me - and Whittaker has written on this before - is the term “creative destruction” used by some right-hawk ideologues to summarize the plan for democratization in Iraq. The term seems […]
Today Paul Krugman’s NYT op-ed points out the obvious cultural difference between US and Europe that American cultural commentators seem to overlook: the differences between the news media. Krugman’s bone of contention is clearly cable TV news, and I think he undersells the transatlantic differences between print news media in framing international events. One of […]