"Marx in the Twenty-First Century"

"This is not to say that Marx thought that industrialization, mechanization, or globalization were bad things. He was no Luddite. His concern was the disconnect between profits and human need: Much like today's industrial regions, the slums of nineteenth-century Manchester that Marx observed were filled with workers who were exhausted, unhealthy, and miserable while the factory owners dined on beef bourguignon and claret in their mansions. The factories these days just happen to be in Shenzhen or Dhaka, not the other side of town. Unlike the British machine wreckers of a generation before, Marx saw no way to stuff the technological genie back into the bottle. New tools must be utilized for the greatest good: Instead of getting rid of the factories, the public should take ownership of them."

Max Holleran at The New Republic reviews David Harvey's The Story of Capital: What Everyone Should Know About How Capital Works.

"What Went Wrong?"

"Some portion of the book's confusion about capitalism, and its author's refusal or inability to stand by its claims about capitalism, is symptomatic and shared. In 2014, Seth Rockman, one of Beckert's colleagues in the new history of capitalism, announced that the field had 'minimal investment in a fixed or theoretical definition of capitalism.' That was a virtue, Rockman claimed, not a vice. If they 'let capitalism float as a placeholder,' scholars would be freed to do 'the empirical work of discovery' and find 'ground-level evidence of a system in operation.' Twelve years—and 1,325 pages—later, free time is over, and judging by the results in hand, scholars of the new history of capitalism have no more sense of a system now than when they began." 

Corey Robin at The Nation reviews Sven Beckert's Capitalism: A Global History.

"A Subterranean Marx"

"The tension between the personalistic vs. scholastic approaches in the book is an outgrowth of the country's tension regarding Marxism itself: as compared to the rest of the world, the United States has never had a mass communist party or even a mass-member, expressly left-wing, viable political party. There have been transformative Marxist politicians, like Eugene Debs, whom Hartman covers in great detail, but there have not been transformative Marxist political parties in the United States on a scale to impact national policy. The backlashes against Marxism have tended to have far more political significance since World War II than the actual inciting theory. What this means for the book is that Hartman devotes a substantial part not to Marxism and American Marxists per se, but to the powerful anti-Marxist political forces and intellectuals of the twentieth century. Chapters five and six, 'False Prophet: Midcentury Liberalism,' and 'Red Menace: Postwar Conservatism,' are overwhelmingly focused on anti-Marxist intellectuals and the forces of American liberalism and the American right that were united in their mutual anticommunism after World War II. At times it seems the book would be more appropriately titled Anti-Marxism in America."

Mathias Fuelling at The Baffler reviews Andrew Hartman's Karl Marx in America.

"Capital's Relevance Is a Function of Capitalism's Persistence"

"Gone is the certainty that capitalism will be felled by its own crises or interred by its proletarian gravediggers. Reitter and North pitch their Capital more as a guide for students than for revolutionaries. There is, as a result, something melancholic about this edition. It marks a shift in Marx's status, a step in his elevation to serious philosopher—but perhaps at the cost of some of his political potency. By reading what Marx actually published, we might get closer to what he really meant, but we seem unlikely to get any closer to the end of capitalism." 

At The Nation, Alyssa Battistoni reviews a new English-language translation of Karl Marx's Captial.

"The Necessary Resource if History Was to Be Understood as a Theatre of Revolutionary Possibility"

"It was Walter Benjamin, the Berlin-born literary and cultural critic who sustained an important affiliation with the Institute, who tried to explain the relationship between Marxism and religion with a memorable image: Marxist theory, he wrote, is like the chess-playing automatism first presented at the imperial court in 18th-century Vienna, whose movements seemed to be governed by nothing but the mechanical operation of levers and wheels. But the true animus of Marxist theory is theology, which in the modern era must hide itself from public view but still lends Marxism its apparently autonomous power, much like the individual who was cleverly concealed within the chess-player's cabinet and assured its victory." 

Peter E. Gordon at New Statesmen explores the relationship the Frankfurt School had with religion.

"Trump's Lies Will Linger for Years, Poisoning the Atmosphere Like Radioactive Dust"

"America under Trump became less free, less equal, more divided, more alone, deeper in debt, swampier, dirtier, meaner, sicker, and deader. It also became more delusional. No number from Trump's years in power will be more lastingly destructive than his 25,000 false or misleading statements. Super-spread by social media and cable news, they contaminated the minds of tens of millions of people." 

George Packer at The Atlantic writes "A Political Obituary for Donald Trump."

And Jonathan Russo at Talking Points Memo defines poor Trump supporters as the lumpenproletariat.

"You Won't Win the Day by Treating People Who Merely Disagree With You as Stalking Horses for Socialist Tyranny"

"American right-wingers hate multiculturalism and gay rights and radical feminism for their own sake, not because they were designed to pave the path for communism. But the story has the emotional advantage of allowing them to imagine that the trends they despise didn't arise from a long history of the social abuse of blacks, gays, women, and immigrants, but from sinister machinations of commies striving to enslave us. Never mind that the unstoppable traditionalist 'cultural decline' of the last several decades has not gotten the United States any closer to public ownership of the means of production.

Brian Doherty at Reason criticizes proponents of a "cultural Marxism" conspiracy.

"Often Had the United States on His Mind"

"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."

Andrew Hartman at Jacobin marks Karl Marx's bicentennial

As does The Economist.

"We Stumbled Into Modernity Accidentally, not by Any Divine Plan"

"The Founding didn't apply these principles as universally as its rhetoric implied. But that rhetoric was transformative. When the Declaration of Independence was written, some dismissed the beginning as flowery boilerplate; what mattered was the ending: Independence! But the boilerplate became a creed, and America's story is the story of that creed—those mere words—unfolding to its logical conclusion. That is what Lincoln did at Gettysburg when he reconceived the meaning of America, what Martin Luther King Jr. appealed to when he called on Americans to live up to their own story's highest principles. A civilization is simply a story: the story the people tell themselves about themselves."

National Review runs an excerpt from Jonah Goldberg's Suicide of the West: How the Rebirth of Tribalism, Populism, Nationalism, and Identity Politics Is Destroying American Democracy.

"The Policing of Opinion Is Now Established Practice in Societies That Believe Themselves to Be Freer Than They Have Ever Been"

"Yet the belief persists that a new society will appear once we have been stripped of our historic identities, and switched to a system in which all are deemed different and yet somehow the same. In this view, all identities are equal in being cultural constructions. In practice some identities are more equal than others. Those of practitioners of historic nationalities and religions, for example, are marked out for deconstruction, while those of ethnic and sexual minorities that have been or are being oppressed are valorized."

John Gray at The Times Literary Supplement criticizes "hyper-liberals."

"Any Business Deal Appears Like a Small Battle in a Never-Ending War for Financial Supremacy"

"His rejection of Friedman's vision of trade is clearly not a considered view but a gut reaction. The story he tells himself about capitalism is one that involves a high-stakes game of winners and losers—those who beat, and those who get beaten. As such, it seems axiomatic to him: In any deal, whether it involves individuals or independent nations, only one side can win. As a matter of economic science, Donald Trump may be wrong, but with respect to the sensibility that guides his approach to business and colors his understanding of capitalism, it may be the case that the GOP nominee is simply a man of his time—and ours."

John Paul Rollert at The Atlantic describes Donald Trump as an avatar of "Sociopathic Capitalism."

"If We Have Movements That Are Entirely Based Around English Majors and Web Designers, We're Not Reaching the Majority of the American Population No Matter What Their Skin Color Is"

"I've written a little about the history of the term. It comes out of some groups that split off from the Communist Party in the '50s, and really came to prominence in the '60s. Its primary architects were Theodore Allen and Noel Ignatiev, and they called it 'white skin privilege.' The idea of white skin privilege was that white workers had been bribed. The American ruling class, especially the Southern planter class dating all the way back to the 17th century, had bribed white workers with greater social status and privileges so they would not unite with black workers—from enslaved workers in the 17th century to super-exploited black wage workers in the '50s, '60s, and '70s—and pose a challenge to the ruling class.
"The idea was that white skin privilege was actually harmful to white people, because despite the fact that they were granted some advantages over black people, they ended up even more entrenched in their condition of exploitation precisely by accepting these advantages. As a result, they did not build a movement across racial boundaries to fight their common oppression. The fact that the idea of white privilege is used today to show why we can't possibly unify—that's a reversal of the core idea."

Kelton Sears in Seattle Weekly interviews Asad Haider.

"What If There Were Another Way?"

"The heart wants such worthy causes to succeed, looking to them hopefully for solutions to our contemporary dilemmas. The head can't turn away from reality. At a certain point, it becomes impossible to resist asking, What is it that makes the noble ideas embodied in these communities so fragile, and so apparently unattractive?"

Akash Kapur in The New Yorker considers recent books on utopian communities.

And Louis Menand thinks about Karl Marx.

"Marx Has a Larger Epistemological Claim on Our Attention as Well"

"Marx has a larger epistemological claim on our attention as well. Just as one cannot discuss human psychology intelligently without coming to grips with Freud's work, despite its flaws, Marx's historical analysis of class relations remains a powerful way to understand the enduring economic inequalities of his time and ours. As a prophet of socialism, he was a bust. He drew only vague sketches of what an egalitarian order should look like. This made it possible for Lenin, Stalin, Mao, and their ilk to use his words to justify the horrors they committed in peasant societies quite different from the industrial ones where Marx had expected socialism to triumph.
"Still, he captured some basic truths about the capitalism he believed was doomed to expire. Perhaps the most lasting of these truths is the relentless destruction of traditions—whether oppressive or comforting—that is the hallmark of modernity. In 1848, when Marx described capitalism as a revolutionary force, he did not realize how it would not just endure but grow."

Michael Kazin at The New Republic reviews Gareth Stedman Jones's Karl Marx: Greatness and Illusion.

"A Specter Is Haunting the 2016 Democratic Party Primary"

"The basic question was whether socialists should work toward revolution and the outright collapse of the capitalist system—or whether they should work to pass social reforms that make capitalism more humane.
"Bernstein favored the reformist approach. Socialists, he believed, should abandon the goal of bringing capitalism to a point of crisis and achieving some final socialist end state. The point of having a socialist movement is not to 'achieve socialism' in some sense, but to exist as a force pushing to make life better for workers. 'The movement means everything for me,' Bernstein famously wrote, 'and … what is usually called "the final aim of socialism" is nothing.'"

Dylan Matthews at Vox explores how Bernie Sanders connects to the history of socialism.

"More Than a Challenge"

"It's difficult even to tally, much less read, all the ripostes and rebuttals, many of which confirmed Chait's original point by reprising even more noisily exactly the category-think he warned against. 'So, here is sad white man Jonathan Chait's essay about the difficulty of being a white man in the second age of "political correctness,"' wrote Alex Pareene at Gawker. Variants of this theme have rocketed around the left wing of the Internet and Twittersphere over the past 24 hours."


David Frum at The Atlantic reacts to Jonathan Chait's New York article on leftists versus liberals.


As does Andrew Sullivan, and Michelle Goldberg, and Ross Douthat, and Samuel Goldman.


Chait himself in The Daily Beast assesses the reaction (as he does in New York, and Henry Farrell reacts.)


"My essay describes p.c. ideology as a form of Marxist thought, substituting race and gender identities for economic ones, and assigning political rights on the basis of class identity rather than individuality.
"I'd argue that the historical record of Marxist regimes is an unambiguous disaster. Marxist regimes have failed everywhere they have been tried—not because of external pressure or the idiosyncratic personal failures of their leaders but flaws inherent in its ideological structure. Marxists are very good at crushing critics of their policies, but rather bad at devising the policies themselves. Those two facts are not unrelated. The construction of effective policy requires internal reasoning, not the automatic identification of all criticism as the representation of a privileged class. That is to say, the liberal ideal of free government is still the right one."


Chait again in New York addresses critics.

"The Turn Toward Capitalism"

"Today, confronting the twin pressures of mounting income inequality and escalating concerns about climate change, partisans of economic growth face stronger opposition than at any time in decades. Even if continued growth were desirable, an increasing number of economists are convinced that a decrease from the last century’s norm will be unavoidable in the century ahead. It is a strange tableau: while economists speculate on growth's decline, a swath of the historical profession, eager to challenge the tyranny of economists, has attempted to make modernity into the story of economic growth—a story that the economists of a prior generation did more than any other group to canonize. Understanding how we arrived at this intellectual crossroads requires a history of its own."


Timothy Shenk in The Nation looks at the rise of "capitalism studies."

"A Mutual Admonition Society"

"In the 1936 letter to Benjamin, Adorno offers a subtler argument—more of a plea for parity. Commercial logic is triumphant, he says, ensnaring culture high and low: 'Both bear the stigmata of capitalism, both contain elements of change. . . . Both are torn halves of an integral freedom to which, however, they do not add up. It would be romantic to sacrifice one for the other.' In particular, it would be a mistake to romanticize the new mass forms, as Benjamin seems to do in his mesmerizing essay. Adorno makes the opposite mistake of romanticizing bourgeois tradition by denying humanity to the alternative. The two thinkers are themselves torn halves of a missing picture. One collateral misfortune of Benjamin’s early death is that it ended one of the richest intellectual conversations of the twentieth century."


Alex Ross in The New Yorker revisits Walter Benjamin's and Theodor Adorno's ideas about pop culture.

They Must Insist He's Not a Socialist

"No, it's tough these days because you've got politicians on the right, the same guys who just helped nationalize the banking system, derisively and inaccurately calling the presidential candidate on the left a socialist. That's enough to make Karl Marx harumph in his grave."

Rex W. Huppke in the Chicago Tribune interviews socialists who are shocked and saddened to hear John McCain claim that Barack Obama is one of them.

And in Slate, Timothy Noah points out how McCain is at odds with his supposed hero, Theodore Roosevelt.

Away with All Your Superstitions

"Those who want to know how the communist theory worked in practice should then turn to Robert Service's Comrades, one of the best of many recent accounts of how the movement grew, spread, and briefly captivated half the world before collapsing in 1989. If you want more blood and gore, read The Black Book of Communism, compiled by French ex-Trotskyites. Service's book is better on the Comintern, Titoism, and the Sino-Soviet split. The Black Book's authors are better on torture, concentration camps, and mass murder. Take your pick or read them both."

For this year's May Day, Anne Applebaum in Slate recommends books about communism.