Greenspan versus Marx
A LOT of people on the free market right have a simplistic two-word explanation for why the world economy is currently close to the edge of a frighteningly steep cliff: Alan Greenspan. Throw those Marxist and Keynesian textbooks out the window, people. We are where we are because the former chairman of the Federal Reserve responded [...]
No, Britain is not totalitarian
TOTALITARIANISM is the ultimate pejorative designation that anyone can direct towards a state. To describe a country with this word means more than to brand it a deficient democracy, or a petty semi-authoritarianism, or even a boring bog standard electrodes-on-the-genitals dictatorship. The term is redolent of one party rule and the attempt to control every [...]
Contra Kolakowski: a defence of Marx
LESZEK Kolakowski – the noted Polish-born political philosopher, who has died aged 81 – probably deserves the designation of the embittered former leftist’s embittered former leftist of choice. His principal work, ‘Main Currents of Marxism’, was widely touted in my undergraduate years as the definitive refutation of Marxism as a doctrine. The book runs to [...]
Overthrowing capitalism for beginners: reply to Janet Daley
EXCITEMENT mounts in my City fringes-based workplace over tomorrow’s anti-G20 demonstrations, with police claims that crusty hoards have commandeered the pub over the road as an operational headquarters. Our HR department this morning emailed all staff, positively instructing us to ditch the normal dress code – suit and tie if you’ve got an external meeting, [...]
So capitalism has failed: what now?
HERE’S an interesting example of intertextuality; Martin Wolf opens a lengthy think-piece on the future of capitalism with this striking five word assertion: ‘Another ideological God has failed’. The reference, of course, is to the well-known 1949 book ‘The God that failed’, in which six famous former Communists offer readers a heart-to-heart on the reasons [...]
Janet Daley, state capitalism and fascism in Britain
GORDON BROWN might accidentally introduce a state capitalist form of fascism to Britain, Janet Daley openly argues in the Daily Telegraph this morning. You think I’m kidding? Here, read it for yourself: But Mr Brown may find that, out of political desperation, he has talked himself (and us) into demanding that the state must actually [...]
Speech: why Marxism is sexy again
This is a draft version of a speech I am due to give in the private room of a well-known London restaurant tomorrow, before an audience that will include a number of seriously rich but left-leaning businessmen, and perhaps even some cabinet-level Labour politicians. Believe me, if I told you who is likely to be [...]
Mao as a Marxist
I have often wondered how it was that a number of Maoist currents emerged in Britain in the 1960s and 1970s; I mean, call me an irredeemable pessimist if you like, but surely it must have dawned on those involved that protracted peasant-based guerilla struggle is not a strategy optimally suited to conditions in this [...]
What might bring democracy to the Middle East?
After it became absolutely clear that the WMDs just weren’t there, the US and Britain hastily erected ‘democratising the Middle East’ as a flimsy ex post facto justification for the invasion of Iraq. All of a sudden, the war was no longer about punishing Saddam for the al Qa’eda links it later turned out he [...]
Marxist theory question of the week
Here’s one for all you Marxist theory buffs out there. I’m currently reading Doug Henwood’s 1997 book ‘Wall Street; how it works and for whom’. It’s a little out of date, naturally, but still head and shoulders above the two bourgeois textbooks on finance I am forced to plough through for academic reasons. On page [...]
