Tag: Karl Marx

A Story for Labor Day

It’s Labor Day weekend. I should have something new to say about labor, but I’m feeling lazy. Which is itself one of the rights of labor: “The genuine wealth of man is leisure,” as Godwin put it. So I’ll post an excerpt from a piece I did for Dissent about 15 years ago. Which opens with one of my favorite stories about work. TOURING WEST VIRGINIA during the 1960 presidential campaign, John Kennedy was accosted by a miner demanding to know whether he was indeed “the son of one of our wealthiest men.” Kennedy admitted that he was. “Is it true that you’ve never wanted for anything and had everything you wanted?” the miner pressed. “I guess so.” “Is it true […]

The Vulgarity of Sylvia Nasar’s Beautiful Mind

Sylvia Nasar—author of A Beautiful Mind and, more recently, Grand Pursuit: The Story of Economic Genius—was interviewed this past weekend by the New York Times Book Review. This particular exchange made my jaw drop. What’s the best book about economics you’ve ever read? The worst?  There are so many great ones, but these are exquisite: “John Maynard Keynes,” by Robert Skidelsky. “Bankers and Pashas,” by David Landes. “The House of Rothschild,” by Niall Ferguson. “Economic Sentiments,” by Emma Rothschild. “Poverty and Compassion,” by Gertrude Himmelfarb. Worst? To be worst it would have to have had a wide following, because otherwise who cares? I suppose “Das Kapital,” by Marx; “The Condition of the Working Class in England,” by Engels; and “Mein […]

Black Money: On Marxism and Corruption

En route with my daughter to the Purim Carnival, I stopped at my friends Greg and Manu‘s house. Manu’s mother Toshi is visiting from India, and we got to talking about corruption scandals there. Specifically, what people do with money they’ve gotten illegally. Toshi called it “black money”—a phrase I hadn’t heard before. Turns out, it’s a fairly common term.  Here’s one definition: Proceeds, usually received in cash, from underground economic activity. Black money is earned through illegal activity and, as such, is not taxed. Recipients of black money must hide it, spend it only in the underground economy, or attempt to give it the appearance of legitimacy through illegal money laundering. Talking about the kind of hoarding people engage […]

Love for Sale: Birth Control from Marx to Mises

From Marx… In On the Jewish Question, Marx famously critiques liberal theorists of religious freedom on the grounds that they merely wish to emancipate the state from religion. Assuming—wrongly, it turns out—that the 19th century state, or at least the American state, had indeed been fully emancipated from religion (e.g., there was no official state religion, no specific confessional requirement for the exercise of political rights, etc.), Marx notes that the American people are nevertheless quite religious. This leads him to the observation that “to be politically emancipated from religion is not to be finally and completely emancipated from religion, because political emancipation is not the final and absolute form of human emancipation.” We may be free of religion at […]

Whenever I read a professional Chomsky-basher…

Whenever I read the work of a professional Chomsky-basher*—you know, the person whose passport to mainstream respectability is stamped with a Chomsky-is-the-most-dastardly-person-on-the-face-of-the-earth visa—or someone who attacks anarchists or leftists in order to maintain his or her liberal street cred, I’m reminded of this passage from Hannah Arendt: In the following chapter, Karl Marx will be criticized. This is unfortunate at a time when so many writers who once made their living by explicit or tacit borrowing from the great wealth of Marxian ideas and insights have decided to become professional anti-Marxists, in the process of which one of them even discovered that Karl Marx himself was unable to make a living, forgetting for the moment the generations of authors whom […]

My Own Munchings (that’s for you, Mom)

I’m supposedly on vacation this week and next, yet I somehow find myself caught in the interwebs. Anyway, a few things of mine came out recently that you might have missed. Once upon a time I wrote a book on fear. I hadn’t been thinking much about that book  in recent years, but Sasha Lilley, host of the fantabulous radio show “Against the Grain” out in the Bay Area, tracked me down for a one-hour interview about it. Turned out to be one of the most engaging interviews I’ve done, all thanks to Sasha’s excellent questions. It’s every author’s dream to be interviewed by someone like Sasha. You might want to check out some of her other interviews as well. […]

Ten Years On, We’re Still Getting Nickel and Dimed (and Still Can’t Pee on the Job)

On the tenth anniversary of its publication, Barbara Ehrenreich’s Nickel and Dimed is being re-released with a new afterword. Before reading Nickel and Dimed, I considered myself fairly well-versed in the coerciveness of the American workplace. But Ehrenreich schooled me in a whole other dimension of barbarism on the job: that, for example, in the United States workers do not enjoy a basic right, the right to go to bathroom when they need to go. Turns out, that’s a privilege, not a right. And it still is. I reviewed Ehrenreich’s book, along with Jill Andresky Fraser’s White-Collar Sweatshop, in Dissent.  Based on the two books, I concluded thus: Against critics—inspired by Michel Foucault—who focus on disciplinary institutions like prisons, hospitals, […]