Marxists, particularly those of an academic or scholastic persuasion, often claim that people misread Marx, especially Capital. Spend fifteen minutes on the internet talking about Marx, and you’ll soon enough get a Marx bro telling you you’ve got it all wrong. He’ll cite chapter and verse to you. Actually, he’ll seldom cite chapter and verse. Usually, he’ll just cite name upon name. “You need to Hegel.” “You need to Althusser.” He won’t show you precisely you’ve got it wrong or where particularly you’re misreading. But he’ll tell you, you’ve got it wrong. Lately I’ve begun to wonder about a political project—no, not just a political project, but a world-building project—that’s tied to a text that almost everybody thinks everybody else […]
When I was in graduate school in the 1990s—and this continued into the aughts and 2010s—the dominant idea in liberal foreign policy circles was that of “humanitarian intervention.” The claim was that though states should ordinarily respect the sovereignty of other states, under extreme circumstances, say of genocide or ethnic cleansing, it was not just the right, but the obligation, of the international community, to take coercive action, including using military force and violence, to stop the genocide or ethnic cleansing. Occasionally, the theory went, this might involve or entail toppling the regime that was engaged in the genocide. Thus Vietnam was allowed to invade Cambodia and overthrow the Khmer Rouge, Tanzania was allowed to invade Uganda and topple the […]
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Categories
Foreign Policy, Middle East, Palestine and Israel, Political Theory, The State, Violence
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Tags ethnic cleansing, genocide, Idi Amin, Khmer Rouge, Rwanda, Tanzania, Uganda, Vietnam
The Yale Medical School and Yale New Haven Hospital announced yesterday that they will no longer prescribe gender-affirming medications for patients under 19. Interestingly enough, much less wealthy and smaller healthcare institutions continue to provide medication and care to trans youth. In conjunction with Columbia’s decision to suspend or expel or revoke the degrees of over 70 pro-Palestine students, it’s hard not to think of Yale’s decision in light of the canonical literatures on sacrifice. In all these cases, these institutions are undoubtedly thinking that they have to sacrifice the smaller, more marginal, and more vulnerable, for the sake of preserving the larger, the more advanced, the whole. 70 pro-Palestine students in return for hundreds of millions of government research […]
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Categories
Economies, Education, Palestine and Israel, Political Theory, Repression, The Left, The Right, The State
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Tags Aeschylus, Arendt, Columbia, Maistre, Wendy Brown, Yale
I’m not a fan of Billy Ackman for several reasons, but nothing has roused my ire more than than this: Because of Ackman, I now have to write about sports, which is something I never talk about unless it’s to make fun of it. For those of you who don’t follow such things, Ackman bought his way into some sort of big tennis match with a lot of big tennis pros. He sucked and lost, prompting Martina Navratilova to mockingly tweet of him, “Oh to have the confidence…” She might have added: “…of a very rich white man.” I can’t understand all the ins and outs of this story, except that his buying his way into this match took away […]
Today is the birthday of Thomas Mann, who was born exactly 150 years ago. In honor of Mann, I’m posting this essay I wrote, several years back, about him, The Magic Mountain, covid, the Trotskyist Ernest Mandel, and late capitalism. The essay never got published, and I’d forgotten about till I read the notification this morning from Lit Hub, that today is his birthday. I first read The Magic Mountain in the summer of 1990, a year after I graduated college and just before I was starting graduate school. I was house-sitting in New Haven and studying German. I didn’t know anyone, and back in those days, that kind of pervasive, seemingly permanent, solitude, made me anxious (nowadays, I struggle […]
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Categories
Economies, Literature, Political Theory, The Left
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Tags Ernest Mandel, late capitalism, Max Weber, The Magic Mountain, Theodor Adorno, Thomas Mann, Werner Sombart, Wolfgang Streeck
In Capital and Black Reconstruction in America, respectively, Marx and Du Bois devote several passages to the fraught conceptions of ownership over labor in post-emancipation societies, whether the laborer is the Black freedman in the American South or the wage laborer in Western Europe. Though many people know that after emancipation, Black people in the South endured another hundred years of slavery by another name, that whites perceived Blacks as still belonging to some entity, we’re less familiar with a version of that story in Western Europe. Pairing these two passages raises delicate issues of comparison, but there’s no doubt that a similar dynamic is at play in both societies. In both societies, the employers of labor wrestle with the […]
One of the continuing puzzles I come back to is the separation of powers: Where did the Framers go wrong? Political scientists often claim that it is norms that undergird the Constitution, but this is not at all the view of the Framers. If anything, the idea that norms underpin the Constitution, and maintaining its delicate balance of separated and limited powers, is an almost pre-Founders, naive, view of things. If you read Madison—whom nobody would accuse of having a rosy view of human nature—in the Federalist Papers, he makes it clear that what preserves liberty and constitutionalism more generally is the separation of powers, and what preserves the separation of powers is…the ambition of individual politicians. Madison makes constant, […]
In chapter 8 of Capital, Marx wrote: The working day does have a maximum limit…Not only do purely physical needs limit the extension of the workday; moral limits play a role here, too. A worker requires time to satisfy his intellectual and social needs, which are determined…by the general state of the culture. Curious what the general state of the culture has to say about workers’ intellectual needs, I turned to the news, and stumbled on this report. One could say a lot more about all this, but beyond the simple and obvious point, I’d point out that discussions of culture in this country are often removed from discussions of the economy. There’s one conversation about the assault on the […]
Everyone’s waiting for that one person to stand up to Trump. Not just that one person. There are a lot of such people. You can read about them in every newspaper. But that one person with real power who’s willing to risk something costly in defiance. That one university president who’ll say, fuck you and your money. That one Democrat who’ll say, fuck you and your threat to my reelection or that of my party. Everyone’s looking for our Tank Man, staring down a column of tanks, all by himself, in Tiananmen Square. Why don’t we see that person? Where is our Tank Man? (And, no, I don’t think Cory Booker doing a marathon-length filibuster counts.) The reason we see […]
One of the big mistakes we make when we think about fear is to oppose fear to hope. Hope against fear, that’s the credo. And it’s badly mistaken. Nadezdha Mandelstam was one of the great writers on Stalinism. Her husband, the poet Osip Mandelstam, was murdered in 1938. She survived the purges and went on to write a miracle of a memoir titled, aptly, Hope Against Hope. This is what she had to say on the topic of hope and fear: Until a short time before, I had been full of concern for all my friends and relatives, for my work, for everything I set store by. Now this concern was gone—and fear, too…Having entered a realm of non-being, I […]
Apollo, speaking in Eumenides, the last part of Aeschylus’s trilogy The Oresteia: The woman you call the mother of the child is not the parent, just a nurse to the seed, the new-sown seed that grows and swells inside her. The man is the source of life—the one who mounts. She, like a stranger for a stranger, keeps the shoot alive unless the god hurts the roots. Maurice Dobb, Political Economy and Capitalism: That labour constitutes a cost in a unique sense was, of course, an assumption [of the labor theory of value]. But it was an assumption born of a particular view of what was the essence of the economic problem….The crux of the economic problem, as this theory […]
In Eichmann in Jerusalem, Hannah Arendt identified two main struts in every regime of fear: careerists, who think about the cost of every action to their ambitions and aspirations; and collaborators, who cooperate with regimes, often under the belief that they have no other choice. These are different types: the careerist is an impresario of his own ascent; the collaborator, a depressive presiding over his descent. But both are critical to the operation of the regime. For each type, Arendt had some thoughts. For the careerist: “What for Eichmann was a job, with its daily routine, its ups and downs, was for the Jews quite literally the end of the world.” “Except for an extraordinary diligence in looking out for […]
Last night, on Chris Hayes’s show, I learned about Sarah Inama, who teaches 6th grade in Idaho, and has a poster on her wall that says, “Everyone is welcome here.” Inama’s school administration told her to take down the poster because…not everyone agrees with that principle. No one ever complained about it or spoke against the principle. But the administration fears that…not everyone agrees with that principle. At a public school. So they told her to take it down by the end of the day. Here’s where the story gets interesting. Inama did as she was told. She took the poster down. For a few days. But then she thought about it and decided, no, I can’t live with this […]
It says something that I learned of the death of Nick Xenos, a recently retired professor of political science at the University of Massachusetts, not from an official announcement or an article in the newspaper but from the dozens of phone calls and texts I received, within just a few hours of his death, from his former students and current colleagues. Nick died, in other words, the way he lived, amid a beloved community of the most steadfast friends. That’s rarer in academia than we might think. I can’t exactly remember when I first met Nick or came into contact with him, though it was more than 20 years ago. I had known his name forever, and always associated it […]
The New York Times reports tonight that the federal government has arrested and detained Mahmoud Khalil, a recent graduate of Columbia University who has been active in pro-Palestine protests on campus and who is a permanent legal resident of the United states. Given that neither Khalil’s lawyer nor his eight-months-pregnant wife knows where in the United States he is currently being held, “detained” seems like a euphemism. Kidnapped seems more appropriate. Secretary of State Marc Rubio said today, “We will be revoking the visas and/or green cards of Hamas supporters in America so they can be deported.” Khalil has a green card, which means, I repeat, that he has the legal right to live and work in the United States. […]
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Categories
Jews, Palestine and Israel, Political Theory, The Right, The State
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Tags Columbia University, Hannah Arendt, Mahmoud Khalil, Marc Rubio, Origins of Totalitarianism, Samantha Power, Shai Davidai
Most readers and followers of Marx are familiar with two fairly simple and stereotypical versions of his theory of the capitalist state. The first, which can be gleaned from On the Jewish Question and other writings, essentially sees the liberal constitutional state, with a rule of law and various civil liberties, as the perfected form of the capitalist state. The second, which can be gleaned from the Eighteenth Brumaire, sees a populist dictator, like Louis Bonaparte, as a different, more authoritarian version of the capitalist state. But in reading and re-reading Bruno Leipold’s Citizen Marx, I think we can find, in Marx’s other writings, particularly his articles on 1848, some of which were later collected in The Class Struggles in […]
One of the more surprising elements in Bruno Leipold’s book Citizen Marx is just how fierce a critic Marx was of what political scientists call presidential systems. In presidential systems, the executive is invested with power that does not derive from the legislature, as in a parliamentary system. Instead, the executive is invested with power derived from elsewhere, most commonly election by the people themselves. Such systems tend to lionize the executive as a creature above and beyond the normal shabbiness of politics. That kind of elevation of the executive in a presidential system is something that Alexander Hamilton, that old fox, was wise to, and why he advocated so forcefully for it. Marx saw immediately how such a system, […]
A thousand years ago, I wrote a book called Fear: The History of a Political Idea. A big part of that book was struggling to figure out how political intimidation and fear work in America. At the time (this was the 1990s), it seemed to many like a somewhat exotic, if not quixotic, project. “No one cares about fear,” a political scientist told me. Well, time passes, as Virginia Woolf wrote in To the Lighthouse. The United States styles itself the land of the free, home of the brave. Yet, as every observer from Tocqueville to W.E.B. Du Bois has remarked, this country has often been a society of intense fear. And what has been the most persistent, common source […]
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Economies, Labor/Workplace, Political Theory, Repression, The Right, The State
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Tags Alexander Hamilton, Die Hard, Du Bois, fear, Marx, To the Lighthouse, Tocqueville, Virginia Woolf, Wall Street
I’m going to be speaking in Santa Barbara on Thursday and Friday of this week (January 24 and 25). On Thursday, at 12:30, on the UC Santa Barbara campus, I’ll be delivering the Phi Beta Kappa Public Lecture, on “Why do—or did—economists read the ancient Greeks?” On Friday, at 10 am, I’ll be doing a workshop on my book-in-progress “King Capital.” You can get all the details for either of these events here. If you’re in the area, stop by and say hello. An excerpt from the talk: Through a close reading of Adam Smith and Karl Marx, I’ll show how two economists used the ancient Greeks to identify a different turn and possibility in the modern world. Not a […]
Democracy in America is not well, but what ails it? According to one diagnosis, the country is suffering from multiple strains of one-man rule—tyranny, fascism, authoritarianism. Variants of the virus originate in the people and their passions. Citizens vote the tyrant into power. Racism, misogyny, or some other affliction of cruelty and fear, fuels their votes. Democracy is not just threatened by disease. It is the disease. This idea, of despotism from the demos, has a distinguished pedigree. Plato and Aristotle thought that all, or nearly all, forms of tyranny arise from the people. The vulgar many oppose the virtuous few, whose ethos of remove is an irritant to the many. Stirred by a demagogue, the people and their leader […]
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Categories
Economies, Political Theory, The Left, The Right
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Tags Andrew Jackson, Aristotle, authoritarianism, fascism, Matthew Simonton, oligarchy, Plato, Steve Bannon, tyranny, William McKinley
One of Marx’s most persistent points, from On the Jewish Question forward, is that despite the formal freedoms that we enjoy in a liberal state—the right to freedom of speech, for example, or freedom of religion—we are socially and in fact unfree. (As Bruno Leipold reports in his Citizen Marx, a lot of Marx’s evidence for this claim, particularly about religion, came from travelers’ reports to America, which Marx read assiduously.) That is what it means to live in a liberal society, says Marx: formally free, actually unfree. But lately I’ve been wondering whether we are not living in the reverse. Despite the efforts of right-wingers to bend the state in a repressive, less free direction, society seems more and […]
Three items that might be of interest. First, over at Balkinization, I participated in a symposium on Rogers Smith and Desmond King’s book America’s New Racial Battle Lines, which came out earlier this year. Rogers was my adviser in graduate school who taught me a lot of what I know about the American right. So I was thrilled to be invited to participate in this discussion, even if I disagree with some of his and King’s claims about where things stand with the right and racial politics in the US. From the conclusion to my post: While cultural battles are critical, it may be that they don’t require, on either side, new racial orders for their fighting. Existing languages, paradigms, […]
Throughout his life, John Maynard Keynes was plagued by the thought that he was ugly. In his diary, Keynes’s father notes that his six-year-old son “thinks no one ever was quite so ugly.” When he was 23, Keynes complained to Lytton Strachey that “I have always suffered and I suppose always will from a most unalterable obsession that I am so physically repulsive….The idea is so fixed and constant that I don’t think anything—certainly no argument—could ever shake it.” Keynes didn’t lack for sexual partners. He kept a detailed list of his sexual experiences, and it’s long. Nor was he an unhappy person, prone to self-doubt. He was just convinced that he was ugly. Interestingly, his lack of confidence in […]
Sorry about the title; advertisements for The Cher Show are all over New York these days, so the song is in my head. Anyway… In the Boston Review, the left economists Suresh Naidu, Dani Rodrick, and Gabriel Zucman offer an excellent manifesto of sorts for a new progressive economic agenda. I was asked to respond, and in a move that surprised me, I wound up returning to Hayek to see what we on the left might learn from him and his achievement. Here’s a snippet: Far from resting neoliberalism on the authority of the natural sciences or mathematics (forms of inquiry Hayek and Mises sought to distance their work from) or on the technical knowledge of economists (as Naidu and […]