One of the critical distinguishing features of the communist movement of the 19th century was its insistence, in the words of Marx, “that the emancipation of the workers must be the work of the workers themselves.” Where other movements were willing to advocate on behalf of the working class or other oppressed groups, the First International demanded that it be the oppressed who liberated themselves. It may seem a leap from that vision to the fact that all New Yorkers, in the next few years, will get childcare for their two-year-olds, and once that is established, perhaps their younger children as well. But I don’t think it is as much of a leap as we sometimes think. One year ago, […]
It’s interesting how many commentators on Marx’s relationship to Judaism focus on his father’s conversion to Christianity. Marx’s mother also converted to Christianity, and from what we know, hers was a more bitter and forced conversion than his father’s. Marx’s father converted entirely for professional reasons: he would no longer be able to practice as a lawyer if he hadn’t). But Marx’s father wasn’t that bothered by any residual attachment to Judaism or Jewishness, despite the fact that his father and then his brother were the chief rabbis of Trier. Marx’s mother, however, resisted conversion for as long as possible. She insisted on waiting till her father died (she, like her husband, came from a long line of rabbis), and […]
I’m pleased to announce that I’ll once again be working with my friend and co-author Alex Gourevitch on a new writing project: an introduction to a new edition of Marx’s On the Jewish Question. The translation will be done by the excellent Paul Reitter, who did that new translation of Capital, and will be published by NYRB Classics, which has issued so many wonderful translations since its founding. It’s hard for me to think of a more timely text than On the Jewish Question. Despite his traffic in antisemitism, Marx is trying here to get us to think about religion, identity, and politics outside the framework of culture war, which had engulfed so many intellectuals of the Enlightenment. Instead of […]
Last Friday, I spoke on a panel at NYU on political theorist Alyssa Battistoni’s new book Free Gifts: Capitalism and the Politics of Nature. The room was packed, somewhat unusual for an academic book of political theory. But if you’ve read Battistoni’s book, or know of her work, you’ll understand why. The book is not only a remarkable synthesis of a variety of literatures on the environment, climate change, work, Marx, feminism, and the politics of care—if you were just looking for an excellent account of the last 50 years of political theory, plus Marx and a lot of twentieth-century economics, this would be your book—but also a brilliant intervention in these debates. It has given me all sorts of […]
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Categories
Economies, Labor/Workplace, Political Theory, The Left, The State
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Tags Alyssa Battistoni, David Ricardo, Grotius, Karl Marx, Plato, Pufendorf, Sianne Ngai
If you were paying attention on election night, you might have heard Zohran make two claims in his victory speech that often code as conservative: Excellence will become the expectation across government, not the exception….We will leave mediocrity in our past. The minute I heard those words, and the talking heads’ murmuring that it was odd for a socialist to talk up excellence and talk down mediocrity (aren’t socialists supposed to care only about equality, and a leveling equality at that, which drives down the quality of everything), I remembered a passage in Marx’s Capital. In the last pages of his chapter on original accumulation, Marx discusses the earliest days of capitalism or last stages of feudalism, when farmers still […]
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 […]
The two best analyses of Zohran Mamdani’s recent victory are this one, by Michael Thomas Carter, and this conversation that Daniel Denvir, the Terry Gross of the left, hosted with two organizers in New York City. Both analyses focus on the elephant in the room. Virtually all of the commentariat have emphasized Mamdani’s videos, his undeniable charisma and political fluency, and Cuomo’s weaknesses. The latter were oddly invisible to most commentators up until the very night that Cuomo conceded; then it became obvious that he was a weak candidate and was always going to lose; there’s a lesson there about power, which people always treat as static, when it’s not). But easily the most important factor in Zohran’s victory is […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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Categories
Political Theory, The Left, The Right
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Tags Barack Obama, birth control, Brian Doherty, Karl Marx, Katha Pollitt, Libertarianism, Ludwig von Mises, Mike Konczal, Robert Nozick, Susan Moller Okin
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 […]
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. […]
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, […]