In an earlier post I presented this excerpt from the preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, without comment. If you’ve never encountered this writing before you may prefer to read it without my comments first, to form your own opinion. If so, you’ll find it here. For the rest of us, here is the same […]
Excerpts from The Communist Manifesto
From The Communist Manifesto by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels (1848): The bourgeoisie, during its rule of scarce one hundred years, has created more massive and more colossal productive forces than have all preceding generations together. Subjugation of nature’s forces to man, machinery, application of chemistry to industry and agriculture, steam navigation, railways, electric […]
Paul Mason: PostCapitalism: A Guide to Our Future
This short video lays out Paul Mason’s perspective on a post-capitalist future. I have not yet read his new book, PostCapitalism: A Guide to Our Future, but it is in my queue. Here is a link to an article written by Mason which elaborates his position: The End of Capitalism Has Begun
Louis Althusser and The Absolutely Fundamental Thesis
This may prove a challenging post. The French philosopher Louis Althusser (1918-1990) considered this subject — the question of which aspect of the mode of production has primacy — to be a difficult one to posit, let alone answer. He begins his essay, On the Primacy of the Relations of Production Over the Productive Forces, (a title which […]
Stephen Hawking Warns Capitalism is the Real Problem
In a Reddit Ask Me Anything session Stephen Hawking was asked the following question: I’m rather late to the question-asking party, but I’ll ask anyway and hope. Have you thought about the possibility of technological unemployment, where we develop automated processes that ultimately cause large unemployment by performing jobs faster and/or cheaper than people can […]
Why Karl Marx?
Someone is bound to wonder — Why bring up Karl Marx? Isn’t there some way to express what you are trying to say without complicating things by dragging in such a controversial figure? Well, yes, probably. But that would be intellectually dishonest. Marx was the first to see and describe the processes which drive changes in […]
Yale Open Courses – Historical Materialism
An Ivy League perspective on the subject of historical materialism. Yale University offers this open course, a chance to audit their SOCY 151: Foundations of Modern Social Theory. Lecture 10 is titled Marx’s Theory of Historical Materialism and the subject is continued in Lecture 11. However, Lesson 12 – Marx’s Theory of History really explains the […]
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Joseph A. Schumpeter: Can Capitalism Survive?
“Can capitalism survive? No. I do not think it can.” So begins Joseph Schumpeter’s classic essay, Can Capitalism Survive?, which constitutes the middle third of his 1942 book, Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy. Schumpeter goes on to say, The thesis I shall endeavor to establish is that the actual and prospective performance of the capitalist system […]
Why Historical Materialism?
Historical Materialism is a Marxist proposition that offers a “methodological approach to the study of human societies and their development over time”1. It holds, among other things, that historical change is driven by contradictions within the mode of production between the means of production and the relations of production, and that the overall nature of […]