Does Marxism have a political future? Hobsbawm is clearly not optimistic. But at the same time, he gives the impression that hard as it may be to imagine the transcendence of capitalism in the short term, it is difficult for him to conceive that socialism is not on the cards in the long run. He still thinks [...]
Josh Mason and I have been debating since my critique of David Graeber’s Debt went online a few weeks ago. We started at Crooked Timber – completists can read the original comments box exchange here. At that point we switched to email, with several lengthy back-and-forths – the total wordcount a multiple of the original [...]
We need more grand histories. But 5,000 years of anecdotes is no substitute for real political economy.
“This means that the economic problem is not … the permanent problem of the human race.”
In “Occupy Economics,” I mentioned Stephen Marglin, a radical Harvard economics professor who got tenure before the crackdown of the 1970s, and who is still there teaching an alternative undergrad economics course. He has to his name a number of absolute classics of radical political economy: “What do bosses do?” (Part I, Part II), with [...]
Occupy Wall Street has thrown off many sparks. A little one landed in academic economics.
At the end of my piece in the new Jacobin, I quoted Joan Robinson’s “Open Letter from a Keynesian to a Marxist.” It’s well out of print, and I think it deserves to be online in full, so here it is. According to John King’s History of Post-Keynesian Economics [2002: p. 50], this originated as [...]
The arrogance of Marxist economists.
It is a little bright spot at the end of the penultimate, gloomiest chapter of Hobsbawm’s history of Marxism: at least the albatross of “really-existing socialism” might not hang around the neck of the latest generation to turn to Marx. “… [E]ven today only those in their thirties and above have any memory of the [...]
Mike Beggs is an editor at Jacobin and a lecturer in Political Economy at the University of Sydney.
