Came across this excellent essay by Benjamin Kunkel of n+1 on the London Review of Books blog, reviewing Marxist scholar David Harvey's two most recent books, The Enigma of Capital: And the Crises of Capitalism and A Companion to Marx's 'Capital.' I haven't read any Harvey, though I'm certainly going to check him out after reading this essay. Harvey, formally trained in geography, has become a leading scholar of "crisis theory," which examines turbulence, instability, and ultimately, well, crisis in the global economy through the prism of Marx's critique of capitalism as laid out in Das Kapital and the Grundrisse.
My familiarity with Das Kapital is basic, but Kunkel's main point -- that mainstream and even "progressive" accounts of the economic crisis of the last three years rarely cross the left boundary demarcated by economic Keynesianism and political left liberalism -- is trenchant and telling. Now it seems to me that there are any number of reasons for this -- in the American media, at least, the rightward shift of media and politics in general occasioned by corporate monopoly over the main media channels -- but the question is relevant. We hear the crisis framed in technocratic terms, according to which regulations were lax, oversight dysfunctional when present, individual incentives misaligned with corporate/social incentives, etc. But we rarely hear any question of whether or not the crisis was not a dysfunction of capitalism, but rather a feature. I'm skeptical as to whether that conversation can take place in the United States outside of explicitly socialist channels on the fringe, but perhaps it's time to ask those questions again.
1.27.2011
Nabokov right after all
This is pretty rad -- Nabokov is one of my favorite writers in any language, and his passion for butterflies is well-documented... but who knew that he developed a theory to explain the evolution of an entire class of butterfly species, and that more than 30 years after his death, contemporary genetics has vindicated him? Nazdarovya, Vladimir.
1.25.2011
SOTU
And... whiff. On the whole, Obama's rhetoric is good as always. He's invariably eloquent, but this entire frame of "winning" and "losing" misses the point. It's not a matter of beating a 22-year-old Beijing University with the hammer of a 22-year-old Columbia University student. When he talks about bringing electricity to rural areas and creating jobs that didn't exist before... those were active government programs. Anything like the TVA that would be proposed today would give the entire right a collective heart attack... not that it didn't then, but at least FDR had the cojones to point out that the collective good benefits by the arbiter of the collective good -- yeah, the G-word.
The broader point though, is that you can't talk up high-speed rail in terms of "competitiveness" when you have governors in major states responding to extremists to veto such projects. You can't credibly discuss lowering corporate tax rates when you've kept the top rate solid and whine about the deficit. It's just not credible.
Then again, that would require rationality in these here United States, and we know that's not happening any time soon.
The broader point though, is that you can't talk up high-speed rail in terms of "competitiveness" when you have governors in major states responding to extremists to veto such projects. You can't credibly discuss lowering corporate tax rates when you've kept the top rate solid and whine about the deficit. It's just not credible.
Then again, that would require rationality in these here United States, and we know that's not happening any time soon.
SOTU
here comes the immigration thang, good shot for a relevant, non-centrist, non-boilerplate point. just say it, barack -- building a fence is stupid and a waste of money. just say it, pleeeeease.
K Hill's
who doesn't love a dictator in his 80s? go ahead and legitimate that regime. http://bit.ly/ihObtX
New Green Revolution?
Mobarak going down to dispossessed Egyptians would be the world's headline. This is worth watching.
And now Egypt
Holy shit, this might just be a transformational moment in the Middle East -- not one engineered by Condi, mind you, but based on genuine populist outrage. I tweeted this earlier, but that's at least 3 regimes that have been threatened/brought to their knees by new technology. Not to fellate social media -- it is and remains a matter of profit -- but wow. This would not have happened 15 years ago in a different era.
Great Interview with Feingold
Plenty of folks more eloquent than I have discussed the fact -- and frankly, it's a fact -- that we're living in the second Gilded Age. This great interview from ThinkProgress highlights an interview with former Wisconsin Senator and progressive hero Russ Feingold. Check it out.
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