A new documentary film on the life and music of Phil Ochs, “There But For Fortune,” is being shown in a several US cities now. It hasn’t come too soon, certainly, because Ochs today is largely unknown outside the circle of lefty baby-boomers. Often Ochs is dismissed as a “topical” songwriter whose music, for...
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What Was He Fighting For? (Phil Ochs as the Sound of the New Left)
Socialist Guide to Marx’s Capital (4. Mystery of Money)
A “world without money” describes one essential aspect of socialism. But to get a clearer idea of how society can function without money we need a better understanding of money and why it must exist under capitalism. It might seem odd to suggest that people don’t really understand money all that well, for it...
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Socialist Guide to Marx’s Capital (3. Labor Theory of Value)
We have seen, then, that capitalism is no different from any other form of society insofar as wealth must be produced through the productive activities of human beings. This goes without saying, for without such wealth production no society (or the people living in it) could continue to exist for very long. The key...
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Socialist Guide to Marx’s Capital (2. The Starting Point)
Marx begins his examination of capitalism in Capital with the analysis of the commodity; and he succinctly explains the reason for his starting point in the first paragraph: “The wealth of societies in which the capitalist mode of production prevails appears as an ‘immense collection of commodities’; the individual commodity appears as its ...
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Socialist Guide to Marx’s Capital (1. Intro)
This series of short articles will examine the first volume of Marx’s Capital from a “socialist perspective,” which is to say, with an eye to how an understanding of capitalism can contribute to our understanding of socialism. I should recognize the obvious fact, right away, that a worker hardly needs to read Capital to...
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The Latest from “Comrade Žižek”
(A review of First as Tragedy, Then as Farce by Slavoj Žižek) Has Slavoj Žižek (the superstar Slovenian “theorist”) signed a piece-work contract with Verso Books? One can’t help wondering because this slim volume brings his tally with that publisher alone to around 21 titles. This Stakhanovite output would be more impressive were it not...
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Debating the “S” Word
Is any word more over-used and misunderstood today than “socialism”? In the United States, the “S-word” appears in almost every other sentence uttered by Republicans, who depict the Democratic Party as marching – or at least creeping – towards socialism. “Socialist” has replaced “liberal” in their vocabulary as an insult to hurl at political...
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Marx’s Contribution to the Critique of Reformism
A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, first published in 1859, only consists of two chapters (apart from its famous Preface). Marx had intended it to be the first installment in a massively ambitious project that was to include six separate “books” addressing, respectively, the topics of capital, landed property, wage labor, the...
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Capitalism in Crisis: Reforms, Collapse — Or a Socialist Revolution?
The severe economic crisis has dominated newspaper headlines – day after day for at least the past six months – like no other story in recent history. The massive layoffs, losses and bankruptcies have grown as familiar as the daily death-count in Iraq and Afghanistan. The ranks of the unemployed are overflowing and...
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Good Cap, Bad Cap
Investment bankers have gone in the past few months from being the “masters of the universe” to the object of universal scorn. Across the political spectrum in the United States, particularly at the fraying ends of its two main political parties, criticism of Wall Street can be heard. Even McCain and Obama– whose...
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