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 that reason, hasn’t stood the test of time. “He’s no Bob Dylan,” his critics sometimes say. Dylan himself famously told Ochs he was “just a journalist” (as he threw him out of his limousine). This image of Ochs owes much to his own statements, for...
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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 is hard to get through a single day without thinking about money in some way or another. Yet for all the thought given to money, or how to get more of that magical substance, most people pretty much take its existence for granted, which is...
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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 difference in the case of capitalism, though, is that this indispensable wealth takes the form of commodities, which simply means that the things produced are exchanged on the market. People today are so accustomed to this capitalist world, where everything has a price, that the...
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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 elementary form. Our investigation therefore begins with the analysis of the commodity.” (Penguin edition; p. 126) The term “wealth” is used here not to refer to riches in the form of money, but rather to the material wealth essential to any form of society: the...
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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 arrive at an anti-capitalist position. Life under capitalism is negative advertisement enough for that social system. Who knows, there may have been a budding capitalist at some point in time who mistook Capital for a how-to guide, and part-way through reading it saw the error...
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(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 for his notorious habit of recycling old material, like any good stand-up comedian does. This two-chapter offering is no exception: Žižek seems to have rapidly assembled the book by combining his favorite quotes and theoretical hyperbole with some recent news stories from the unfolding economic...
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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 opponents, while the meaning remains unchanged as a term to indicate an advocate of government intervention in production and the social infrastructure. Everything from Keynsianism to Communism (= state capitalism) falls under this blanket definition, which means that Republicans must feel terribly outnumbered by their...
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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 state, international trade, and the world market. The first book on the topic of capital was to have included four “sections” dealing with: capital in general, competition, credit, and share capital. In other words, the two chapters of Contribution (“The Commodity” and “Money, or Simple...
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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 no job seems secure. Not only is the situation spinning out of control, but workers are being reminded how little control they have over their lives. Their own futures are in the hands of business leaders and politicians, who themselves can do nothing more...
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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 presidential campaigns have been generously funded by Wall Street– have had to make half-hearted statements about how “greed is, um, bad.” This criticism is richly deserved, of course, but many of the harshest critics of speculators are fond of capitalism itself and take a rather...
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