David Harvey- The Crises of Capitalism

My email account has been hacked!

Romiustexis@yahoo.com has been hacked!  If you are getting spam e-mails from my account then please delete me as a contact.  I have contacted the spammer and yahoo but I am awaiting responses, most likely I will delete this account and start another!

I am sorry for any inconvenience.  Let me know if you have any additional information for me!

Thanks
Romius T.

Video Lecture of Karl Marx

Pay of Top Earners Erodes Social Security - WSJ.com

Best reason to be a communist I have seen in a while.

Pay of Top Earners Erodes Social Security - WSJ.com

Thoroughly Modern Marx : NPR

Thoroughly Modern Marx : NPR

"Ironically, one of the most radical proposals making the rounds today has come from an economist at the London School of Economics, Willem Buiter, a former member of the Bank of England's Monetary Policy Committee and certainly no Marxist. Buiter has proposed that the whole financial sector be turned into a public utility. Because banks in the contemporary world cannot exist without public deposit insurance and public central banks that act as lenders of last resort, there is no case, he argues, for their continuing existence as privately owned, profit-seeking institutions."

"Instead they should be publicly owned and run as public services. This proposal echoes the demand for "centralization of credit in the banks of the state" that Marx himself made in the Manifesto. To him, a financial-system overhaul would reinforce the importance of the working classes' winning "the battle of democracy" to radically change the state from an organ imposed upon society to one that responds to it."

Dissent Magazine

Dissent Magazine

Murray Hausknecht from Dissent Magazine offers us a portrait of Karl Marx the blogger.

"IF KARL Marx was still with us today he would be posting acid comments on his blog—www.loseyourchains.com—about the current mess with subtexts of “I told you so” and “It’s the system, stupid.”

Last Exit Magazine « Prophet of Profit

A quote attributed to Karl Marx has been haunting the internet.

“Owners of capital will stimulate the working class to buy more and more of expensive goods, houses and technology, pushing them to take more and more expensive credits, until their debt becomes unbearable. The unpaid debt will lead to bankruptcy of banks, which will have to be nationalised, and the State will have to take the road which will eventually lead to communism.”

-Karl Marx, Das Kapital, 1867

The Last Exit Magazine and James Ledbetter discuss how the quote is in fact NOT Karl Marx's:

Last Exit Magazine « Prophet of Profit

Karl Marx on your i-phone!

I just found the an i-phone app that offers the full text of Marx's Wage, Labour and Capital:

"iClassix, bringing classical literary works to your iPhone.

Originally written as a series of newspaper articles in 1847, Wage-Labour and Capital was intended to give a short overview, for popular consumption, of Marx’s central theories regarding the economic relationships between workers and capitalists.

These theories outlined include the Marxian form of the Labour Theory of Value, which distinguishes “labour” from “labour-power”, and the Theory of Concentration of Capital, which states that capitalism tends towards the creation of monopolies and the disenfranchisement of the middle and working classes.

The Theory of Alienation, which describes a dehumanising effect of capitalist production, in which an immediate social significance of labour to the worker is absent, is also touched upon. These theories were later elaborated in Volume 1 of Capital, published in 1867.

This edition of Wage-Labour and Capital, published in 1891, was edited and translated by Friedrich Engels, and remains one of the most widely read of Marx’s works.

This great title is now available in its entirety on the iScroll, a Text Synchronized Audiobook (TSA) reader that enables you to experience your favorite book in a whole new way. Choose to read, listen or both, its in your hands, literally. "

Source:

I am re-inventing this blog

I have not worked on this blog in months. Despite my neglet this blog gets more hits and generates more interest than any of my other blogs.

Obviously I am a poor Capitalist. I have not seen the opportunity here.

Expect update frequently.

I may take a popular route of examining Karl Marx on the internet. I have not decided what I will "cover."

I hope you enjoy the new Karl Marx Blog.

Sarah Palin the Marxist?

From the New Yorker:

"One of the reasons Palin has been a popular governor is that she added an extra twelve hundred dollars to this year’s check, bringing the per-person total to $3,269. A few weeks before she was nominated for Vice-President, she told a visiting journalist—Philip Gourevitch, of this magazine—that “we’re set up, unlike other states in the union, where it’s collectively Alaskans own the resources. So we share in the wealth when the development of these resources occurs.” Perhaps there is some meaningful distinction between spreading the wealth and sharing it (“collectively,” no less), but finding it would require the analytic skills of Karl the Marxist."

Marxist Podcasts

Reading Karl Marx is back in vogue. I have seen a number of news articles that have spotlighted the increased sales of Marxist literature. I would encourage every one to read Marx.

I can't think of anything better than a podcast dedicated to "Reading Karl Marx's Capital."

The podcast comes from David Harvey. You can find it here. Harvey has been teaching a class on reading Capital for decades. He knows his stuff. He also has an enjoyable speaking voice. He strays from a pure "textual" rendition of Capital and included a wide range of sophisticated techniques of analysis.



If you would like to "listen" to Capital on your own you can listen to a terrific version here.

Happy Birthday Karl Marx

Marx was born today May 5th. Here are some links celebrating his birthday.

Bluegal

Overnightlows

imperfect world

And here

Marx and Obama "The Mask Slips" - New York Times

Right Wing crazy man William Kristol's article The Mask Slips - New York Times.

A short read with pithy remarks like "The Marx-Engels Reader, edited by Robert C. Tucker — a book that was assigned in thousands of college courses in the 1970s and 80s, and that now must lie, unopened and un-remarked upon, on an awful lot of rec-room bookshelves. "

Green Left - Review: The Communist Manifesto: 160 years old and still causing trouble

Green Left - Review: The Communist Manifesto: 160 years old and still causing trouble

Karl Marx as AD MAN

Nigel Beale writes at the Guardian Unlimited that Karl Marx could have been the best advertising man of all time. Beale takes a look at the Communist Manifesto as ad copy and gives his take.

"First off, it doesn't waffle. It goes straight to the point. It's specific. It contains facts. It's enthusiastic, memorable and brutally honest. It speaks to its audience with passion and understanding. It attracts attention. It is concise and easily understood. Its message is straightforward and unambiguous. It eloquently expresses the major concern of its target audience, and provides a compelling solution."

What I enjoyed the most from this article was Beale's contention that the Manifesto's real purpose was to "brand" Communism, correctly.

Hyperborean

Hyperborean is Blog of the Week™

Boing Boing tv: Monochrom's Marxist sock puppets - Boing Boing

Marxist Sock Puppets.

Boing Boing tv: Monochrom's Marxist sock puppets - Boing Boing

Studies in Language and Capitalism

For those who tire of reading sociobiological explanations of language check out this article by Marnie Holborow.

Putting The Social Back Into Language: Marx, Volosinov and Vygotsky

In other items of interest:

"In a speech, President JF Kennedy said that if only Karl Marx "had remained a foreign correspondent, history might have been different". How wrong he was, argues Christopher Hitchens. Much of Marx's writing during his years as a hack was a passionate defence of the values that were to inform his political philosophy."

Links courtesy of Book Forum (formerly Political Theory Daily.)

Marx in China

It's been a while since I posted on here folks. Anyone still watching?

Here is an article by William Pesik who contemplates how Marx would view China and it's emerging capitalist economy.

"Karl Marx is back in China, and the philosopher is arguably bigger than ever."

Karl Marx Is Back, and Punting on Chinese Stocks:

"It's interesting, then, that China's markets in some respects are looking more like the kinds envisioned by Marx than by laissez-faire champion Friedman.

Mao Zedong fancied himself an heir to Marx. Today, when investors look at China's 11 percent growth and domestic reforms, the Marxist theory China subscribed to back in the 20th century seldom comes to mind.

And were Marx to visit modern-day China, he might be distressed to see how the rich are flourishing and a sizeable portion of gross domestic product comes from private companies, while the poor need to pay for education and health care. China also hopes one day to arrive at a system where markets control the prices of goods, production and labor.

Yet something about China's spectacular stock rally has Marx written all over it.

One of the German-born philosopher's main worries about free markets was a ``reserve army of labor,'' a huge labor pool that would prevent wages from rising and benefit only corporations that exploited workers. In today's China, a reserve army of individual investors is stepping forward to boost stock prices.

Ignoring Greenspan."

The Structural Limits of Marxism: Separation from Nature Under The Sign of Production – Marxist Anthropology and The Domination of Nature

International Journal of Baudrillard Studies has an article by Jean Baudrillard.