Modernity

Regarding this review of Marx which I thought was too critical and kind of lacking, there's also this from Krugman about Modernity:

Horse Soldiers Blogging by Krugman

And now that we’re at the 150th anniversary of the raid, I’m going to have a chance to start indulging my U.S. Grant obsession. I’ve always had a thing for Grant — the stubby, unprepossessing guy who failed at most things until he turned out to have a unique understanding of modern war. The scene at Appomattox — aristocratic Lee in his dress uniform surrendering to disheveled, unimpressive-looking Grant — represents for me the coming of the modern world.

Marx was very much in favor of the bourgeoisie winning over the artistocratic feudal class and modernity triumphing over feudalism. As a journalist he wrote in favor of Lincoln over the South. And he campaigned against Britain's support of the South.

But part of what I like about Game of Thones and its setting are the notions of honor and solidarity. With capitalism you get the "cash nexus" - as Marx put it - which dissolves everthing - religion, nationalities, solidarities - into air. Everything has a price but no value. The global elite becomes detached from its home fellow nationals. The social convention of exchange value trumps everything else like use value. Virtues and morality is devalued.

The financial sector becomes a giant parasite on the "real" economy.

Graeber and zombie Marxism

Robert Kuttner reviews Graeber in the NYRB.

review of a new book on Marx.

Thoughts on religion, "unhingement," and slavery

In the Hitchens article from yesterday, he discusses Nietzsche's episode in Turin where he had a nervous breakdown/psychotic break:

Eventually, and in miserable circumstances in the Italian city of Turin, Nietzsche was overwhelmed at the sight of a horse being cruelly beaten in the street. Rushing to throw his arms around the animal’s neck, he suffered some terrible seizure and seems for the rest of his pain-racked and haunted life to have been under the care of his mother and sister. The date of the Turin trauma is potentially interesting. It occurred in 1889, and we know that in 1887 Nietzsche had been powerfully influenced by his discovery of the works of Dostoyevsky. There appears to be an almost eerie correspondence between the episode in the street and the awful graphic dream experienced by Raskolnikov on the night before he commits the decisive murders in Crime and Punishment. The nightmare, which is quite impossible to forget once you have read it, involves the terribly prolonged beating to death of a horse. Its owner scourges it across the eyes, smashes its spine with a pole, calls on bystanders to help with the flogging … we are spared nothing. If the gruesome coincidence was enough to bring about Nietzsche’s final unhingement, then he must have been tremendously weakened, or made appallingly vulnerable, by his other, unrelated sufferings. These, then, by no means served to make him stronger. The most he could have meant, I now think, is that he made the most of his few intervals from pain and madness to set down his collections of penetrating aphorism and paradox. This may have given him the euphoric impression that he was triumphing, and making use of the Will to Power. Twilight of the Idols was actually published almost simultaneously with the horror in Turin, so the coincidence was pushed as far as it could reasonably go.

This reminded me of the opening scene in Amazing Grace, a film about William Wilberforce, the religious friend of William Pitt who ended the the British transatlantic slave-trade. In the movie, Wilberforce, played by the kindly and sympathetic Ioan Gruffudd, halts his carriage to stop the beating of a horse and soon after has a similar "unhingement" and becomes a religious fanatic or fundamentalist. He also endeavors to end the British slave trade against great odds.

To me the idea of a horse being beaten for some reason always brings to mind Orwell's Boxer, who represented the Russian working class in his book Animal Farm. Loyal and hardworking, worked to death in fact.

John Brown was a religious fanatic too. In AMC's "Hell on Wheels," the preacher in the railroad camp road with John Brown during "Bloody Kansas." It's very interesting that Obama chose to give a speech in Osawatomie.

As I understand it, Nietzsche and Mencken had a very negative of religion as a sort of a slave mentality. On the Internets someone wrote:

[Nietzsche] thought Christian morals and asceticism rejected life. The good for him is only that which asserts his aristocratic, elitist ideal. Christian morals defend the opposite - the meek, impoverished, and lower class. He was also skeptical of the Platonic rejection of the material world common in Christianity.

Hitchens writes Mencken believed in a sort of Social Darwinism. Christianity began as a slave religion under the Roman Empire. I share Hitchens's and Marx's view of it as an opiate. It's a less condescending, more sympathetic view, although maybe pity is ultimately condescending.

Religious suffering is, at one and the same time, the expression of real suffering and a protest against real suffering. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people. The abolition of religion as the illusory happiness of the people is the demand for their real happiness. To call on them to give up their illusions about their condition is to call on them to give up a condition that requires illusions. The criticism of religion is, therefore, in embryo, the criticism of that vale of tears of which religion is the halo.

Joan Robinson’s “Open letter from a Keynesian to a Marxist” by Mike Beggs

Ricardo existed at a particular point when English history was going round a corner so sharply that the progressive and the reactionary positions changed places in a generation. He was just at the corner where the capitalists were about to supersede the old landed aristocracy as the effective ruling class.

Ricardo was on the progressive side. His chief pre-occupation was to show that landlords were parasites on society. In doing so he was to some extent the champion of the capitalists. They were part of the productive forces as against the parasites. He was pro-capitalist as against the landlords more than he was pro-worker as against capitalists (with the Iron Law of Wages, it was just too bad for the workers, whatever happened).

Ricardo was followed by two able and well-trained pupils – Marx and Marshall. Meanwhile English history had gone right round the corner, and landlords were not any longer the question. Now it was capitalists. Marx turned Ricardo’s argument round this way: Capitalists are very much like landlords. And Marshall turned it round the other way: Landlords are very much like capitalists. Just round the corner in English history you see two bicycles of the very same make – one being ridden off to the left and the other to the right.

Marshall did something much more effective than changing the answer. He changed the question. For Ricardo the Theory of Value was a means of studying the distribution of total output between wages, rent and profit, each considered as a whole. This is a big question. Marshall turned the meaning of Value into a little question: Why does an egg cost more than a cup of tea? It may be a small question but it is a very difficult and complicated one. It takes a lot of time and algebra to work out the theory of it. So it kept all Marshall’s pupils preoccupied for fifty years. They had no time to think about the big question, or even to remember that there was a big question, because they had to keep their noses right down to the grindstone, working out the theory of the price of a cup of tea.

Keynes turned the question back again. He started thinking in Ricardo’s terms: output as a whole and why worry about a cup of tea? When you are thinking about output as a whole, relative prices come out in the wash – including the relative price of money and labour. The price level comes into the argument, but it comes in as a complication, not as the main point. If you have had some practice on Ricardo’s bicycle you do not need to stop and ask yourself what to do in a case like that, you just do it. You assume away the complication till you have got the main problem worked out. So Keynes began by getting money prices out of the way. Marshall’s cup of tea dissolved into thin air. But if you cannot use money, what unit of value do you take? A man hour of labour time. It is the most handy and sensible measure of value, so naturally you take it. You do not have to prove anything, you just do it.

(via DeLong)