Nèdeem Elmahjoub's blog

The constitution of a system of private property requires, as a necessary correlate, the constitution of a system of ‘defence’ or coercive power. . . . The analysis of the very ‘base’ of capitalist society, of its kernel of social  productive relations, requires not simply an ‘economic’ theory but equally a theory of jurisprudence, a theory of politics, and a theory of war. —Colin Barker, 1998

You can put Marx back into the nineteenth century, but you can’t keep him there. He wasted a ridiculous amount of his time feuding with rivals and putting out sectarian brush fires, and he did not even come close to completing the work he intended as his magnum opus, “Capital.” But, for better or for worse, it just is not the case that his thought is obsolete. He saw that modern free-market economies, left to their own devices, produce gross inequalities, and he transformed a mode of analysis that goes all the way back to Socrates—turning concepts that we think we understand and take for granted inside out—into a resource for grasping the social and economic conditions of our own lives. with his compatriots in the nineteenth century, and that certainly does not wear well today, after the experience of the regimes conceived in his name. It therefore sounds perverse to say that Marx’s philosophy was dedicated to human freedom. But it was. Marx was an Enlightenment thinker: he wanted a wo...

“Thomas Piketty’s thousand-page economics bestseller reduces capital to mere wealth — leaving out its political impact on social and economic relationships throughout history .”