I was asking myself this the other year. When all your needs are met, does everyone (or most) ultimately just want a private sex party? The mass forbidden? Is this the supreme goal in this society? That sounds awful!
It truly does. I think Sade’s 120 Days of Sodom captures what some of them want, like when Judge Curval talks about how even the most disgusting crimes and sex acts get boring and how he would eventually love to destroy the sun or use that star to burn the world. Sade was an elite, and I think the book - which was cobbled together much later (by others) from notes from a manuscript thrown together while he was imprisoned - is probably as good a look at the “supreme goal” of bored elites as we’re ever going to find anywhere. I mean, what else is there for them to do besides destroying the sun or burning down the world?
Just this week: “Earlier on Tuesday, male escort Sharay Hayes - also known as The Punisher [the well-endowed men in 120 Days of Sodom have nicknames like this too] - told how he was paid to oil up Diddy's ex-girlfriend and alleged victim Cassie Ventura in two Manhattan hotels while the rapper watched.Hayes said Diddy wore a face-covering veil [the four libertines also embrace feminine garb/passive roles at times similar to this] similar to the garb often worn by conservative Muslim women to disguise his identity during their initial meetings.”
To be over encumbered by resources - what a dull thrill.
I’ve worked under sons whose father bought them the business. They are loud about their declared skills and past success. To have to prove oneself constantly seems exhausting. To people they pay for labor? So boring!
To achieve individual success is fleeting. And boring. One can only max out so far.
To grow as a collective towards a larger goal is more fulfilling…and religions trick us into larping this. To actually do so - what a thrill!
"The complaint, simply by entering the docket, cracks that silence, and in so doing becomes a bespoke abyss into which at least a few well-to-do denizens of our media-saturated empire must finally stare. What, I wonder, do they see gazing back at them?"
Good question. I have an answer, but I'll keep it to myself. And those images in the PDF were really something.
Good work here. Love to see it, and kinda hate to see it, too.
Yeah, thanks to all these new subscribers for giving me the time to work on some longer articles. Everyone should open the PDF. It might give them a few hints about what the rich are seeing
Rofl. So non-capitalist societies did not have sex slaves, harems, prostitutes. I don't really know what a fevered rhapsody quoting Marx and an assortment of Marxist writers whose every word, work and act have been exposed as frauds is supposed to do.
Did Marx commodify his children when he let them starve as he "did the work" of scribbling his rants in public libraries?
Epstein many believe is connected to blackmail of intelligence agencies and the political class, not so much corporate espionage over trade secrets. Is that the market?
I think I can make a much better case for viewing the current world as late stage disaster statism, with Trump and the MAGA movement an attempt to reverse that back toward a more voluntaryist set of social relations.
There's a lot to unpack here, but it's interesting enough (to me, anyway) to warrant a detailed response for anyone who might be reading.
First off, Marx never claimed pre-capitalist societies were sexual utopias. In fact, he specifically analyzed slavery, serfdom, and yes, even "harems" as structures rooted in earlier modes of production (see, e.g., https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch31.htm). What Marx was examining was how capitalism transformed these older forms of exploitation. He wrote extensively about the "extirpation, enslavement and entombment in mines of the aboriginal population" and the "looting of the East Indies" including forced concubinage as part of what kicked off capitalism's development.
About Marx's personal life: the reality is that three of his seven children died of common 19th-century illnesses during years of exile and poverty. Engels paid their rent because Marx's intellectual work wasn't valued in the economic system he was critiquing. You can criticize many aspects of Marx's personal life, but suggesting he "commodified his children" isn't historically accurate. He was almost certainly a bum, an asshole, and an unlikeable person, though.
Regarding this idea of "disaster statism"...Naomi Klein, whose recent work hasn't been very good at all, used "disaster capitalism" to describe how governments and investors exploit crises (wars, hurricanes, economic collapses) to push through deregulation that would face resistance in normal times. More recent scholarship has reframed this as "disaster statism," noting that states themselves orchestrate these post-crisis windfalls. In any event, this process transcends partisan politics.
Take the Trump-1 administration's policies. The Opportunity Zones created in the 2017 tax bill quickly became subsidies for politically-connected real estate billionaires. The CARES Act directed billions to large corporations (including fossil fuel companies) while small business support lagged (though some mid-size operations did expand domestic production, a fact I had to cover in what was then my day job and wrote about in a previous article). And of course the odd back-and-forth market swings of Trump-2, tied to tariff talks, certainly raise the specter of insider trading (as does, of course, whatever the Biden family had cooking over in Ukraine with regard to Hunter B's fascinating career as an "energy exeucutive"...they're all crooks, which is totally understandable because most of us humanzees would be if we were in proxmity to the "god almighty dollar").
Democratic administrations have deployed similar tools. The Biden administration fast-tracked LNG exports, and Democrats co-authored the aforementioned CARES Act. For me, at least, this isn't a partisan issue: it's "always already" a structural problem where crisis legislation reliably benefits entrenched capital regardless of which party holds power.
About Epstein...there are indeed multiple credible sources pointing to intelligence connections. Virginia Giuffre (an Epstein survivor) has circulated speculation about his "spy" operations. Newsweek reported on missing surveillance tapes and quoted ex-CIA officers suggesting a blackmail archive. Vanity Fair's Vicky Ward reported rumors of Epstein claiming to work for "CIA-type people." And former Israeli intelligence officer Ari Ben-Menashe told 60 Minutes Australia about ties between Epstein, Maxwell, and Israeli military intelligence (very likely, it seems).
These theories vary in details, but they share a common logic: Epstein collected compromising material on global elites, intelligence services trade in leverage, so intelligence links seem plausible (though unproven). Your skepticism about corporate espionage being the whole story makes sense, though state and parastate interests often collaborate in these elite surveillance operations and it's hard to tell where one ends and the other begins (perhaps Mossad has access to an answer like this).
I think the core issue isn't whether capitalism invented exploitation (it didn't), but how our current political-economic system refines and supercharges very old hierarchies as we chug toward who knows what kind of future. I'd lay -1000 odds that nobody on any political patronage team is coming to save any of us, but what do I know? I'm just a former academic turned private-sector content/research person who asks people for money on Substack (many such cases; some, I think, are even) and periodically rolls out the ol' grad school reading list when putting old wine in new bottles.
Thank you for the reply, almost every stitch of I would contest if I had the interest and time to do it now.
Two things:
First: Actually the funny “labor” Marx engaged in has only ever been valued in two places: Western academia, which curiously could be viewed as by capitalism, the economic system he was criticizing. Harvard’s endowment funds the only people who have ever been persuaded Marxism was true or relevant. Of course academia is also now state funded and functions as a priesthood to protect the state with mystical tales about how the state helps poor people, or racial minorities, etc. or protects health and safety, or dispenses life saving vaccines, or makes food healthier or safer.
Second: yes slavery clearly existed in “pre-capitalist” times, biblical, Homeric etc. Capitalist societies actually eradicated it. Communist/socialist/Soviet societies still had slavery. Only with the pretzel shaped anti-concept of “wage slavery” can one begin to associate slavery with capitalism. In Soviet or Maoist countries human beings were clearly treated as “commodities” as informers, conscripts, firing line victims, traded if not always for money then for power. Slavery continues to exist in Africa, even though African kings can no longer sell their delinquent taxpayers and other opponents to plantations in other countries.
Much of what seems like slavery in mixed economies is the result of government grants of monopoly, government inflationism that reduces wages while raising asset prices, and taxation, forcing both parents to work etc.
It’s funny how if you read Marxist academics they frequently say Marx was completely mistaken about the area in which they have expertise, e.g. economist Joan Robinson or economic historian Gabriel Kolko saying his understanding of monopoly, economics in general, and economic history was all wrong, while Marxist philosophers etc. say he did not understand ethics or epistemology but his economics was good. And they all like him for his sense of outrage and his licensing of virtue signaling.
I think the real economic analysis of Marx would be that having invested time in memorizing his system or larping, his shell game, his catechism, those having made this investment feel that they must use it, or admit that they wasted their time and money.
It’s funny how if you read Marxist academics they frequently say Marx was completely mistaken about the area in which they have expertise, e.g. economist Joan Robinson or economic historian Gabriel Kolko saying his understanding of monopoly, economics in general, and economic history was all wrong, while Marxist philosophers etc. say he did not understand ethics or epistemology but his economics was good. And they all like him for his sense of outrage and his licensing of virtue signaling.
I think the real economic analysis of Marx would be that having invested time in memorizing his system or larping, his shell game, his catechism, those having made this investment feel that they must use it, or admit that they wasted their time and money.
I appreciate the double-header response after declaring you lacked "the interest and time"! That's actually quite generous, and it gives me plenty to work with as far as supplying anyone still following this with links to articles, books, etc. (which is what these essays and articles are primarily intended to do...they can read it themselves).
As far as Marx plagiarizing libertarian class analysis, you're absolutely right that he acknowledged his debt to earlier theorists. In his March 5, 1852 letter to Joseph Weydemeyer (https://wikirouge.net/texts/en/Letter_to_Joseph_Weydemeyer,_March_5,_1852), Marx wrote: "Now as for myself, I do not claim to have discovered either the existence of classes in modern society or the struggle between them. Long before me, bourgeois historians had described the historical development of this struggle between the classes, as had bourgeois economists their economic anatomy."
The French liberal theorists Charles Comte, Charles Dunoyer, and Augustin Thierry developed a class analysis in the 1810s-1820s that distinguished between the "industrious" productive classes (including both workers and capitalists) and the parasitic political classes who lived off taxation. Marx drew on this tradition, though he transformed it by focusing on economic production rather than political predation, though I do personally think the latter (because of various behavioral/evolutionary/etc.) impulses cannot be undervalued. Libertarianism.org has great stuff on all these thinkers for readers who might be following this for some godforsaken reason (https://www.libertarianism.org/articles/libertarian-class-analysis).
Now, in re Joan Robinson...as I understand it from dipping a toe into this +/-15 years ago, her 1942 "An Essay on Marxian Economics" was actually aimed at making Marx's economics intelligible to academic colleagues, not dismissing it wholesale. As Carolina Alves notes (https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/jep.36.2.247), Robinson relied on Marxian insights to escape Marshallian orthodoxy and the book was intended to lay the foundations of her enduring challenge to orthodox economics. She was critical of some aspects while appreciating others, but I wouldn't say that's the wholesale rejection you suggest.
I think Kolko was brilliant: he argued that businessmen favored government regulation because they feared competition and desired to forge a government–business coalition, a thesis about "political capitalism" that libertarians like Murray Rothbard (as an opponent of compulsory schooling, I think MR nailed it here: https://www.libertarianism.org/publications/essays/twelve-year-sentence-historical-origins-compulsory-schooling) smartly embraced. But as I understand it, he wasn't saying Marx didn't understand monopoly per se; he was arguing that monopoly power came through state intervention, not market forces (readers can gather that from this review of Kolko's big book (https://libcom.org/article/gabriel-kolkos-triumph-conservatism-reinterpretation-american-history-1900-1916) or the text itself (https://annas-archive.org/md5/d372f96548cfa734897fd7d95d5d8556) (Richard Hofstader (in The Age of Reform) and Robert Wiebe (in The Search for Order, https://annas-archive.org/md5/d372f96548cfa734897fd7d95d5d8556) offer slightly different takes - Hofstadter sees the progressives as incipient capitalists but the New Dealers as revolutionaries, a weird bit of presentism re the latter; Wiebe does provide good info on how the "experts" essentially "de-localized" society in a way ultimately favorable to business) but it's possible to try to square that circle, at least if one is writing one's comprehensive exams around all of that and Kolko is more or less correct).
Your claim about capitalism eradicating slavery while communist societies maintained it needs serious qualification (Seymour Drescher, one of my profs at Pitt and the author of Econocide, would certainly argue the former, but I still think Eric Williams' thesis, abetted by new post-Time on the Cross works like And the Half Was Never Told, is still the stronger: capitalist nations could abolish slavery where better solutions existed, and in the case of the U.S. Civil War, the South was right to cling to the Peculiar Institution because it had seen better returns on slave work from 1830-1860 just due to export price fluctuations and slightly improved labor practices, with nascent industrialization using slaves around Richmond (Tredegar), etc. ... that said, the North was equally right to want to move past it, because "free labor" was simply more flexible and easily discarded for mass-production purposes).
The Soviet Union did indeed use forced labor extensively, as estimates suggest 10 to 11 million people (the real numbers ar eprobably higher) were transported to North European Russia, Siberia, and Central Asia, where a third went into concentration camps under Stalin. Contemporary China (https://www.americafirstpolicy.com/issues/modern-day-slavery-chinas-persecution-economy-of-forced-labor) continues to use forced labor, particularly targeting Uyghurs and other minorities (but is this not peak capitalism? they're making Nike shoes and so on while homogenizing the national population; I've seen strange, positive readings of this by both Marxists and libertarians over the years, though Arora and Stephens' paper here is fairly interesting re the salutary impact of capitalism on currently-existing slavery: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/00076503211066589). Either way, these are undeniable atrocities.
But the relationship between capitalism and abolition is complex. Slavery in America, Brazil, and Cuba relied on capitalist markets, which supplied credit and demand for slave-made goods. In Brazil, the abolitionist movement could not embrace the principal forces of capitalist advance because the latter were implicated in the slave system (Robin Blackburn's work on the second slavery here, summarized in Jacobin but admittedly fairly well, captures all of that complexity: https://jacobin.com/2024/05/slavery-capitalism-abolition-the-reckoning-blackburn-review/). The story isn't capitalism good, socialism bad: it's about how power structures in any system always already enable exploitation.
Finally, on the sunk cost fallacy argument about Marxist academics...you might have a point about some individuals, but it cuts both ways (I certainly don't and can't identify as one; I merely use everything from the ol' comps list + my current annotated readings, mixing in what suits the current project and ensuring anyone reading it has a link to the source himself so that he can read the material if there's a dispute over some point ("being right" doesn't = agreeing with someone, after all)...but I also work a day job in the corporate world, producing research that serves specific market-oriented ends, so it's all content to me in this regard).
Either way, how many liberals and libertarians have invested so much in their knee-jerk anti-Marx stance that they can't acknowledge when he got something right (which I'd say primarily centers more around aspects of human behavior related to increasingly concentrated power than the niceties of theory that indeed shouldn't be regarded as dogma but often are)? Personally, I'd prefer not to use him (Althusser on, say, The Reproduction of Capitalism is much better, much more readable and easy to incorporate) but some of that work fit what I was doing here, so there it is.
In saying I wasn’t going to invest time in replying I didn’t mean I wasn’t interested in the issue. I meant reading every Marxist from Marcuse to Adorno along with Marx himself to engage in a point by point discussion of capitalism and socialism attending to what Marxists have said isn’t something I can make time for. From what I have read, I think anyone doing that (whether anti-Marx or especially pro-Marx) would be better off putting their time and energy elsewhere, including even Emma Goldman or Proudhon. I think all of his constructs, from the labor theory of value on, are not rooted in reality. How much he (and they) just kept going because of sunk costs in his (and their) investment, how much their enthusiasm blinds them to critics, and how much it is a kind of con artistry would require the investigation I don’t think is a good investment of time, except for perhaps some very unusually situated person. For example I would think one could read and re-write your essay considering whatever issues were raised and analyzing them without the Marxism, and in your case I might have an initial inclination to do so because we write for one website in common and I often like your pieces at Unherd etc. But I have too many things to do to get involved with Marxists, unless they had a waxing instead of a waning influence.
A more interesting topic would be why Marxism as a movement had to dissolve itself into polylogism and identity politics to get traction in the modern world, mutating into black supremacism, gender theory, Islamic/Palestinian terrorism, etc.
I agree that that last point is the topic, so much that Walter Benn Michaels and others have had to write books saying “let’s stop doing this” (the weakness of the class-first WBM book, in my opinion, is that he gives insufficient space, as you note, to why that is case). In fact, that is pretty much the only “leftist” topic I address privately these days when talking to a good friend who works in a field very much overrun with that very thing.
And yes, that's a good point about my external work. At UH (and elsewhere) I quite deliberately leave this material out of there because there are far better ways to approach most of those subjects (especially the sort of intra-right/intra-left feuding I cover for UH).
I’m glad to see you critique the harridan and hypocrite Naomi Klein.
The thesis of her book ‘The Shock Doctrine’ was that capital/corporations, with assistance from the state, swooped in during and after a disaster and re-wrote all the rules, removed problematic populations from certain areas, sucked up resources, you name it. I believe her thesis was sound.
She then blew her credibility out of the water by actively cheering on the disaster capitalism/disaster statism of the Covid Regime, and likewise she actively supports the use of the supposed ‘Climate Crisis’ to do the same.
She’s a very unsympathetic character and perhaps there is a Gulag Island we could send her and the rest of the Covid Authoritarians to, forever.
She took a good photo. This may be very important in publishing, as it is in news anchoring, and maybe electoral politics. And as Trump critics have claimed, presidential appointments.
Very important. Kristi Noem did a lot of work on her face prior to her appointment. Naomi Klein has cycled out of view to an extent and should consider doing the same. Bee sting lips at least
I was asking myself this the other year. When all your needs are met, does everyone (or most) ultimately just want a private sex party? The mass forbidden? Is this the supreme goal in this society? That sounds awful!
It truly does. I think Sade’s 120 Days of Sodom captures what some of them want, like when Judge Curval talks about how even the most disgusting crimes and sex acts get boring and how he would eventually love to destroy the sun or use that star to burn the world. Sade was an elite, and I think the book - which was cobbled together much later (by others) from notes from a manuscript thrown together while he was imprisoned - is probably as good a look at the “supreme goal” of bored elites as we’re ever going to find anywhere. I mean, what else is there for them to do besides destroying the sun or burning down the world?
Just this week: “Earlier on Tuesday, male escort Sharay Hayes - also known as The Punisher [the well-endowed men in 120 Days of Sodom have nicknames like this too] - told how he was paid to oil up Diddy's ex-girlfriend and alleged victim Cassie Ventura in two Manhattan hotels while the rapper watched.Hayes said Diddy wore a face-covering veil [the four libertines also embrace feminine garb/passive roles at times similar to this] similar to the garb often worn by conservative Muslim women to disguise his identity during their initial meetings.”
To be over encumbered by resources - what a dull thrill.
I’ve worked under sons whose father bought them the business. They are loud about their declared skills and past success. To have to prove oneself constantly seems exhausting. To people they pay for labor? So boring!
To achieve individual success is fleeting. And boring. One can only max out so far.
To grow as a collective towards a larger goal is more fulfilling…and religions trick us into larping this. To actually do so - what a thrill!
A better world is before us all.
yes!
I have nothing intelligent to contribute save for the fact that this was the crossover episode of crossover episodes that I never knew I needed.
So much is in here (no Paige VanZant, but she’ll get her own thing soon enough)!
"The complaint, simply by entering the docket, cracks that silence, and in so doing becomes a bespoke abyss into which at least a few well-to-do denizens of our media-saturated empire must finally stare. What, I wonder, do they see gazing back at them?"
Good question. I have an answer, but I'll keep it to myself. And those images in the PDF were really something.
Good work here. Love to see it, and kinda hate to see it, too.
Yeah, thanks to all these new subscribers for giving me the time to work on some longer articles. Everyone should open the PDF. It might give them a few hints about what the rich are seeing
Oliver Bateman doing the work on sex cults is the type of work I like to see.
Ken, this was a labor of love. There's even a National Enquirer reference in here!
Rofl. So non-capitalist societies did not have sex slaves, harems, prostitutes. I don't really know what a fevered rhapsody quoting Marx and an assortment of Marxist writers whose every word, work and act have been exposed as frauds is supposed to do.
Did Marx commodify his children when he let them starve as he "did the work" of scribbling his rants in public libraries?
Epstein many believe is connected to blackmail of intelligence agencies and the political class, not so much corporate espionage over trade secrets. Is that the market?
I think I can make a much better case for viewing the current world as late stage disaster statism, with Trump and the MAGA movement an attempt to reverse that back toward a more voluntaryist set of social relations.
There's a lot to unpack here, but it's interesting enough (to me, anyway) to warrant a detailed response for anyone who might be reading.
First off, Marx never claimed pre-capitalist societies were sexual utopias. In fact, he specifically analyzed slavery, serfdom, and yes, even "harems" as structures rooted in earlier modes of production (see, e.g., https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch31.htm). What Marx was examining was how capitalism transformed these older forms of exploitation. He wrote extensively about the "extirpation, enslavement and entombment in mines of the aboriginal population" and the "looting of the East Indies" including forced concubinage as part of what kicked off capitalism's development.
About Marx's personal life: the reality is that three of his seven children died of common 19th-century illnesses during years of exile and poverty. Engels paid their rent because Marx's intellectual work wasn't valued in the economic system he was critiquing. You can criticize many aspects of Marx's personal life, but suggesting he "commodified his children" isn't historically accurate. He was almost certainly a bum, an asshole, and an unlikeable person, though.
Regarding this idea of "disaster statism"...Naomi Klein, whose recent work hasn't been very good at all, used "disaster capitalism" to describe how governments and investors exploit crises (wars, hurricanes, economic collapses) to push through deregulation that would face resistance in normal times. More recent scholarship has reframed this as "disaster statism," noting that states themselves orchestrate these post-crisis windfalls. In any event, this process transcends partisan politics.
Take the Trump-1 administration's policies. The Opportunity Zones created in the 2017 tax bill quickly became subsidies for politically-connected real estate billionaires. The CARES Act directed billions to large corporations (including fossil fuel companies) while small business support lagged (though some mid-size operations did expand domestic production, a fact I had to cover in what was then my day job and wrote about in a previous article). And of course the odd back-and-forth market swings of Trump-2, tied to tariff talks, certainly raise the specter of insider trading (as does, of course, whatever the Biden family had cooking over in Ukraine with regard to Hunter B's fascinating career as an "energy exeucutive"...they're all crooks, which is totally understandable because most of us humanzees would be if we were in proxmity to the "god almighty dollar").
Democratic administrations have deployed similar tools. The Biden administration fast-tracked LNG exports, and Democrats co-authored the aforementioned CARES Act. For me, at least, this isn't a partisan issue: it's "always already" a structural problem where crisis legislation reliably benefits entrenched capital regardless of which party holds power.
About Epstein...there are indeed multiple credible sources pointing to intelligence connections. Virginia Giuffre (an Epstein survivor) has circulated speculation about his "spy" operations. Newsweek reported on missing surveillance tapes and quoted ex-CIA officers suggesting a blackmail archive. Vanity Fair's Vicky Ward reported rumors of Epstein claiming to work for "CIA-type people." And former Israeli intelligence officer Ari Ben-Menashe told 60 Minutes Australia about ties between Epstein, Maxwell, and Israeli military intelligence (very likely, it seems).
These theories vary in details, but they share a common logic: Epstein collected compromising material on global elites, intelligence services trade in leverage, so intelligence links seem plausible (though unproven). Your skepticism about corporate espionage being the whole story makes sense, though state and parastate interests often collaborate in these elite surveillance operations and it's hard to tell where one ends and the other begins (perhaps Mossad has access to an answer like this).
I think the core issue isn't whether capitalism invented exploitation (it didn't), but how our current political-economic system refines and supercharges very old hierarchies as we chug toward who knows what kind of future. I'd lay -1000 odds that nobody on any political patronage team is coming to save any of us, but what do I know? I'm just a former academic turned private-sector content/research person who asks people for money on Substack (many such cases; some, I think, are even) and periodically rolls out the ol' grad school reading list when putting old wine in new bottles.
Thank you for the reply, almost every stitch of I would contest if I had the interest and time to do it now.
Two things:
First: Actually the funny “labor” Marx engaged in has only ever been valued in two places: Western academia, which curiously could be viewed as by capitalism, the economic system he was criticizing. Harvard’s endowment funds the only people who have ever been persuaded Marxism was true or relevant. Of course academia is also now state funded and functions as a priesthood to protect the state with mystical tales about how the state helps poor people, or racial minorities, etc. or protects health and safety, or dispenses life saving vaccines, or makes food healthier or safer.
Second: yes slavery clearly existed in “pre-capitalist” times, biblical, Homeric etc. Capitalist societies actually eradicated it. Communist/socialist/Soviet societies still had slavery. Only with the pretzel shaped anti-concept of “wage slavery” can one begin to associate slavery with capitalism. In Soviet or Maoist countries human beings were clearly treated as “commodities” as informers, conscripts, firing line victims, traded if not always for money then for power. Slavery continues to exist in Africa, even though African kings can no longer sell their delinquent taxpayers and other opponents to plantations in other countries.
Much of what seems like slavery in mixed economies is the result of government grants of monopoly, government inflationism that reduces wages while raising asset prices, and taxation, forcing both parents to work etc.
Incidentally, Marx’s class analysis is a bizarro world version of libertarian class analysis, which he plagiarized https://www.libertarianism.org/articles/libertarian-class-analysis#
It’s funny how if you read Marxist academics they frequently say Marx was completely mistaken about the area in which they have expertise, e.g. economist Joan Robinson or economic historian Gabriel Kolko saying his understanding of monopoly, economics in general, and economic history was all wrong, while Marxist philosophers etc. say he did not understand ethics or epistemology but his economics was good. And they all like him for his sense of outrage and his licensing of virtue signaling.
I think the real economic analysis of Marx would be that having invested time in memorizing his system or larping, his shell game, his catechism, those having made this investment feel that they must use it, or admit that they wasted their time and money.
It’s funny how if you read Marxist academics they frequently say Marx was completely mistaken about the area in which they have expertise, e.g. economist Joan Robinson or economic historian Gabriel Kolko saying his understanding of monopoly, economics in general, and economic history was all wrong, while Marxist philosophers etc. say he did not understand ethics or epistemology but his economics was good. And they all like him for his sense of outrage and his licensing of virtue signaling.
I think the real economic analysis of Marx would be that having invested time in memorizing his system or larping, his shell game, his catechism, those having made this investment feel that they must use it, or admit that they wasted their time and money.
I appreciate the double-header response after declaring you lacked "the interest and time"! That's actually quite generous, and it gives me plenty to work with as far as supplying anyone still following this with links to articles, books, etc. (which is what these essays and articles are primarily intended to do...they can read it themselves).
As far as Marx plagiarizing libertarian class analysis, you're absolutely right that he acknowledged his debt to earlier theorists. In his March 5, 1852 letter to Joseph Weydemeyer (https://wikirouge.net/texts/en/Letter_to_Joseph_Weydemeyer,_March_5,_1852), Marx wrote: "Now as for myself, I do not claim to have discovered either the existence of classes in modern society or the struggle between them. Long before me, bourgeois historians had described the historical development of this struggle between the classes, as had bourgeois economists their economic anatomy."
The French liberal theorists Charles Comte, Charles Dunoyer, and Augustin Thierry developed a class analysis in the 1810s-1820s that distinguished between the "industrious" productive classes (including both workers and capitalists) and the parasitic political classes who lived off taxation. Marx drew on this tradition, though he transformed it by focusing on economic production rather than political predation, though I do personally think the latter (because of various behavioral/evolutionary/etc.) impulses cannot be undervalued. Libertarianism.org has great stuff on all these thinkers for readers who might be following this for some godforsaken reason (https://www.libertarianism.org/articles/libertarian-class-analysis).
Now, in re Joan Robinson...as I understand it from dipping a toe into this +/-15 years ago, her 1942 "An Essay on Marxian Economics" was actually aimed at making Marx's economics intelligible to academic colleagues, not dismissing it wholesale. As Carolina Alves notes (https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/jep.36.2.247), Robinson relied on Marxian insights to escape Marshallian orthodoxy and the book was intended to lay the foundations of her enduring challenge to orthodox economics. She was critical of some aspects while appreciating others, but I wouldn't say that's the wholesale rejection you suggest.
I think Kolko was brilliant: he argued that businessmen favored government regulation because they feared competition and desired to forge a government–business coalition, a thesis about "political capitalism" that libertarians like Murray Rothbard (as an opponent of compulsory schooling, I think MR nailed it here: https://www.libertarianism.org/publications/essays/twelve-year-sentence-historical-origins-compulsory-schooling) smartly embraced. But as I understand it, he wasn't saying Marx didn't understand monopoly per se; he was arguing that monopoly power came through state intervention, not market forces (readers can gather that from this review of Kolko's big book (https://libcom.org/article/gabriel-kolkos-triumph-conservatism-reinterpretation-american-history-1900-1916) or the text itself (https://annas-archive.org/md5/d372f96548cfa734897fd7d95d5d8556) (Richard Hofstader (in The Age of Reform) and Robert Wiebe (in The Search for Order, https://annas-archive.org/md5/d372f96548cfa734897fd7d95d5d8556) offer slightly different takes - Hofstadter sees the progressives as incipient capitalists but the New Dealers as revolutionaries, a weird bit of presentism re the latter; Wiebe does provide good info on how the "experts" essentially "de-localized" society in a way ultimately favorable to business) but it's possible to try to square that circle, at least if one is writing one's comprehensive exams around all of that and Kolko is more or less correct).
Your claim about capitalism eradicating slavery while communist societies maintained it needs serious qualification (Seymour Drescher, one of my profs at Pitt and the author of Econocide, would certainly argue the former, but I still think Eric Williams' thesis, abetted by new post-Time on the Cross works like And the Half Was Never Told, is still the stronger: capitalist nations could abolish slavery where better solutions existed, and in the case of the U.S. Civil War, the South was right to cling to the Peculiar Institution because it had seen better returns on slave work from 1830-1860 just due to export price fluctuations and slightly improved labor practices, with nascent industrialization using slaves around Richmond (Tredegar), etc. ... that said, the North was equally right to want to move past it, because "free labor" was simply more flexible and easily discarded for mass-production purposes).
The Soviet Union did indeed use forced labor extensively, as estimates suggest 10 to 11 million people (the real numbers ar eprobably higher) were transported to North European Russia, Siberia, and Central Asia, where a third went into concentration camps under Stalin. Contemporary China (https://www.americafirstpolicy.com/issues/modern-day-slavery-chinas-persecution-economy-of-forced-labor) continues to use forced labor, particularly targeting Uyghurs and other minorities (but is this not peak capitalism? they're making Nike shoes and so on while homogenizing the national population; I've seen strange, positive readings of this by both Marxists and libertarians over the years, though Arora and Stephens' paper here is fairly interesting re the salutary impact of capitalism on currently-existing slavery: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/00076503211066589). Either way, these are undeniable atrocities.
But the relationship between capitalism and abolition is complex. Slavery in America, Brazil, and Cuba relied on capitalist markets, which supplied credit and demand for slave-made goods. In Brazil, the abolitionist movement could not embrace the principal forces of capitalist advance because the latter were implicated in the slave system (Robin Blackburn's work on the second slavery here, summarized in Jacobin but admittedly fairly well, captures all of that complexity: https://jacobin.com/2024/05/slavery-capitalism-abolition-the-reckoning-blackburn-review/). The story isn't capitalism good, socialism bad: it's about how power structures in any system always already enable exploitation.
Finally, on the sunk cost fallacy argument about Marxist academics...you might have a point about some individuals, but it cuts both ways (I certainly don't and can't identify as one; I merely use everything from the ol' comps list + my current annotated readings, mixing in what suits the current project and ensuring anyone reading it has a link to the source himself so that he can read the material if there's a dispute over some point ("being right" doesn't = agreeing with someone, after all)...but I also work a day job in the corporate world, producing research that serves specific market-oriented ends, so it's all content to me in this regard).
Either way, how many liberals and libertarians have invested so much in their knee-jerk anti-Marx stance that they can't acknowledge when he got something right (which I'd say primarily centers more around aspects of human behavior related to increasingly concentrated power than the niceties of theory that indeed shouldn't be regarded as dogma but often are)? Personally, I'd prefer not to use him (Althusser on, say, The Reproduction of Capitalism is much better, much more readable and easy to incorporate) but some of that work fit what I was doing here, so there it is.
In saying I wasn’t going to invest time in replying I didn’t mean I wasn’t interested in the issue. I meant reading every Marxist from Marcuse to Adorno along with Marx himself to engage in a point by point discussion of capitalism and socialism attending to what Marxists have said isn’t something I can make time for. From what I have read, I think anyone doing that (whether anti-Marx or especially pro-Marx) would be better off putting their time and energy elsewhere, including even Emma Goldman or Proudhon. I think all of his constructs, from the labor theory of value on, are not rooted in reality. How much he (and they) just kept going because of sunk costs in his (and their) investment, how much their enthusiasm blinds them to critics, and how much it is a kind of con artistry would require the investigation I don’t think is a good investment of time, except for perhaps some very unusually situated person. For example I would think one could read and re-write your essay considering whatever issues were raised and analyzing them without the Marxism, and in your case I might have an initial inclination to do so because we write for one website in common and I often like your pieces at Unherd etc. But I have too many things to do to get involved with Marxists, unless they had a waxing instead of a waning influence.
A more interesting topic would be why Marxism as a movement had to dissolve itself into polylogism and identity politics to get traction in the modern world, mutating into black supremacism, gender theory, Islamic/Palestinian terrorism, etc.
I agree that that last point is the topic, so much that Walter Benn Michaels and others have had to write books saying “let’s stop doing this” (the weakness of the class-first WBM book, in my opinion, is that he gives insufficient space, as you note, to why that is case). In fact, that is pretty much the only “leftist” topic I address privately these days when talking to a good friend who works in a field very much overrun with that very thing.
And yes, that's a good point about my external work. At UH (and elsewhere) I quite deliberately leave this material out of there because there are far better ways to approach most of those subjects (especially the sort of intra-right/intra-left feuding I cover for UH).
I’m glad to see you critique the harridan and hypocrite Naomi Klein.
The thesis of her book ‘The Shock Doctrine’ was that capital/corporations, with assistance from the state, swooped in during and after a disaster and re-wrote all the rules, removed problematic populations from certain areas, sucked up resources, you name it. I believe her thesis was sound.
She then blew her credibility out of the water by actively cheering on the disaster capitalism/disaster statism of the Covid Regime, and likewise she actively supports the use of the supposed ‘Climate Crisis’ to do the same.
She’s a very unsympathetic character and perhaps there is a Gulag Island we could send her and the rest of the Covid Authoritarians to, forever.
Yeah, her work after that has just not been good, but The Shock Doctrine and No Logo were interesting books at the time
She took a good photo. This may be very important in publishing, as it is in news anchoring, and maybe electoral politics. And as Trump critics have claimed, presidential appointments.
Very important. Kristi Noem did a lot of work on her face prior to her appointment. Naomi Klein has cycled out of view to an extent and should consider doing the same. Bee sting lips at least