One of my frustrations with contemporary Marxist philosophy is the way in which the word ‘dialectical’ is often employed like a magical wand to sanctify various relational phenomena. Such vague employment is reflected in radical theory adjacent to Marxism as well where theorists pepper their work with the term ‘dialectical relationship’. Why such relationships are precisely dialectical is usually never explained, nor is the precise meaning of dialectical reason. This leaves me with the impression that dialectical and relational are taken to be synonymous––that the term ‘dialectical relationship’ is a tautology. In this context, Torkil Lauesen’s The Principal Contradiction is something of a breath of fresh air since it is concerned with centering and demystifying dialectical reason and, specifically, its iteration as dialectical materialism.
What makes The Principal Contradiction refreshing is that it partially resembles the kind of text that would be produced by a revolutionary study group. Indeed, it was inspired by Lauesen’s past participation in such a study group when he was ‘a member of Denmark’s Communist Working Circle’ (7) which would eventually lead to his own revolutionary activity––as a part of the so-called ‘Blekingegade Group’––and thus his eventual incarceration. Hence, due to the author’s past as a revolutionary and political prisoner, the book is driven by the sensibility that ‘[d]ialectical materialism is a philosophy, but not just for intellectual pleasure in ivory towers.” Rather, dialectical materialism is “a tool for changing the world.’ (7) The lucidity of the text is largely due to Lauesen’s correct conviction that the dialectical reason of Marxism has to do with revolutionary transformation.
Furthermore, although his book is grounded in a classical anti-revisionist Marxist conception of materialist dialectics (Marx, Engels, Lenin, and Mao), Lauesen also utilizes thinkers such as Foucault in a creative manner to shed light on his object of critique. Although such utilization occasionally feels forced, it demonstrates the author’s desire to explicate how his grounding in the classical conception of dialectical materialism is not an artifact of the past but a living philosophical perspective that can incorporate other philosophies and perspectives into its framework.
For Lauesen, the kernel of dialectical reason is contradiction (the unity of opposites), and how dialectical materialism is a theory of contradictions that not only treats the material ground of existence as primary (27) but also concerns social totality. In this sense, he grasps how the dialectical materialist perspective is concerned with the science of revolution rather than an ur-science (32) based on the Marxist axiom that history is the history of class struggle. He is also careful to delineate the dialectical conception of contradiction from the analytical conception, avoiding those pitfalls that analytic philosophers have used to dismiss dialectical reason. For example,
“that capitalism is contradictory does not mean that the productive forces and the relations of production [along with other contradictions Lauesen discusses] stand in any logical [in the formal logic sense] contradiction to one another; it means that the social character of the productive forces and the private character of the relations of production together form a whole with contradictory aspects.” (37)
Using the last great classical Marxist treatise on dialectical materialism (Mao’s On Contradiction) as a framework, Lauesen’s conception of social contradictions is refracted through the insights that: i) internal/interior contradictions are the basis for change, but are influenced by external/exterior contradictions (i.e. only a chicken can be hatched from a chicken egg, but the hatching can only come about through specific exterior aspects); ii) that the general contradictions of a social formation (specifically capitalism) are always concretely embedded in particular contradictions (i.e. the way in which the contradiction between bourgeois-proletariat plays out in a semi-feudal/semi-colonial society, in a struggle for national self-determination, or etc. is affected by the particular situation). In order to grasp this interplay of contradictions it is also necessary to understand what Mao called the principal contradiction which, as the name of the book indicates, is Lauesen’s thematic concern. The principal contradiction, for both Mao and Lauesen, is that contradiction that plays a ‘leading and decisive role’ (45) in that, at particular historical conjunctures, it ‘affects all others.’ (44) Principal contradictions emerge from the interplay between general and particular contradictions and grasping them, through social investigation and the tools of dialectical materialism, allow us to understand the meaning of a given historical conjuncture. For example, in a context of settler-colonialism the contradiction between colonizer-colonized is the principal contradiction through which class struggle is refracted. To concentrate on the abstractly general contradiction of bourgeois-proletariat in a social context where these categories are disarticulated by colonial predation would in fact be a betrayal of class struggle and, as history as taught us, does nothing to liberate the oppressed masses. The overall point, then, is ‘[i]f we simply copy our analysis of one country or time and apply it to another, we convolute their respective particular contradictions. This leads to dogmatism.’ (48)
This notion of the principal contradiction serves as a method to think the totality of contradictions. Early on, Lauesen makes some interesting points about how the contradictions of warfare and catastrophe function as principal contradictions. The former––a contradiction between different warring factions as an expression of the always existing civil war between classes––is an area he holds to be underdeveloped in classic Marxist literature (56) until, possibly, Mao’s interventions. In the latter, being the contradiction between civilization and barbarism, Lauesen sees the looming threat of environmental degradation and even pandemics such as COVID-19. (63) It is here that Lauesen moves from the textbook analysis of dialectical materialism to the application of his conception of the principal contradiction to the global perspective.
Since, for most of existence, there was only ‘sporadic contact’ (68) between some nations, and no contact between most nations, to conceive of principal contradictions from the global perspective would only make sense with the rise of the capitalist world system since such a system is ‘one process.’ (67) Hence, Lauesen begins his analysis of global principal contradictions following 1492, the mercantile and colonial ‘beginning of this process.’ (69) The book charts the development of an interrelated world history from this moment, zooming in on conjunctural periods and the contradictions that defined these periods. We are thus treated to an exhilarating history of the contradictions between imperialist powers, between capitalist crisis and the state, between the capitalist and socialist blocs, between imperialism and the oppressed masses, and a variety of other key moments in the history of modernity to the present. Moreover, the way in which Lauesen tries to think the interaction between a variety of contradictions through the lens of a conjunctural and global principal contradiction is quite invigorating. By the time he reaches the rise of neoliberalism, the resurgence of the state (along with nationalism and national rivalry), and even the emergence of the current pandemic as part of capitalist crisis (119), we are left with the impression that ‘we need to develop an adequate strategy.’ (122)
The final and smallest section of the book attempts to sketch out the general contours of this strategy. However, this section largely functions as self-criticism for the failed strategy of the proto Third Worldism Lauesen and his comrades once embarked upon. Hence, the final chapter is more of a warning about the failing to think strategically than a handbook for organizational or military strategy. This negative critique, however, is wagered so that readers can understand that ‘we need to be prepared; we need to have the right organizations and practices.’ (125) What these correct organizations and practices are, however, is something Lauesen remains largely agnostic about (though the canny reader can guess what he forecloses), but it is clear he believes that the toolbox of dialectical materialism, as he has described it, will help others answer, through theory and practice, the questions he has raised.
When I reflect on these questions, however, one general criticism I have is the way in which the categories of historical materialism and dialectical materialism have been conflated. While it is indeed the case that this categorical distinction has also been doctrinaire and has thus resulted in a kind of scholasticism amongst various Soviet philosophers, I have always been of the mind that a distinction between science and philosophy––between historical materialism and dialectical materialism––is a useful rubric in thinking Marxism as a totality. To collapse these categories is to make the scientific apprehension of class struggle synonymous with philosophy, possibly promoting the notion that philosophy is the same as science, which is something I feel should be avoided. But this criticism is admittedly technical; it is possibly scholastic.
My larger criticism is the way in which Lauesen binds the apprehension of the principal contradiction to his conception of the global perspective. If ‘inner contradictions are the basis for… change’ (33) then concentrating on principal contradictions of the global system as being decisive, as the second half of the book seems to imply, would seem to elevate exterior contradictions above those of given social formations. While it is the case that these exterior contradictions are ‘crucial for the direction… development takes’ (33), referring to them as the principal contradictions would seem to be inconsistent––unless there are both interior and exterior principal contradictions. If this was what the author intended, it could have been both clarified and elaborated further. Such a slippage of categories, similar to my above concern about the conflation of science and philosophy, hampers an otherwise lucid primer on dialectical materialism. Paradigmatic of this slippage is Lauesen’s claim that, on the one hand, capitalism was generated by colonial conquest (70) and, on the other hand, ‘colonialism was a consequence of the contradictions in European capitalism.’ (74) Here there appears to be an outright formal contradiction, rather than a dialectical one, although it could be better thought as a dialectical contradiction, i.e. one form of colonialism that caused capitalism being transformed into another that was the consequence of capitalism, so that colonialism is simultaneously cause and consequence. In general, I got the sense that Lauesen plays a bit fast and loose with certain categories, undermining the overall clarity of his work. But, if we look at how much Lauesen is trying to pack into this relatively short work, it is not difficult to extend the principle of charity and overlook some of these problems.
Indeed, as one of the subheadings in the last section proclaims: It’s Not Simple. Thinking both dialectically and materially about historical conjunctures, especially as organizers interested in changing the world, demands more than formulaic repetition and phrase-mongering. ‘We cannot simply copy analyses and strategies from one time and place,’ writes Lauesen, ‘and simply apply them mechanically to other situations.’ (133) The Principal Contradiction, despite these flaws, demonstrates that the practice of dialectical materialism can and should be a creative endeavour, but one grounded in a concern for concrete circumstances, and we need more work with the same perspective.
Friedrich Engels, born 200 years ago on November 28, 1820, has been termed the ‘first Marxist’ in some commentaries and histories from the nineteenth century on, and with good reason.
In 1883, still deeply affected by his friend’s death, Friedrich Engels went through stacks of letters, manuscripts, and notes that had been left unfinished at Marx’s house on London’s Maitland Park Road. Among the papers, he found a series of notes on the work of U.S. anthropologist Lewis Henry Morgan, whose last book, Ancient Society, had been published a few years earlier. The two friends had had several exchanges on the topic, and Engels was excited to organize some ideas. On the basis of Marx’s ethnological notes, Engels developed a historical and materialist analysis of social organizations, specifically related to changes in forms of kinship, the patriarchal family, the institution of marriage, and monogamy. His book, The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State was published in 1884 and has since been considered essential reading for socialist feminists.
I return to this book later, to point out some of its fundamental contributions as well as some of the controversies it continues to generate. But first it is necessary to consider the general context in which Marx and Engels’ first formulations on the emancipation of women emerged.
Engels wrote about the dual oppression experienced by working women for the first time in The Condition of the Working Class in England, a book published in 1845. It provides readers with a first-hand view of the life of the English working class, their working conditions, the overcrowding they experienced in the cities, and their great hardships, which he viewed as a foundation for the emergence of various socialist movements, from utopian socialism to communism. Engels was 24 years old at the time and, as he explains in the introduction to the 1892 German edition, the perspective of scientific socialism he would later develop on the basis of his collaboration with Marx was only in its initial stages in that work.
The book’s beginning is a wonderful visual metaphor for capitalist society. Engels describes the shock one experiences upon entering London, traveling up the Thames. The traveler is captivated by the extraordinary urban development, the number of buildings, the ships, all the signs of a thriving civilization. However, as one gets off and walks down the narrow streets that lead to the “slums,” one begins to understand that:
These Londoners have been forced to sacrifice the best qualities of their human nature, to bring to pass all the marvels of civilization which crowd their city; that a hundred powers which slumbered within them have remained inactive, have been suppressed in order that a few might be developed more fully and multiply through union with those of others.1
Engels thus refers to the brutal inequalities created by capitalism, where “all the marvels of civilization” are achieved by crushing a large part of that society — the part that has nothing, the proletariat. Engels’ gaze penetrates even further into working-class neighborhoods, revealing dirty, narrow streets, unheated homes, and food shortages. He then refers in particular to female workers, who were the majority in the textile industry. They worked 10- or 12-hour days, like their male counterparts, but received lower wages. In times of crisis, they were the first to be laid off. And when they returned to their homes, they had to take care of the cooking, cleaning, and childcare. Although Engels does not develop a theory about the role of working-class women in capitalist society in this book, he repeatedly highlights a social phenomenon that affects women in particular. The capitalist social order, in his view, leads to the disintegration of the working-class family, rendering the conditions for its existence impossible:
Thus the social order makes family life almost impossible for the worker. In a comfortless, filthy house, hardly good enough for mere nightly shelter, ill-furnished, often neither rain-tight nor warm, a foul atmosphere filling rooms overcrowded with human beings, no domestic comfort is possible. The husband works the whole day through, perhaps the wife also and the elder children, all in different places; they meet night and morning only, all under perpetual temptation to drink; what family life is possible under such conditions? Yet the working-man cannot escape from the family, must live in the family, and the consequence is a perpetual succession of family troubles, domestic quarrels, most demoralizing for parents and children alike.2
Women between ages 15 and 20 worked in the textile factories, as did large numbers of children. Engels points out that, many times, women workers after giving birth “return to the mill three or four days after confinement” and during their rest hours they run home from work to feed their newborns. While they spend 12 or 13 hours at the mills, the children are left in the care of a relative or a neighbor, or they wander around barefoot. In addition, sexual abuse was rampant in workplaces. According to Engels, “factory servitude, like any other, and to an even higher degree, confers the jus primae noctis [the lord’s right] upon the master. In this respect also the employer is sovereign over the persons and charms of his employees.”3
For this reason, Engels insisted that “the employment of the wife dissolves the family utterly and of necessity, and this dissolution, in our present society, which is based upon the family, brings the most demoralizing consequences for parents as well as children.”4 Today’s society is based on the family, but at the same time breaks it apart; it makes the conditions for its existence impossible. This explosive contradiction has a profound impact on the conditions in which working women and the entire working class live and struggle. This idea, still undeveloped, would be taken up later by Marx and Engels.
Both would return to this question, offering some definitions on the need to fight for the emancipation of women, an analysis of the historical origins of oppression and a radical critique of the patriarchal family. In The Holy Family, they take up the ideas of utopian socialist Fourier, who argues that “social progress and changes of period are brought about by virtue of the progress of women toward liberty, and social retrogression occurs as a result of a diminution in the liberty of women.” Many utopian socialists had addressed the oppression of women previously, proposing alternatives on how to overcome it. This tradition had considered matters such as the need to socialize housework, end monogamy, and develop free love, as well as the need to reorganize the architecture of single-family homes, drawing plans of small communitarian societies. These outlines, made by pre-scientific socialists, were quite vague. They did not clearly state how to meet those objectives, or by what social force they could be achieved. The experiences of the Owenite communities in the United States failed to prosper, although, as Engels pointed out in a later book, with Owen’s writings, utopian socialists sowed the first seeds of a future communist society.5
The work of Flora Tristán, a pioneer of socialist feminism, was midway between utopian socialism and scientific socialism. In her book The Workers’ Union (1843), she outlined a proposal for the social and political organization of the working class and, for the first time, addressed the relationship between class and gender. The third chapter of the book was devoted entirely to women, who she referred to as “the last slaves” of French society. Her book called upon workers to consider this question and noted that it is impossible to sustain a project of human emancipation without taking women into account.6
In The Communist Manifesto, Marx and Engels reassert the idea that capitalism tends to destroy traditional family ties in the working class by incorporating masses of women and children into the workplace, exploiting all members of the working family equally. But at the same time, they denounce the “double standard” of the bourgeoisie: while they accused communists of wanting to establish the “community of women,” it was they who actually practiced it through adultery (which was socially acceptable only for men) or through prostitution, regarding women as their property.
Lastly, although in Capital there are several references to women’s labor, both in terms of the composition of the industrial reserve army of labor as well as of the brutal exploitation of women’s and children’s labor, the most systematic analysis of the family institution and the causes of women’s oppression would be developed by Engels, as mentioned above, in The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State.
The Family, Women’s Labor, and Communism
The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State continues to be an essential work, despite that Morgan’s studies are now outdated or because of the book’s somewhat schematic view of historical periods. It remains essential, first of all, because it points to the historical origins of women’s oppression, demonstrating that it did not always exist and that it is not natural but rather, is historical and social. In this regard, Engels also engaged in a debate on the work of other socialist theorists, such as Bebel.7 and Kautsky, who had published writings on the subject shortly before and had argued that women’s subordination could be traced to the beginning of human societies, as if it had always existed. Engels did not believe this to be the case; instead, he believed there had been primitive societies that were more egalitarian and even societies based on maternal law, and he sought to highlight this historicity.
Engels established a connection between the emergence of private property, society’s class divisions, and the crystallization of a family institution in which women played a subordinate role. Through the establishment of marriage and monogamy, women and children became “the private property of man.” In this regard, he states:
The man took command in the home also; the woman was degraded and reduced to servitude, she became the slave of his lust and a mere instrument for the production of children. … In order to make certain of the wife’s fidelity and therefore of the paternity of the children, she is delivered over unconditionally into the power of the husband; if he kills her, he is only exercising his rights.8
In addition, in the preface to the first edition, there is an important passage in which he highlights the relationship between production and reproduction, as the central point from which to consider the question of the family and the role of women in society.
According to the materialistic conception, the determining factor in history is, in the final instance, the production and reproduction of the immediate essentials of life. This, again, is of a twofold character. On the one side, the production of the means of existence, of articles of food and clothing, dwellings, and of the tools necessary for that production; on the other side, the production of human beings themselves, the propagation of the species. The social organization under which the people of a particular historical epoch and a particular country live is determined by both kinds of production: by the stage of development of labor on the one hand and of the family on the other.9
This passage has been cited many times, and also questioned from different theoretical positions. While Engels was still alive, there was a debate between those who defended the struggle for women’s emancipation as a fundamental part of the socialist program and some more conservative sectors within social democratic parties unwilling to accept it. In October 1886, for example, during the Congress of the Social Democratic Party of Germany in Gotha, Clara Zetkin made an important speech on the question of working women and socialism. She asserted that the struggle for the emancipation of women was linked to the struggle for socialism, and that it was thus essential to promote socialist agitation among women and their organization into unions. English socialist Belfort Bax, known for his misogynistic positions, harshly criticized the speech.10 In his arguments against Zetkin’s position, Bax attempted to appeal to Engel’s authority, citing his perspective on the matter.
Eleanor Marx, Karl Marx’s youngest daughter who was very close to Engels, publicly responded to Bax, reaffirming that Engels and Zetkin were in agreement in this regard. Her answer is also quite interesting because it highlights the issue of housework and the double burden borne by working women. She began by pointing out the numbers of working women in several European countries: about 4.5 million in England, 3.7 million in France, 3.5 in Italy, more than 5 million in Germany, and 3.5 million in Austria-Hungary — were more than 20 million women workers in the main European states, who in many cases were the main breadwinners for the elderly, children, or their unemployed husbands. She then referred to the fact that, although many tasks once done in homes had become social work in production, a large volume of work was still done privately in people’s homes. In relation to this controversy, she stated the following:
But besides this factory and other wage-labor the women have also to do their housekeeping work. I know that Belfort Bax or others of his opinion, can point out that the capitalist industrialism has freed the woman of many important functions which were once the duties of a housekeeping women; that she has not any more to knit socks, to sew linen, etc, for the home; and that other housekeeping functions of hers have decreased to a minimum; still, there is some housekeeping yet to do, such as cleaning, washing, cooking, &c. Capitalism has not yet invented housekeeping machinery, and has not at the same time “domesticated” the unemployed husband to such a degree as to make him take care of the house and children, and thus free his wife of a part of her burden. Yes, comrade Belfort Bax, Clara Zetkin had a full right to say, with Engels, that the woman is a “proletarian in the home.” She ought to have rather said that the woman, under our capitalist regime, is a double proletarian — she has two kinds of work to do, the work of a producer in the factory and the work of a housekeeper, wife, and mother in the home. On one hand her muscles and blood are spent for the immediate profit of the capitalist, and on the other for his future profit – in bearing and feeding up a new generation of proletarians. Toil there, toil here!
Eleanor Marx’s response, directly referencing Engels, was undoubtedly forceful. She and Clara Zetkin, as well as other socialist leaders, would subsequently focus on organizing working women and fighting for social and political rights for all women, while continuing to denounce the double burden of housework in the home. Decades later, the experience of the Russian Revolution would be a great social experience in this regard, which would make it possible to take some essential measures: the legalization of abortion and divorce, the recognition of children born out of wedlock, equal pay for women, and the establishment of nurseries, soup kitchens, child care centers and laundries, to take steps towards the socialization of housework. The subsequent regression in this area, particularly during the 1930s, took place in the context of an internal counterrevolution. While a repressive dictatorship was consolidating as a form of government, under Stalin’s leadership, the reactionary ideology according to which women were viewed as “guardians of the home” within the traditional family, began to regain ground. The later policy implemented by Communist Parties of “separating” women’s struggle as if it were a “secondary” issue with respect to the struggle of the working class did not arise from an original misconception of this matter in early Marxist texts, but rather from a conservative revision of Marxism aimed at justifying bureaucratic positions and an economistic interpretation of class issues.11
Patriarchy, Production and Reproduction
With second-wave feminism in the 1960s and 1970s, other debates regarding Engels’ book reemerged. On the one hand, radical feminist authors such as Shulamith Firestone and Kate Millett defended Engels’ contribution to denaturalizing the family institution and conceptualizing the oppression of women as a social phenomenon. At the same time, however, they criticized historical materialism in general as if it were a kind of “economism.” Shulamith Firestone, for example, goes so far as to propose that a new historical materialism needed to be developed on the basis of sexual class struggle.12 She criticizes an economistic version of Marxism, which she inverts by focusing on the question of sexuality. But by erasing or diminishing the importance of the material and economic phenomena of social relations, Firestone shifts towards an idealistic conception, according to which the possibility of change is limited to cultural movements. On this basis, separatist tendencies developed in the radical feminist movement in the years after that were opposed in a reactionary way to any common struggle between various oppressed sectors of society.
From a different perspective, the same paragraph quote above from “The Pairing Family” chapter of Engels’ The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State was criticized as a source of subsequent errors in that it separated, to an excessive degree, the sphere of production from that of the reproduction of life. This idea that Engels “dualistically” separated the sphere of production from the sphere of reproduction was put forward by the Marxist feminist Lise Vogel in her 1983 book Marxism and the Oppression of Women.13 This critique has been taken up more recently by various authors, such as Susan Ferguson, who develop what they define as a theory of social reproduction.14 In Ferguson’s view, although Engels’ text made fundamental contributions to socialist feminism, the perspective it offers led sectors of the Social Democratic and Communist parties later to argue that women’s “special” struggle could be separated from the struggle of the working class, or even that it needed to be “postponed” until after the revolution.
From my point of view, however, the oft-quoted passage from Engels does not posit such a separation. On the contrary, it establishes a relationship between both spheres and, as Ariane Díaz points out, this is “precisely what is novel about Engels’ analysis; he elevates the problem of the oppression of women to the theoretical level of social production, as part of the core concerns of Marxism.”15 However, it is important to point out that “understanding the relationship between reproduction and production — and highlighting the subordination of the former to the latter under capitalism — is essential for building a strategy of struggle” from a socialist feminist perspective.16
It is true that a more systematic Marxist theorization of housework done by women in the family emerged onlyin the context of second-wave feminist debates in the 1960s and 1970s, when different theoretical positions and political strategies were debated within the feminist movement. However, this does not mean that Marxists had not previously viewed this as an important issue, or that it was presumed that the fight against women’s oppression was limited to achieving democratic demands and a more egalitarian participation in the labor market so women could gain financial independence. Nothing could be further from the truth. These were fundamental issues, but so was the struggle for the socialization of housework, since women were also “proletarians in the home.” And all of these struggles were connected to a socialist strategy to bring an end to capitalism.
Engels himself put forth this perspective in an 1885 letter: “It is my conviction that real equality between men and women can come true only when the exploitation of either by capital has been abolished and private homework has been transformed into a public industry.”17
With regard to Engels’ legacy to socialist feminism, it is important to note that his sharp critique of the patriarchal family and the institution of marriage remains extremely powerful today. On the one hand, it is important given the growth of conservative and “familialist” positions that, in the context of the crisis of neoliberalism and capitalism, suggest that the role of the traditional (patriarchal) family must be uncritically revalidated. Engels reminds us that this institution is neither “natural” nor an “oasis” in the middle of the storm, but is based on economic dependence, permeated by hierarchical relationships, and reproduces social contradictions within it. Gender-based violence can hardly be understood beyond the scope of this patriarchal institution and the idea of the “ownership” of women by their husbands. At the same time, as mentioned above, capitalism degrades the living conditions of the working family — denying millions even the right to a home or a job — while maintaining it as one of the pillars of this society. This creates profound contradictions.
From Engels’ point of view, women will be able to overcome patriarchal oppression only when families and marriage cease to exist as units of compulsory economic dependence, when reproductive work is socialized, and even when “the care and education of the children becomes a public affair.”18 It should be noted that when Engels wrote those words, women still educated their children at home in much of the world; there was no universal public education or kindergarten. Only the women of the bourgeoisie could free themselves completely from part of their childcare work, through the poorly paid labor of working women. Beyond the historical differences, this continues to be a key issue, considering the decline in education and public health as a result of the policies implemented by capitalist governments that do not guarantee kindergartens or free nurseries during the first few months of children’s lives. More recently, we have seen the triple burden borne by many working women who need to help with their children’s virtual education during the pandemic.
Finally, Engels’ critique of the social mechanisms that regulate and impose restrictions on emotional and sexual relationships between human beings makes it possible to imagine a society in which these obstacles can be overcome. It allows us to envision a society in which personal relationships can be freed from the limitations imposed by a society governed by private property and the exploitation of a large part of humanity, so that love, sexuality, and friendship can be rebuilt on new foundations.
First published in Spanish on November 21 in Izquierda Diario in the Spanish State.
Engels, Socialism: Utopian and Scientific (1880). First published serially in the newspaper Vorwarts (Leipzig), the central organ of the Socialist Workers Party of Germany, from 1876 to 1878. First compilation as a book published in 1880 in a French translation by Paul Lafargue.
Bebel’s book Woman and Socialism was first printed clandestinely in Leipzig and was distributed illegally for several years, under the censorship of anti-socialist laws. By 1895, it had been reprinted 25 times in Germany and also published in English, French, Russian, Italian, Swedish, Danish, Polish, Flemish, Greek, Bulgarian, Romanian, Hungarian, and Czech. It clearly had a significant impact. After the publication of Engels’ book, Bebel reviewed his own work, incorporating Engels’ references to Morgan.
8.
↑
Engels, The Origins of the Family, Private Property, and the State, chap. II, “The Family,” part 3, “The Pairing Family.”
Some time later, in response to John Stuart Mill’s book The Subjection of Women (1869), Bax would write a book provocatively entitled The Legal Subjection of Men (1908) that contains all sorts of assertions against the women’s movement, maintaining that women are the ones who enjoy “privileges” in marriage.
Shulamith Firestone, The Dialectic of Sex: The Case for Feminist Revolution (New York: Morrow, 1970).
13.
↑
Lise Vogel, Marxism and the Oppression of Women: Toward a Unitary Theory (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1983).
14.
↑
Susan Ferguson, Women and Work: Feminism, Labour, and Social Reproduction (London: Pluto Press, 2019).
15.
↑
Ariane Díaz, “El marxismo y la opresión de la mujer” [Marxism and the Oppression of Women], Ideas de Izquierda, April 28, 2017). And by associating the oppression of women with social phenomena, production and reproduction, the question is released from any biological determination, which naturalizes the subjugation of women.
It is not my intention here to address the entire prolific debate on social reproduction, to which many new contributions have been made in the past few years. For a more detailed analysis of this topic, the reader may refer to several articles in the endnote.[[Andrea D’Atri and Celeste Murillo, “Nosotras, el proletariado” [We, the Proletariat], Ideas de Izquierda, July 22, 2018; Ariane Díaz, “Economía política de la reproducción social I: trabajo y capital” [Political Economy of Social Reproduction I: Labor and Capital], Contrapunt, July 14, 2019; Paula Varela, “¿Existe un feminismo socialista en la actualidad?: Apuntes sobre el movimiento de mujeres, la clase trabajadora y el marxismo hoy” [Is There a Socialist Feminism at Present?: Notes on the Women’s Movement, the Working Class, and Marxism Today], Theomai Journal 39, no. 1 (2019).
16.
↑
Josefina L. Martínez and Cynthia Luz Burgueño, Patriarcado y capitalismo. Feminismo, clase y diversidad [Patriarchy and Capitalism: Feminism, Class, and Diversity] (Tres Cantos, Spain: Akal, 2019).
Engels, The Origins of the Family, Private Property, and the State, chap. II, “The Family,” part 4, “The Monogamous Family.”
We need a new philosophy of the earth. Geological time used to refer to slow and gradual processes, but today we are watching land sink into the sea and forests transform into deserts. We can even see the creation of new geological strata made of plastic, chicken bones, and other waste that could remain in the fossil record for millennia or longer. Crafting a philosophy of geology that rewrites natural and human history from the broader perspective of movement, Thomas Nail provides a new materialist, kinetic ethics of the earth that speaks to this moment.
Climate change and other ecological disruptions challenge us to reconsider the deep history of minerals, atmosphere, plants, and animals and to take a more process-oriented perspective that sees humanity as part of the larger cosmic and terrestrial drama of mobility and flow. Building on his earlier work on the philosophy of movement, Nail argues that we should shift our biocentric emphasis from conservation to expenditure, flux, and planetary diversity. Theory of the Earth urges us to rethink our ethical relationship to one another, the planet, and the cosmos at large.
Joe Biden has won the 2020 US Presidential Election after narrowly defeating the sitting president Donald Trump. This victory comes at a tremendous cost: the defeat of an incipient counter-hegemonic movement which embryonically expressed demands for an alternative future to capitalism.
Even after the collective utterance of anger against police brutality and the nascent realization of the structural violence of capitalism, the electoral mechanisms of the American bourgeoisie state have been successful in thwarting the full-blown development of a distinctively socialist campaign.
Following the ideological mutilation of massive protests against an inherently exploitative system, Americans have been rewarded with Biden – a dyed-in-the-wool bourgeoisie politician who once opposed de-segregation, called on police to shoot Black Lives Matter demonstrators in the leg, rejected the smallest of concessions to the working class, vehemently supported imperialist wars and refused to commit to even the minimal reforms of the Green New Deal.
Reformism
The overwhelming de-activation of revolutionary militancy in USA can be traced to certain theoretico-practical problems relating to the formation of socialist strategy. These issues and impediments have been historically constituted as a result of continual errors regarding political premises and form a consistent backdrop against which progressive projects in America have taken place.
Among the multiple components which form the foundations for such an incorrect political paradigm, reformism is perhaps the most dominant, subordinating social struggles to its own theoretical dictates. At the most general level, reformism consists in a defeatist politics of uncritical surrender to the contingencies of existing conditions.
Instead of acting as a driving force of history and impinging centrally upon the processes of social change, reformism crafts a type of politics which is wholly driven by historical forces.
The concrete content and specificity of reformism comprises of the erasure of the strategic goal of socialism and the corresponding initiation of efforts to slightly tweak capitalism’s internal mechanisms.
These attempts at gradually re-calibrating capitalism are made through the adoption of a crass electoral politics which is theoretically uninformed and fails to learn from actual experience.
Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels had formulated the problem of reformism as that of “parliamentary cretinism”, a destructive form of political organization antithetical to the aims of a socialist revolution.
Engels defined parliamentary cretinism as “a disorder which penetrates its unfortunate victims with the solemn conviction that the whole world, its history and future, are governed and determined by a majority of votes in that particular representative body which has the honor to count them among its members, and that all and everything going on outside the walls of their house…is nothing compared to the incommensurable events hinging upon the important question, whatever it may be, just at that moment occupying the attention of their honorable House”. Similarly, Marx held that parliamentary cretinism was “that peculiar epidemic…which holds its victims spellbound in an imaginary world and robs them of all sense, all memory, and all understanding of the rough external world”.
Thus, the actuality of revolution organically integrates the ultimate goal of socialism into the planning of concrete action.
Reformism, therefore, is the fetishization of the institutions of bourgeoisie democracy, the dissociation of political practices from the changing correlation of forces in a specific conjuncture and the concomitant belief in a succession of gradual reforms, each posed as an end in itself.
The 2020 US Presidential Election can be regarded as a logical result of such a reformist policy which contributes directly to the electoral defanging of explosive class struggle. One of the maneuvers used to legitimize the flattening of class struggle into vacuous support for Biden has been the principle of “lesser of two evils”.
According to this principle, any vote for a non-Biden candidate will mean an automatic victory for Trump, portrayed as a true fascist capable of destroying America’s already hollow democracy. Correspondingly, every progressive American has to vote for Biden if he/she does not want the specter of Trump to return and halt the social development of the nation.
Considering the fact that an effervescent multi-racial rebellion took place in America just a few months before the election, it seems difficult to absorb the fact that progressives continued to preach the principle of the lesser of two evils.
One can locate the source of this continued support for a largely ineffective political view in the panorama of entrenched reformism in the US which failed to utilize the latent energy of extremely important protests and allowed them to peter out.
Before the protests occurred, reformist organizations in USA unconditionally espoused an explicitly reformist orientation which – instead of enfolding present-day politics in the wider goal of revolution – chose to adapt to the existing situation, thus abjuring socialist ideals and counter-productively allying with mainstream ideologies.
When protests broke out, these reformist organizations were at a loss to understand the socio-historic dynamics of a newly emergent revolutionary agency which foregrounded radical demands and took care of the interests of the future within the movement of the present.
Unable to successfully interact with the revolutionary potentialities of the massive rebellion, reformists reverted back to their trivial tactical objectives by peddling the lesser of two evils principle.
Through this “pragmatic” principle, reformists presented the election of Joe Biden as an unavoidable, all-powerful compulsion and tinged the revolutionary subjectivity of the working class with diluted reformist demands, each considered independently of the ultimate aim of socialism.
When political organizations failed to transform the experiences from the struggle into political tactics, the germinal class consciousness of the proletariat soon settled within the discursive region delimited by reformists. In this way, Biden’s path to victory was paved by the reformists who de-mobilized a rebellion to advance changes by appealing to the benevolence of a Biden presidency.
The Actuality of Revolution
From the 2020 US Election, it is evident that the Left need to construct a re-vitalized project of socialist hegemony which does not succumb to the blunders of reformism.
In contradistinction to reformism, the equally unacceptable and unfruitful position of abstract and maximalist revolutionism has been presented, creating an impasse for the further advancement of revolutionary struggle.
While these maximalist calls for revolution define themselves as “Marxist”, they falter when the need arrives to skillfully interweave theory with politico-practical contexts. Rather than concretizing, modifying and applying Marxism’s theoretical matrix to ever new and changing conjunctures of class struggle, abstract revolutionism dogmatizes and distorts its principles, subsequently conceiving socialism as an ideal form against which attempts to transcend capitalist society are to be measured.
Like reformism, it also avoids a direct contact with material conditions, rigidly overpowering the contextual specifities of shifting conditions with the universalism of theory. In other words, it can be termed as “mechanical idealism” which prioritizes theoretical principles over the concrete struggle for revolution.
To chart the future course of revolutionary politics, we need to revisit what Vladimir Lenin said when he talked about the nature of Marxism: “Absolutely hostile to all abstract formulas and to all doctrinaire recipes, Marxism demands an attentive attitude to the massstruggle in progress, which, as the movement develops, as the class consciousness of the masses grows, as economic and political crises become acute, continually gives rise to new and more varied methods of defence and attack…Under no circumstances does Marxism confine itself to the forms of struggle possible and in existence at a given moment only, recognising as it does that new forms of struggle, unknown to the participants of the given period, inevitablyarise as the given social situation changes.
In this respect Marxism learns, if we may so express it, from mass practice…To attempt to answer yes or no to the question whether any particular means of struggle should be used, without making a detailed examination of the concrete situation of the given movement at the given stage of its development, means completely to abandon Marxism.”
Taking into account what Lenin said, the Left has to construct a politics of praxis which learns from the masses i.e. a kind of politics which recognizes the fact that practice cannot proceed without theory and vice versa.
The two are constitutive of one another in a dialectical relationship: practice guided by a theory that will necessarily be rethought in light of the outcomes of this practice.
If we try to assimilate the lessons of present-day class struggle in the US and reciprocally influence the dynamics of that struggle, the relevance of Georg Lukács’ concept of the “actuality of revolution” will certainly stand out. With the help of this conceptual tool, the absence of socialism as a strategic goal can be filled with the presence of a strong and supple theoretical architecture.
As per Lukacs, “The theory of historical materialism…presupposes the universal actuality of the proletarian revolution. In this sense, as both the objective basis of the whole epoch and the key to an understanding of it, the proletarian revolution constitutes the living core of Marxism.” Thus, the actuality of revolution organically integrates the ultimate goal of socialism into the planning of concrete action. Lukacs derived the skeletal framework of his notion of the actuality of revolution from Lenin who had written in one of his articles: “only by constantly having the ‘ultimate aim’ in view, only by appraising every step of the ‘movement’ and every reform from the point of view of the general revolutionary struggle, is it possible to guard the movement against false steps and shameful mistakes”.
Elaborating on Lenin’s brief description of the significance of the “ultimate aim”, Lukacs stated in his book “Lenin: A Study on the Unity of his Thought”: “The actuality of the revolution provides the key-note of a whole epoch. Individual actions can only be considered revolutionary or counter-revolutionary when related to the central issue of revolution, which is only to be discovered by an accurate analysis of the socio-historic whole. The actuality of the revolution therefore implies study of each individual daily problem in concrete association with the socio-historic whole, as moments in the liberation of the proletariat. The development which Marxism thus underwent through Lenin consists merely – merely! – in its increasing grasp of the intimate, visible, and momentous connection between individual actions and general destiny – the revolutionary destiny of the whole working class. It merely means that every question of the day – precisely as a question of the day – at the same time became a fundamental problem of the revolution.”
Unlike the static process of historical change conceptualized by reformism which is decoupled from concrete conditions, the actuality of revolution frames historical processes as an undulating series of politico-economic situations which is pregnant with revolution and crisscrossed by the complex, uneven and contradictory logic of the class struggle. When different conjunctures are conceived like in this dynamic way, the proletarian party converts itself into a collective process of learning; works to increase the speed of the subaltern classes’ spontaneous gravitation towards socialism; weeds out the ideological influence of bourgeoisie institutions; and constantly learns from and crystallizes the practical experience of the oppressed people.
Since the perspective of the actuality of revolution dissolves revolution as a distant horizon and immerses it in the interstices of contemporary conditions, it is fully cognizant of the inevitable patchiness of social transformation and starts from the here-and-now of the proletariat’s consciousness. This means that transformational changes are realized through a set of intertwined intermediate objectives which make evident the necessity for the transition to socialism, prefigure it in certain concrete aspects, dislocate capitalist society through the political percolation of socialist ideals and themselves constitute an apprenticeship and experience of workers’ power. To put it in other words, the specific aspirations of the subaltern classes is articulated within the perspective of a common goal which contains them all and at the same time transcends them: the goal of a socialist society.
The concretization of some of the theoretical underpinnings of the actuality of revolution may be listed as follows: socialists must (a) work within the existing system to reveal its inherent limitations while winning such short-term concessions as may be possible and (b) develop a counter-hegemonic project that intrinsically connects short-term specific interests to the pursuit of a socialist system and justifies necessary short-term sacrifices in terms of the strategic goal. These programmatic objectives can serve to avoid the pitfalls of reformism, avoid super-imposing the abstract exigencies of a hermetically sealed theory on the terrain of concrete struggle and navigate through the rippled territories of revolutionary politics.
With the election of Biden as the President of America, the predominantly negative role played by reformism has been starkly shown. In the foreseeable future, the ideological role of reformism in moderating the content of spontaneous outbursts of anger will continue increasing as the economic base of capitalism assumes ever more grotesque forms.
Under the regime of monopoly-finance capitalism, income inequality has exponentially increased and humans have been increasingly reduced to the status of mere commodities, dispensable and endlessly exploitable.
As living conditions continue to deteriorate, the Left needs to adopt a new form of politico-organizational modality which is able to move the working class in the direction of socialism and allow its smoldering rage against capitalism to be realized in the form of a revolution.
The Relevance of Marxist Critique Geoffrey Wed, 11/04/2020 – 19:06
Today, two hundred years after his birth, Frederick Engels can be seen as one of the foundational ecological thinkers of modern times. Engels’s contributions to our understanding of the overall ecological problem remain indispensable, rooted in his own deep inquiries into nature’s universal metabolism. It is because of the very comprehensiveness of his approach to the dialectic of nature and society that Engels’s work can help clarify the momentous challenges facing humanity in the Anthropocene epoch and the current age of planetary ecological crisis. | more…
This article will be released in full online November 2, 2020.
In grasping emergent qualities and laws on various levels of organization of matter, dialectical theory employs its own conceptual structure, scientific language, and investigation method, and takes a categorially open-ended shape. In this context, Engels provides a remarkable illustration that not only argues for the interconnection and interpenetration of distinct spheres such as chemistry and biology, but also draws on a generative feature of self-organizing systems. | more…
And she has done so using modern examples that help the reader to understand why Marxist political economy is so clinical in its analysis of the reality of modern capitalist economies. I would say nobody has done it better – and I ought to know because I have tried to do such in the past, but with nowhere near Thier’s success.
I think part of the reason for Thier’s achievement is that she is an activist in the labour movement and not an academic economist. In my experience, academic Marxist economists are usually lacking in ability to explain clearly Marxist political economic ideas to others. Thier refers to her own experience: “when I first picked up a book on economics, I made it about two pages in before I broke down in tears, feeling hopeless that I could ever understand economics. The capitalist system in general, and economics in particular, are purposefully mystified. Analyzing how capitalism works is left to “the experts,” and if things look a little askew to you, well, that must be because you don’t know any better. This is doubly and triply so for working-class people, women, people of color, and other oppressed constituencies who are daily barraged with the message that we cannot hope to comprehend complex systems and ideas, let alone hope to impact.”
So Thier sets out to turn this round: “I do my best to offer enough concrete examples and jargon-free descriptions to clarify the points, which will help you keep climbing with minimal huffing and puffing.” She succeeds admirably. This book is aptly named A People’s Guide to Capitalism.
Thier says that her book “aims to follow the content and arc of Marx’s Capital. Capital’s three volumes were written to provide a theoretical arsenal to a workers’ movement for the revolutionary overthrow of the system—and to do so on the most scientific foundation possible.” But Thier rightly starts with the history of the emergence of capitalism before moving onto theory (the opposite of Marx’s approach in Capital). She deftly outlines the main concepts of Marxist economic theory, interspersed with excellent box insets on various key issues that stand on their own as insightful explanations. The subjects in these insets include: Marx on nature; the theory of marginal utility versus Marx’s value theory; how capitalism wastes so much resources; what is a bitcoin?; capitalism as a mode of production and so on.
After the chapter on how capitalism emerged from previous human social organisations, Thier then has two chapters on the “juicy questions of where profits come from and capitalism’s particular form of exploitation”. In these, she “unpack(s) the vital concepts of capital, labor, and class society”, so that “we’ll be able to see the system’s driving tendencies of competition and accumulation”. There is no room in this review to go over in detail the narrative presented by Thier; after all, the reader can do that. But in brief, Thier covers the myth of so-called free markets and the superiority of Marx’s value theory that only labour creates value for society as opposed to the ‘vulgar economics’ of ‘utility’ and ‘scarcity’ theories of value.
She also deals with the role of money in modern economies as “a universal equivalent” of exchange of commodities. In contrast to the currently fashionable modern monetary theory that claims money is the product of the state, she argues that money “necessarily crystalizes out of the process of exchange.” (Marx). And Thier deals clearly with fiat money which has replaced gold and silver in modern economies and with rising role of digital or cryptocurrencies like bitcoin.
She points out that Marx argued that price is not the same thing as value. As Marx explained, “The values of necessaries. . . might remain the same, but a change might occur in their money prices, consequent upon a previous change in the value of money. Nothing would have changed except the money names of those values” A change in the exchange-value of a particular currency does not change the value imbued in a commodity, but it will change the price. Thus, we have the kernel of a theory of inflation.
Thier also shows how capitalists must incessantly accumulate capital (value appropriated from labour power), leading to increased concentration and centralisation of assets with a few at the expense of the many. There is a trend towards monopoly on the one hand but “capitalism still maintains its dynamism through the constant jostling for market positioning by large and small companies. In some cases, a newer business, not so deeply entrenched in outmoded methods, could come out ahead.” If this were not the case, “we would see the economy increasingly dominated by fewer and fewer companies, until one day we found ourselves with a single McGoogleAmazon.”
The concept of imperialism is also taken up by Thier. It may not have been specifically analysed in Marx’s Capital but, as Thier notes, Marx and Engels wrote: “The need of a constantly expanding market for its products chases the bourgeoisie over the whole surface of the globe. It must nestle everywhere, settle everywhere, establish connections everywhere.”
The final chapters of the book look at the contradictions embedded within capitalism: the anarchy of capitalist production along with an unceasing impulse to accumulate gives way to regular crises in production and financial markets,“which so thoroughly and grotesquely score our current economic landscape.”
She exposes the failure of mainstream economic analysis to explain these regular and recurring crises in capitalist production and investment that periodically lead to mass unemployment and loss of livelihoods globally. Mainstream economics cannot explain this because its analysis “starts and ends at the surface of the economy—price fluctuations, monetary policy, and financial markets. But Marxists argue that crises originate at the system’s core and are not imposed on the system from outside.” She points out that, although “Keynesian economists offer an explanation of crises as inherent to the system, ultimately, since Keynes did not see growth or profits as essential to the system, he assumed regulation could provide a means to reassert the harmony of capitalism.” So Keynesian policy answers have proved inadequate to stop crises.
That brings me to Thier’s own view of Marxist crisis theory and here I beg to differ. Thier warns her readers that “Marxists have differed in which aspects of Marx’s writing—falling profitability, overproduction (or in some cases, underproduction), disproportionality among branches, the role of credit—are emphasized, and how these pieces fit together.”
Thier follows Marx and Engels in rightly rejecting the most popular version: underconsumption; namely that workers cannot buy all the goods they have produced and capitalists then try to sell them, causing a slump due to a ‘lack of demand’.
Instead, Thier adopts a theory of overproduction.Here she follows closely the work of Bolshevik overproduction theorist, Pavel Maksakovsky, and that of Marxist economist Simon Clarke who wrote: “capitalists throw an increasing mass of commodities onto the market. However, this increase in production has not been motivated by a desire to meet expanding demand, but by a desire to increase the production of surplus value. This compulsion creates a tendency for capitalists to overproduce—for production to run ahead of demand, often way beyond what the market can absorb.”
Thier concludes that “the fever pitch of expansion eventually oversaturates the market. Too many goods have been produced to be able to sell at the exaggerated prices produced by the boom, or even at their value. The inflation of prices hits a point at which they threaten effective demand”, and then a slump ensues.
Thier notes that “The significance and effect of the tendency for the rate of profit to fall, and its role within a broadertheory of crisis, is the topic of long-standing and deep debates among Marxists.” But she dismisses this law that Marx outlines in three chapters of Volume 3 of Capital as a theory of crises. For her, this is a long-term theory “rather than producing regular economic crises, the tendency for the rate of profit to fall creates a long-term drag on capitalism.” Instead she follows Simon Clarke in arguing that “Marx did not identify the tendency for the rate of profit to fall as a “privileged cause for crises,” but it nevertheless “plays the role of a factor which makes crises more likely, primarily because it leads to an intensification of the competitive struggle between capitalists.” So Marx’s law of profitability is not an underlying cause of crises although it intensifies competition.
Those who follow this blog and have read my books will know that I do not agree with this interpretation of Marx’s crisis theory. In my view, Marx’s theory of crisis based on his law of profitability is both cyclical and secular. His law of profitability suggests regular and recurring crises of overproduction and slump followed by recovery for a while; but also an inexorable decline over decades (and longer) in the profitability of capital accumulation, suggesting an end to capitalism. But I leave the reader to decide.
The book’s last chapter also includes a substantive analysis of the Great Recession, the world’s previous major economic crisis. In this chapter, Thier offers a lively analysis of the causes of the biggest slump in the 21st century (until the current pandemic slump!). She explains the ins and outs of the Great Recession through the lens of the role of credit (‘greasing the wheels of capital’) and Marx’s concept of ‘fictitious capital’ (the result of credit speculation). She does not think it was “primarily a “financial” crisis (as some do argue)”. For her “the roots of the Great Recession of 2007 into 2009 run deeper than the world of banking and finance.”
Thier notes the huge rise of the financial sector over the last 50 years that eventually led to the global financial crash of 2008-9, but she correctly downplays the term ‘financialisation’ which is so prevalent among radical economists now because it assumes “a divide between the “real” economy of industrial capital, which engages in the production and selling of goods, but has little capital of its own from which to seed this activity, and of finance capital, which plays a purely facilitating role in circulation. In reality, there is no hard line between financial and non-financial firm.”
However, her explanation of the Great Recession falls back on what she calls “two crises of overproduction”: China’s overproduction making global markets “incapable of absorbing the increased output”; and rising US debt which “undergirded a global expansion of production and the realization of extraordinary profits, despite never resolving the worldwide glut of goods.”
Here we have the overproduction theory of crises again, with a whiff of Keynes. Slumps are caused by overproduction delivering a glut of goods. Profitability and profits have disappeared from the causal explanation of crises. For me, ‘overproduction’ is the expression of a capitalist crisis, but not its cause; that lies with falling profitability for capital. Instead, Thier adopts a ‘secular stagnation’ theory favoured by many Keynesians and the ‘monopoly finance’ school; namely that crises are not the product of falling profitability leading to a collapse in investment, but are caused by capitalism finding it difficult obtain “additional outlets for investment.” In other words, it’s too much investment and production rather that too little profit that causes crises. Again, I consider this is an inadequate theory of crises, and certainly not Marx’s.
Be that as it may, Thier has written an excellent introduction to Marx’s analysis of capitalism and one that can be regularly turned to in order to understand the waste, destruction and misery caused by the modern capitalist system of exploitation.
