February 26: The day the Communist Manifesto was published

These are some of the most used words in The Communist Manifesto
“WordCloud” of some of the most used terms in The Communist Manifesto

26 February, 1848: Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels publish the COMMUNIST MANIFESTO, a political theory that has become one of the modern world’s most influential documents and a source of inspiration for most of our political leaders.

The Communist Manifesto changed the face of the twentieth century beyond recognition, inspiring millions to revolution became an ideological source for millions of deaths (at least 94 million people according to Werth et al. Margolin‘s The Black Book of Communism).  This book has become the basis of political systems that dominate countless lives and continues to ignite violent debate about class and mixed systems of economic and political government today.

If you have never read this book (as most of its advocates have surely not done so) I encourage you to read it and study it attentively.

communist manifesto karl marx book cover

In countries where modern civilisation has become fully developed, a new class of petty bourgeois has been formed, fluctuating between proletariat and bourgeoisie, and ever renewing itself as a supplementary part of bourgeois society. The individual members of this class, however, are being constantly hurled down into the proletariat by the action of competition, and, as modern industry develops, they even see the moment approaching when they will completely disappear as an independent section of modern society, to be replaced …” Manifesto

Table of Online Contents for the Communist Manifesto:

Preamble
I:   Bourgeois and Proletarians
II: Proletarians and Communists
III: Socialist and Communist Literature
IV: Position of the Communists in Relation to the Various Existing Opposition Parties

Other Free Versions for Download: AudioWordepubprcPDF, Kindle.

Occupy the Mind with Economics

Video: Occupy Wall Street & Capitalism: A Professor’s Response

Karl Marx was an intellectual radical.  What that means is that he sought to get at the root cause of social ills with his analysis.  Despite my extreme disagreement with Marx on his diagnosis, I have always been attracted to intellectual radicalism.  Not the fashionable radical chic of rock stars, etc., but the nerdy radicalism of scholars and public intellectuals.  Not a radicalism evident where the cool-kids party while skipping school, but a radicalism born in the library and in reading dusty old books and studying long and hard to try and figure things out.  Think hard, read widely, think even harder, then attempt to write clearly — that is the intellectual radicalism that I find exciting.”

Continue reading via: Occupy the Mind with Economics

Article: The Global Reserve Army of Labor and the New Imperialism

Loyalist Arms Factory
Image by Burns Library, Boston College via Flickr

I managed to read this article while having coffee today in a exquisite café in front of the Palace Museum in Weimar. It was very hard to try understanding the author’s ideas while he refuses to accept that the value of a product is the result of an objective theory of valuation done by the consumers and sellers in specific contexts. He gives for granted that labor force is the one deterministic condition behind production and trying to get his point seems quite difficult at points. Nonetheless, this is a great opportunity to understand the mainstream ideas of Karl Marx theories in regard to Globalization and what some of them call “Global Capitalism / New Imperialism”. Here’s the intro and then a link to the article via EbscoHost,

The article discusses the ways in which the growth of the global capitalist labor force has altered the imperialistic nature of global capitalism, as represented by powerful multinational corporations, by negatively affecting wages in both developing and wealthy countries. The authors rely heavily on philosopher Karl Marx’s theories on the industrial reserve army and capital accumulation, which posit that wealth accumulation will invariably lead to increased suffering for the working masses. They go on to explain the exploitative nature of global labor arbitrage, which essentially means a corporation’s benefiting from low wages in developing countries. The process of arbitrage is related to the development of massive global supply chains.
Read more: The Global Reserve Army of Labor and the New Imperialism. (AN 66933797) Academic Search Complete. FOSTER, JOHN BELLAMY; McCHESNEY, ROBERT W.; JONNA, R. JAMILMonthly Review: An Independent Socialist Magazine; 11/01/2011