Sublime

Shopping may not be the most intellectual exercise on earth, but it is one of the more culturally revealing. Indeed, one of the upshots of the new era is that Karl Marx may have had it exactly backward. He argued that classes are defined by their means of production. But it could be true that, in the information age at least, classes define themsel

Dans les Temps modernes, explique ensuite le Manifeste, « de plus en plus, la société se divise en deux grands camps ennemis, en deux grandes classes qui s’affrontent directement : la bourgeoisie et le prolétariat(2) ». Leur lutte s’achèvera par la victoire du prolétariat, laquelle marquera la fin de l’histoire et l’instauration du paradis communis

The labour theory of value—i.e., the doctrine that the value of a product depends upon the labour expended upon it—which some attribute to Karl Marx and others to Ricardo, is to be found in Locke, and was suggested to him by a line of predecessors stretching back to Aquinas.

analytical definitions are the following. What I call social democracy comprises any form of socialism or Marxism that limits itself to redistribution and does not grapple with the fundamental question of value in the mode of production. Democratic socialism, by contrast, requires a fundamental and practical revaluation of the capitalist measure of

Karl Marx was wrong about a lot of things in economics, but we’re now realizing he was also right about some stuff. When you remove people’s emotional connection to their labor and treat them merely as machines that produce effort, it’s soul killing.

Kierkegaard and Marx are not only Hegel’s most trenchant critics but also his most important appropriators.

But in spite of the shortcomings of his analysis, Marx had raised some basic questions. I was deeply concerned from my early teen days about the gulf between superfluous wealth and abject poverty, and my reading of Marx made me ever more conscious of this gulf. Although modern American capitalism had greatly reduced the gap through social reforms,