Abstract
Below, I reconstruct as accurately as possible a remarkable conversation I happened to have while walking with my dog today on Hampstead Heath. Barrington (my dog) is a sweet but strong-willed terrier, prone to pursuing his own inclinations. This afternoon, we were taking advantage of a rare break in the clouds, following one of the Heath’s many improvised paths when Bear (as he is affectionately known) suddenly broke away, dashing through a hedgerow and barking with great animation. Giving chase, and incurring some minor scratches on the way, I was relieved upon emerging from the brush into a small clearing to find Bear retrieving a tennis ball thrown by a girl of around ten, much to her delight and that of her two younger sisters. Near where the girls were playing, a middle-aged man with a heavy beard sat on a blanket, surrounded by the remains of a picnic and several newspapers. I apologized for Bear’s poor behaviour, and was trying to bring him to heel when the man put down the volume from which he had been reading aloud (Shakespeare if I’m not mistaken) and addressed himself to me.
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Notes
For Marx’s interest in America, see: Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Letters to Americans, 1848–1895: A Selection Leonard Mins, trans., (New York: International Publishers, 1953)
Robin Blackburn, An Unfi nished Revolution: Karl Marx and Abraham Lincoln (London: Verso, 2011).
For Marx’s thoughts on moving to the United States, see: Jonathan Sperber, Karl Marx: A Nineteenth-Century Life (New York: W.W. Norton, 2013), 185–6, 258–60.
David Leonhardt, ‘The Great Wage Slowdown of the 21st Century’, The New York Times, 7 October 2014, A3;
Thomas Pikketty and Emmanuel Saez, ‘Income Inequality in the United States, 1913–1998’, Quarterly Journal of Economics, vol. 118, no. 1 (February 2003), 1–39; Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman, ‘Wealth Inequality in the United States Since 1913: Evidence from Capitalized Income Tax Data’, NBER Working Paper 20625 (October 2014).
For an account of the financial crisis of 2007–8 by reference to Marx’s comments on the ‘law of the tendency of the rate of profit to fall’ see Andrew Kliman, The Failure of Capitalist Production: Underlying Causes of the Great Recession (London: Pluto Press, 2011). For a modified version of the argument, written before the crisis, which emphasizes the effects of globalization on declining profitability,
see Robert Brenner, The Economics of Global Turbulence (London: Verso, 2006). For critiques, see also: Nicholas Crafts, ‘Profits of Doom?’, New Left Review, no. 54 (November–December 2008), 49–60; Michael Heinrich, ‘Crisis Theory, the Law of the Tendency of the Profit Rate to Fall, and Marx’s Studies in the 1870s’, Monthly Review, vol. 64, no. 11 (April 2013), http://monthlyreview.org/2013/04/01/crisis-theory-the-law-of-the-tendency-of-the-profit-rate-to-fall-and-marxs-studies-in-the-1870s/; and David Harvey, ‘Crisis Theory and the Falling Rate of Profit’, unpublished manuscript (2014).
Davis, Prisoners of the American Dream, 16–50; David R. Roediger, The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class (London: Verso, 1991).
John Roemer, Woojin Lee, and Karine Van der Straeten, Racism, Xenophobia, and Redistribution: Multi-Issue Politics in Advanced Democracies (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007).
See José María Aricó, Marx y América Latina (Mexico City: Alianza Editorial Mexicana, 1982).
Theotonio Dos Santos, Imperialismo y Dependencia (Mexico City: Editorial Era, 1978)
John Toye and Richard Toye, ‘The Origins and Interpretation of the Prebisch-Singer Thesis’, History of Political Economy, vol. 35, no. 3 (2003), 437–67
Immanuel Wallerstein, World-Systems Analysis: An Introduction (Durham: Duke University Press, 2004).
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Simon, J. (2016). A Conversation with Karl Marx (1818–1883) on Why There Is No Socialism in the United States. In: Lebow, R.N., Schouten, P., Suganami, H. (eds) The Return of the Theorists. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137516459_17
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137516459_17
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