8.1 Mill’s importance
8.1 Mill’s importance
The Mills, father and son, had a fateful impact upon the history of economic thought. If James Mill played a crucial and neglected role in developing Ricardian economics and its philosophical ally, Benthamite utilitarianism, and in foisting them upon the British intellectual world, his son John was by far the most important force in reimposing Ricardian dominance two decades after it had fallen into decline.
9. Roots of Marxism: messianic communism
9.1 Early communism
9.2 Secularized millennial communism: Mably and Morelly
9.3 The conspiracy of the Equals
9.4 The burgeoning of communism
9.5 Notes
9.1 Early communism
9.1 Early communism
For centuries the alleged ideal of communism had come to the world as a messianic and millennial creed. Various seers, notably Joachim of Fiore, had prophesied the final state of mankind as one of perfect harmony and equality, one where all things are owned in common, where there is no necessity for work or need for the division of labour. In the case of Joachim, of course, problems of production and property, indeed of scarcity in general, were ‘solved’ by man no longer possessing a physical body.
10. Marx’s vision of communism
10.1 Millennial communism
10.2 Raw communism
10.3 Higher communism and the eradication of the division of labour
10.4 Arriving at communism
10.5 Marx’s character and his path to communism
10.6 Notes
10.1 Millennial communism
10.1 Millennial communism
The key to the intricate and massive system of thought created by Karl Marx (1818–83) is at bottom a simple one: Karl Marx was a communist. A seemingly banal or trite statement set alongside Marxism’s myriad of jargon-ridden concepts in philosophy, economics, history, culture et al. Yet Marx’s devotion to communism was his crucial point, far more central than the dialectic, the class struggle, the theory of surplus value, and all the rest.
11. Alienation, unity, and the dialectic
11.1 Origins of the dialectic: creatology
11.2 Hegel and the man-God
11.3 Hegel and politics
11.4 Hegel and the Romantic Age
11.5 Marx and Left revolutionary Hegelianism
11.6 Marx as Utopian
11.7 Notes
11.1 Origins of the dialectic: creatology
11.1 Origins of the dialectic: creatology
‘Alienation’, to Marx, bears no relation to the fashionable prattle of late twentieth century Marxoid intellectuals. It did not mean a psychological feeling, of anxiety or estrangement, which could somehow be blamed on capitalism, or on cultural or sexual ‘repression’. Alienation, for Marx, was far more fundamental, more cosmic.
12. The Marxian system, I: historical materialism and the class struggle
12.1 The Marxian strategy
12.2 Historical materialism
12.3 The class struggle
12.4 The Marxian doctrine of‘ideology’
12.5 The inner contradiction in the concept of‘class’
12.6 The origin of the concept of class
12.7 The legacy of Ricardo
12.8 Ricardian socialism
12.9 Notes
12.1 The Marxian strategy
12.1 The Marxian strategy
Marx desperately sought a materialistic dialectic of history, a dialectic that would account for all basic historical change and would lead inevitably to communist revolution. Lacking a Boehmeian ‘nisus’ or mystical inner drive to serve as motor of the dialectic, Marx had to fall back on class conflict embedded in historical materialism.
13. The Marxian system, II: the economics of capitalism and its inevitable demise
13.1 The labour theory of value
13.2 Profit rates and ‘surplus value’
13.3 The ‘laws of motion’, I: the accumulation and centralization ofcapital
13.4 The ‘laws of motion’, II: the impoverishment of the workingclass
13.5 The ‘laws of motion’, III: business cycle crises
13.5.1 Underconsumptionism
13.5.2 The falling rate of profit
13.5.3 Disproportionality
