Andrew Kliman on ‘Causes and Implications of the Economic Crisis’
Wednesday 8 July
Lucas Arms (upstairs room)
245a Grays Inn Road
St Pancras, London (Kings Cross tube)
8 to 10 pm.
Andrew Kliman is author of Reclaiming Marx’s “Capital” and a member of Marxist-Humanist Initiative. Meeting sponsored jointly by The Hobgoblin and The Commune.
Today I’m going to be discussing Marx’s theory of fictitious capital and its relation to real capital accumulation. Along the way I’m going to focus on Marx’s seldom-read analysis of a French bank known as the Credit Mobilier, in which this theory played a fundamental role. I’ll conclude with some thoughts on how this relates to socialist politics today.
This article originally appeared in May of 2008 in Marxist-Humanism Today, the online publication of the now-defunct Marxist-Humanist Committee.
“It is impossible completely to understand Marx’s Capital, and especially its first chapter, without having thoroughly studied and understood the whole of Hegel’s Logic. Consequently, half a century later none of the Marxists understood Marx!”
–V. I. Lenin, Conspectus of Hegel’s Science of Logic [1]
Marx says in his Postface to the second edition of Volume 1 of Capital [2] that his method is none other than the dialectic. It is not, however, a direct application of the Hegelian dialectic. On the contrary, Marx tells us that the dialectic in Hegel–based on the journey and self-development of the Idea, of which the world is a result or “external appearance”–is exactly the opposite of his own. With Marx we have a materialist dialectic wherein the Idea is a “reflection” of the real world rather than its creator [3]. And yet Marx also goes on to call himself a “pupil of that mighty thinker [Hegel],” and says that the “mystification which the dialectic suffers in Hegel’s hands by no means prevents him from being the first to present its general forms of motion in a comprehensive and conscious manner,” calling the “rational kernel” inherent in Hegel’s dialectic “critical and revolutionary” [4].
The video series below contains an introduction by Radhika Desai and presentations by Brendan, Andrew Kliman, and Alan Freeman.
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MHI @ the Left Forum
Join us March 20 & 21 at the Left Forum in NYC! MHI is sponsoring two panels, and we will have a literature table as well. The Left Forum will be held at Pace University in lower Manhattan. For directions and registration info, visit www.leftforum.org.
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Saturday, March 20, 12:00 pm, room W628
FALSE ALTERNATIVES TO CAPITALISM: PROUDHONISM AND ITS PROGENY
Michael Joseph Roberto, “Proudhonism, Then and Now”
Anne Jaclard, “You Can’t Change the Mode of Production with a Political Agenda”
Greg Meyerson, “Green Capitalism”
Andrew Kliman, “Not Another ‘Labor Money’ Scheme: Marx’s Lower Phase of Communism”
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Sunday, March 21, 12:00 pm, room W617
ECONOMICS & POLITICS OF THE CURRENT CRISIS: CAUSES & PROSPECTS FOR THE FUTURE
Andrew Kliman, “Roots of the Economic Crisis: The Persistent Fall in Profitability and Debt Financing”
Brendan Cooney, “Value, Crisis, and Marx's ‘Order of Operations’"
Anne Jaclard, “Do We Have an Uncoupled Economy?”
Interviews on the Economic Crisis of 2007-?
by Andrew Kliman
How long will it last? What will happen once the artificial stimulus, financed by massive borrowing against the future, ends? Four journal interviews address these questions, the immediate and long-term causes of the crisis, and “What is socialism, and what needs to be done to advance toward it?” Just published by MHI and only available in paper, this new pamphlet also includes an introduction by the author.
To order, send $4.00 by check or money order and your street and e-mail addresses to MHI, P.O. Box 414, Planetarium Station, New York, NY 10024