Marx: GOD and Credit

 At the moment, Marxism seems better prepared to interpret the world than to change it.

                                    --Benjamin Kunkel

That quote is from the closing sentences of an article in the February 2011 London Review of Books.  The article itself – “How Much is Too Much?” – ostensibly reviews David Harvey’s effort in his 2010 work The Enigma of Capital: and the Crises of Capitalism [no, I don’t know why there is a colon in that title] to consider the world’s current economic situation through the lens of Marxian crisis theory.  However, most of its length is devoted to explaining what “Marxian crisis theory” actually is and to describing the gloss that Harvey put on this theory in his earlier work from the 1980s, The Limits to Capital.

I came across the LRB article about a month ago, read it, was highly intrigued by it, but realized that I didn’t actually understand it.  So I printed it out, put it aside, and waited until this weekend to re-read it.  I think I have a better handle on it now, but reading the thing does underscore how woefully little I know about Karl Marx’s critique of capitalism.  It doesn’t help – judging solely from Kunkel’s review and some of the passages he quotes – that the critique does not seem to be easily penetrable. 

In any event, while there is a great deal in the article to pique one’s interest, I cannot claim to really be on any kind of sure footing when I discuss (as I do below) some of the ideas I found particularly interesting.  I suspect that what I really need is a very dumbed-down introduction to this stuff, something like Marxian Economic Theory for Dummies.  (I looked for it; it doesn’t seem to be in print.)

Anyway . . . here goes.

Randian Republicans: God IS the Free Market

I saw an article yesterday that may help me to understand something about which I've been puzzled for years:  how it is so-called "Randian Republicans" (like Rand and Ron Paul, Paul Ryan, etc.) can simultaneously embrace Ayn Rand and profess to be faith-based, dyed-in-the-wool Christians.  Ayn Rand certainly made no bones about her disdain for all religion, and explicitly declared that "her followers had to choose between Jesus and her teachings."  The American Values Network is now trying to make this a wedge issue for the GOP.

But a recent study by Baylor University sheds an interesting light on this issue.

Hell: Perspective and Eternity

Well, I'm a bit late getting to this topic, but it is one I have spent some time thinking about and it was discussed a bit over last Easter Weekend, so I thought I'd spend a little time opining. On the episode that aired Friday before Easter, Chris Matthew's Hardball apparently convened a roundtable to discuss whether or not "Hell" exists. As Digby pointed out over at her blog, this is an extremely silly topic for a "news program" to spend time debating, but there you are.

Then, on Easter Sunday, The New York Times ran a column by Ross Douthat arguing - as I understood it -- not only that Hell exists, but that Hell must exist because if there were no possibility of error, no potential for humans to be punished for making the wrong choices, then human endeavor would have less meaning: "If there's no possibility of saying no to Paradise then none of our no's have any real meaning either. They're like home runs or strikeouts in a children's game where nobody's keeping score."

This type of reasoning underscores how difficult it is for us humans to tell ourselves narratives that are not inherently solipsistic. We have virtually no capacity to view Life, the Universe, or Anything other than on our limited scale, and that leads to some pretty skewed thinking.