The current state of the Reading Group Series voting
Yo Patrons,
The runners and riders and positions of the poll is currently:
1. EO Wright - Understand Class, with 14 votes
2. The 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte - Karl Marx, with 8 votes
3. Critique of the Gotha Program - Karl Marx, with 7 votes
4. The Law of Accumulation - Henryk Grossman, with 6 votes
EO Wright is currently well out in front.
It should be noted that you can vote for multiple titles - so if you can vote in a highly strategic manner.
As of today, only 29 people have voted from the 66 patrons. So its all to play for. God knows its possible one of the candidates will produce a gaff and be thrown out of the race.
Commandante Alpha
Comments (3)
I maintain my preference for "Understanding Class" but I was wondering if you or perhaps others as a Emancipation Network collab had any interest in Anwar Shaikh's "Capital: Competition, Conflict, Crises" as a topic for a discussion series as a work that attempts to take classical political economy, and Marxism in particular, and give it a more complete expression given modern access to data collection and tools of analysis. The reason I think this is an interesting and important topic is because from my lay understanding of both Marxism and history the predominant expressions of the Marxist tradition in practical movements have happened in the shadow of an incomplete expression of Marx's work on capitalist political economy and as such have been potentially hampered in their attempts to put into practice institutions and policies that effectively and competently move beyond it. I'm interested whether folks think this is a worthwhile text, and if so, whether it is a feasible text to cover in a format you're capable of producing.
People have expressed an interest in doing this book, both listeners and panelists. It is a monster however and we would take about 5 years to probably go through it all. We will probably do some relevant parts of it in the reasonably near future. The TSSI series we dealt with some of the empirical claims of Shaikh about the labour theory of value. Indeed, we will be discussing it in the next episode or two with Kliman. Lexi and myself have some detailed plans on this stuff in particular. Hopefully we should be able to explain the problems with Shaikh's empirical work in detail.
I propose a two-choice referendum on whether to read The Hungry Caterpillar from a pre-neo-Marxist or post-post-Bukakkean perspective.