Branko Milanovic — “We had everything before us, we had nothing before us”.

Some philosophy in the broad sense that is neither MMT nor economics-related but important owing to its contemporary relevance in determining the social, political and economic dialectic that the world is experiencing at this point in time and which is shaping the future for some time to come.

Are we in another Gramsci interregnum?

The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying but the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear. — A. Gramsci, Prison Notebooks, 3

Global Inequality
“We had everything before us, we had nothing before us”.
Branko Milanovic | Visiting Presidential Professor at City University of New York Graduate Center and senior scholar at the Luxembourg Income Study (LIS), and formerly lead economist in the World Bank's research department and senior associate at Carnegie Endowment for International Peace

A quick search on the Internet shows that, in the past few years, a spike occurred in the frequency of references to Gramsci’s famous quote about “morbid symptoms”: “The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear.”

I myself have contributed to this spike by borrowing the phrase “morbid symptoms” for the title of my 2016 book on the counterrevolutionary phase that followed the Arab Spring, and by quoting the whole sentence as epigraph to the book.

The obvious reason for this spike in uses of the quote is that it provides a clue to the emergence on the global scale, in recent years, of various phenomena that are unmistakably “morbid” from a progressive perspective: from the sad fate of the Arab Spring to the so-called Islamic State, to the reinvigoration of the European far right, to Donald Trump, and so on and so forth. However, before dwelling on the relevance of the above sentence to our present condition, it is appropriate to start by making sure that we correctly understand what Gramsci meant when he wrote it. For this, we need to reinsert the quotation in the text from which it was lifted and replace this text in its own historical context in order to grasp Gramsci’s intention, which may be different from what we instinctively attribute to him in retrospect....

ISR — International Socialist Review
Morbid Symptoms?
Gilbert Achcar

Elaine Graham-Leigh — Marxism and Human Nature

Weekend reading.

This post presents the Marxist position on human nature as socially embedded and historically determined in contrast to the the natural law position of classical liberalism that is based on individualism.

Longish, but clearly written and informative.

Counterfire
Marxism and Human Nature

Elaine Graham-Leigh

Irfan Habib — Karl Marx And His Conception Of History

Good summary of the basic Marxist world view, which Marx got essentially correct in my view. It's what we now call economic sociology/anthropology. In my view also, economic sociologists and economic anthropologists are much closer to getting it right than theoretical economists, most of whom have lost the big picture by overly limiting the scope and scale of their inquiry.

NewsClick (India)
Karl Marx And His Conception Of History

Irfan Habib

(Irfan means wisdom, gnosis in Arabic. Habib means the Beloved.)

Alastair Crooke — How the ‘Center’ Is Spinning Apart

The "center" is the Establishment and its narrative. History is going fully dialectical as opposing positions clash.

Consortium News
How the ‘Center’ Is Spinning Apart

Alastair Crooke | founder and director of the Conflicts Forum, and former British diplomat and senior figure in British intelligence and in European Union diplomacy

Dan La Botz — The Contemporary Crisis of the American Ideology

The old world order is shaking as the post-WWII Pax Americana approaches its end and the post-WWII era runs out of steam domestically and is seriously challenged politically.

It's a bit longish but extremely well done. Definitely worth a read on the weekend.

Defend Democracy
The Contemporary Crisis of the American Ideology
Dan La Botz

David F. Ruccio — Varoufakis’s Marx

This is an important post. This the clearest and best assessment of Yanis that I have seen, largely in his own words. It also explains why YV is a "pseudo-Marxist." He is a realist who understands Marx rather than a Marxist revolutionary. That is his strength or weakness, depending on one's point of view.

Relatively few realize that Marx was actually the real liberal who recognized that  human freedom is the basis of advancing civilization — as did Hegel for that matter, from whom Marx inherited the dialectic as Hegel had inherited from the ancient Greeks. But Hegel did not write on economics. 

Although even though Marx ended up writing on economics, he was chiefly a philosopher and his doctorate was in philosophy. Marx approached his work in terms of the enduring questions with a few toward creating a systematic approach to them based on the paradoxes of the human condition that develop historically — the apparent contradictions that drive and historical dialectic based on an internal logic that is actually consistent, even though it appears to be contradictory at turning points. Every question generates answers and the answers generate further questions. Now we would call this a complex adaptive system characterized by reflexivity (feedback) and emergence (innovation).

This is the basis not only of the human condition, which is "experimental" and adaptive, but also the historical dialectic that operates on the basis of exploring the range of possibilities. Like a homing device, humanity oscillates among options in his search for the target, which is distributed freedom rather than the freedom of a few.

Yanis understand this, and understand that the neoliberals are not actually liberal at all. They are not for distributed freedom but plutonomy on the back of labor.

Occasional Links & Commentary
Varoufakis’s Marx
David F. Ruccio | Professor of Economics University of Notre Dame Notre Dame