What’s in a name?
Godwin’s law states: "As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches one. ” In my experience, a similar law applies to the words “socialist,” “communist” and “Marxist.” All three words are used interchangeably and as epithets, not descriptions of governments or economic systems. Let’s start with Marxist: “The assumption behind most political debate is that Marxist texts contain a detailed design for a “socialist” society. That assumption collapses into oblivion on contact with the actual literature. “Marx spent the overwhelming majority of his intellectual energy analyzing capitalism — how surplus value is extracted, how class relations form, how markets expand, how crises emerge from systemic contradictions. Das Kapital , all three volumes of it, is fundamentally a forensic examination of capitalism’s mechanics. Volume I alone runs to nearly 900 pages of dense analysis of the commodity form, the working da...