Radical Notes

Rick Kuhn's Henryk Grossman and the Recovery of Marxism (University of Illinois Press/Amazon) is not just another biographical sketch of a Marxian economist. In fact, it is an authoritative attempt to understand and interpret Grossman's contributions to the Marxist critique of political economy as realizations of his lifelong commitment to the working class and revolutionary politics. The book begins with a comprehensive and lucid survey of Grossman's political activism at the turn of the twentieth century, when capitalist expansion, intensification and competition were increasingly met with a rise in the self-activity and organization of the working class against exploitation and national oppression. The biography shows how Grossman's approach to Marxism and his theoretical agenda congealed against this backdrop. This entirely new approach to Grossman's Marxism makes his complex theoretical insights equally accessible to political economists, activists and non-academic audience. The following discussion with Rick Kuhn touches upon some of the themes in Grossman's life and work detailed in the book.

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Radical Notes

The importance of Vijay Prashad's book, The Darker Nations: A People's History of the Third World, lies in its ability to trace the trajectory of the "Third World Project" - its genesis, growth and crisis - amidst the cacophonous range of local political economic structures and their varied articulation with global capitalism and the metropolitan world. The book shows us that beyond the simplistic orientalist image of the Global South as just being on the receiving end and reactive, there has existed definite protagonism with all its contradictions grounded in the peoples' struggle against domination, oppression and exploitation. The following discussion with the author of The Darker Nations is an attempt to retrieve some of the salient insights in this formidable work.

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Radical Notes 

Michael Lebowitz's Build it Now: Socialism for the Twenty-First Century is not just another book about the specificities of the Bolivarian Revolution. Like the Communist Manifesto, its purpose is to identify the participants in the ongoing class struggle - the fundamental struggle between the needs of capital and the needs of human beings - underlying contemporary capitalism and its crisis, exposing the contours of their practices. It refreshes the classical Marxist notion of a continuous and uninterrupted revolution of radical needs as practice of the working class, as its struggle for self-emancipation.

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Pratyush Chandra

"Criticism - the most keen, ruthless and uncompromising criticism - should be directed, not against parliamentarianism or parliamentary activities, but against those leaders who are unable - and still more against those who are unwilling - to utilise parliamentary elections and the parliamentary rostrum in a revolutionary and communist manner. Only such criticism-combined, of course, with the dismissal of incapable leaders and their replacement by capable ones-will constitute useful and fruitful revolutionary work that will simultaneously train the "leaders" to be worthy of the working class and of all working people, and train the masses to be able properly to understand the political situation and the often very complicated and intricate tasks that spring from that situation." (V.I. Lenin, Left-Wing Communism: an Infantile Disorder, Chapter 7)

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The need to go beyond capital

Pratyush Chandra
Dipankar Basu

Recent events in Singur - a town which is less than 40 kms away from Kolkata (Calcutta), where the West Bengal government is struggling to acquire and sell 1000 acres of agricultural land to Tata Motors - indicate the extent to which capitalist-parliamentarianism can regiment a counter-hegemonic force once it agrees to play by the rules. At the least, it clearly shows that the Communist government, which boasts of being the longest-running democratically elected Marxist government in the world, is hopelessly caught in the neoliberal project. And Singur is not an isolated event. In the state of West Bengal alone, the process of state-led land grab and the resultant opposition is already gaining momentum in at least three different locations: (a) in Kharagpur, West Medinipur district, where vast tracts of multi-crop farmland is being taken over for yet another Tata vehicle factory; (b) in Nandigram, East Medinipur district, where a chemical industries hub is proposed to be set up by the Salim group on a 10,000-acre area; and (c) in North Bengal where a Videocon Special Economic Zone (SEZ) is proposed to come up in the near future.

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DeLong on "Adam's Fallacy"

Dipankar Basu

Imagine for a moment that you are a student of mathematics; imagine further that you have just proved an important and non-trivial theorem. Having established the theorem, you then try to illustrate the result through several examples. This is not very uncommon in mathematics, as anybody working in that discipline will tell you. Now imagine someone reading through your work and discovering some mistake in one of your examples. Having made this brilliant discovery, this person then proceeds to pompously announce to the world that your theorem is false! That, in a nutshell, is my impression of macro-economist, economic historian and commentator J. Bradford DeLong's comments on Duncan Foley's recent book "Adam's Fallacy: A Guide to Economic Theology".(1) As it turns out, even that impression is only half correct; the example, in this case, seems to have no mistakes and certainly not the mistakes that DeLong makes his case on. As I will argue below, most of DeLong's criticism of the example are baseless; some of them rest on misreadings, and some on what I call "imputation"; some of his claims are supported by quoting passages out of context or quoting them only partially. 

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Solow on "Adam's Fallacy"

Dipankar Basu

Soon after its publication by the Harvard University Press (1), well-known economist and Nobel laureate Robert Solow reviewed "Adam's Fallacy" for the New York Review of Books ("How to Understand the Economy", Robert M. Solow, Nov. 16, 2006). It is difficult to read through the review and escape the conclusion that Solow's main purpose was to write a tirade against the labour theory of value rather than to review the book by Foley. For instance, Solow never even attempts to indicate, let alone summarize, the main argument of the book; if all one did was to read the review by Solow, the reader would have to come away without even knowing what it is that Foley refers to as "Adam's fallacy". This is strange because Foley introduces the reader to what he means by this important phrase right in the preface, even before the main text of the book begins.

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