MetaFilter posts tagged with Marx

304 WAYS TO SUBVERT THE BOURGEOISIE (and still feel sexy!)

elizardbits — Mon, 29 Apr 2013 13:38:20 -0800

Cosmarxpolitan! Karl in the bedroom: "From each according to his ability, to each according to her needs."

Marx's Revenge

the man of twists and turns — Wed, 27 Mar 2013 11:48:30 -0800

How Class Struggle Is Shaping The World The Next Left - An Interview with Bhaskar Sunkara

However, socialism’s reputation is making a comeback, at least among the young. If Millennials need any pointers, the avowedly socialist editorial board of Jacobin (previously) is happy to oblige.

via the man himself. Previously on MetaFilter

Work, leisure, and AI.

stinker — Tue, 26 Mar 2013 18:33:48 -0800

Rule No. 1 is tomorrow we die; and Rule No. 2 is nobody, not even the most helpful robot, can change Rule No. 1. The Barbed Gift of Leisure in The Chronicle Review looks at how robots, by replacing our need to work, can change our relationship with leisure. The problem with robots is that (1) they are scary and (2) if you don't have to do any work, your ability to enjoy your time-off dissipates. It's nothing that Veblen, Marx, and Debord didn't anticipate.

How The Left Has Won

the man of twists and turns — Wed, 13 Feb 2013 13:35:05 -0800

Or, why is there still socialism in the United States?

Why, then, would we look for evidence of socialism only where a state seized by radicals of the Left inaugurates a dictatorship of the proletariat? Or, to lower the rhetorical volume and evidentiary stakes, why would we expect to find socialism only where avowed socialists or labor parties contend for state power? We should instead assume that socialism, like capitalism, is a cross-class cultural construction, to which even the bourgeoisie has already made significant contributions – just as the proletariat has long made significant contributions to the cross-class construction we know as capitalism. What follows?

The Red and the Black

davidjmcgee — Mon, 07 Jan 2013 12:42:56 -0800

"The lofty vision of a stateless, marketless world faces obstacles that are not moral but technical, and it’s important to grasp exactly what they are." Seth Ackerman for Jacobin Magazine on "thinking concretely and practically about how we can free ourselves from social institutions that place such confining limits on the kind of society we are able to have. Because of one thing we can be certain: the present system will either be replaced or it will go on forever."

Eric Hobsbawm

Mister Bijou — Mon, 01 Oct 2012 06:44:14 -0800

British Marxist historian and lover of jazz, Eric Hobsbawm is dead: Guardian obit. His key works: Industry and Empire (1968); and the "Age of" series, which he began with The Age of Revolution: 1789-1848, first published in 1962. Followed in 1975 by The Age of Capital: 1848-1875. And in 1987, The Age of Empire: 1875-1914. A fourth volume, The Age of Extremes: 1914-91, was published in 1994. He also found time to be castaway on BBC Radio 4's Desert Island Discs (5 March 1995). Other than the music, his choice of book was a collection of Neruda's poems and his "luxury item" was a pair of binoculars. stream or download

John Lanchester on Marx

pharm — Fri, 30 Mar 2012 03:05:29 -0800

John Lanchester on Marx in the LRB.

Marx for Beginners

Jasper Friendly Bear — Sat, 28 Jan 2012 06:31:42 -0800

Marx for Beginners (running time: 7 minutes)

Objects of philanthropy and NGOs or targets of the war on terror

klue — Sat, 21 Jan 2012 20:42:03 -0800

Ayn Rand has a fantasy in Atlas Shrugged of striking ‘creative’ capitalists, a fantasy that finds its perverted realisation in today’s strikes, most of which are held by a ‘salaried bourgeoisie’ driven by fear of losing their surplus wage. These are not proletarian protests, but protests against the threat of being reduced to proletarians.

The Revolt of the Salaried Bourgeoisie in the London Review of Books.

Life After Capitalism

The Whelk — Sat, 24 Dec 2011 08:45:42 -0800

One thing we can be certain of is that capitalism will end. Maybe not soon, but probably before too long; humanity has never before managed to craft an eternal social system, after all, and capitalism is a notably more precarious and volatile order than most of those that preceded it. The question, then, is what will come next.

Robert Paul Wolff's "The Philosopher's Stone."

anotherpanacea — Thu, 08 Dec 2011 06:38:28 -0800

Robert Paul Wolff is most famous as the author of In Defense of Anarchism and as the "only person on the face of the earth who has read, cover to cover, Immanuel Kant's Inaugural Dissertation, Karl Marx's doctoral dissertation, and Newt Gingrich's doctoral dissertation." His memoir has also drawn considerable interest. But as a part of his blogging he has habitually offered "micro-tutorials" to encourage his readers to re-acquaint themselves with the classics of what might be called the Heroic Age in the study of society -- the writings of Marx, Freud, Weber, Ricardo, Mannheim, and others. His newest micro-tutorial, on Durkheim's Suicide, begins today.

This guy is trying to hypnotize me!

pmugowsky — Mon, 15 Aug 2011 11:49:46 -0800

The Face That Intimidated Groucho Marx (SLYT)

Respect Dad's harp

Paragon — Sat, 11 Sep 2010 15:31:21 -0800

Harpo's Place A tribute to Harpo Marx, by his son Bill.

Futurama Writer Saves Tiny Presidents

marxchivist — Mon, 09 Nov 2009 12:06:35 -0800

Futurama Writer Saves Tiny Presidents. Beginning in the 1950's, toymaker Louis Marx released a line of figurines of U.S. Presidents (accompanied by a model White House). Sold as sets and given away as grocery store premiums the figures are still popular collectibles today. The series ended when Richard M. Nixon was president. Patric M. Verrone, writer for Futurama and The Simpsons has carried on the tradition, using appropriate torsos from the old Marx figures and sculpting new heads, he has continued the line up to President Obama. Verrone hawks these at his web site. In addition to U.S. Presidents, he has sculpted Supreme Court Chief Justices and other historical figures including "President for a Day" David Rice Atchison. Interesting fact from the "line of figurines" link: During the 1968 election Marx made figures of not only the major party candidates (Richard Nixon and Hubert Humphrey) but some of the leading contenders, such as Nelson Rockefeller (then-governor of New York), Robert F. Kennedy (NYS Senator) and Ronald Reagan (then-governor of California). Prior to election day Marx created President-series figures of both Richard M. Nixon and Hubert H. Humphrey, hedging his bets over the winner of the election. Nowadays the Humphrey figures still frequently turn up mint in bag on eBay (as well as do most all of the Presidential figures), whereas the other 1968 candidates such as Ronald Reagan, Robert F. Kennedy and Nelson Rockefeller are somewhat harder to find (and more expensive).

Das Kapital - The Musical

Kirth Gerson — Tue, 24 Mar 2009 06:29:23 -0800

You've read the book, attended the seminars and pondered the accumulation of surplus value – now see the musical.

Ssssssssssst! Throw me a Gookie!

miss lynnster — Sat, 28 Jun 2008 17:13:06 -0800

The story behind Harpo Marx's "Gookie" face. (See 2:16.) The Animaniacs take on The Gookie. (Previously.)

Dead labour.

Abiezer — Mon, 16 Jun 2008 06:35:04 -0800

A close reading of the text of Volume One of Marx's Capital in 13 two-hour video lectures by David Harvey. (Two online so far) David Harvey is a Distinguished Professor of Anthropology at the City University of New York. He has been teaching Karl Marx's Capital, Volume I for nearly 40 years. Marx biographer Francis Wheen speaks on NPR as to why the book remains required reading.

Groucho's daughter Melinda Marx and her very brief singing career.

flapjax at midnite — Sun, 02 Mar 2008 06:21:36 -0800

The year is 1965: Groucho Marx takes the Hollywood Palace stage to introduce (in typically gag-laced fashion) the next number on the program, to be sung by none other than his 18-year-old daughter, Melinda Marx. What follows is, arguably, right up there with some of the worst songs ever written, performed by Melinda and her backup singers in some of the most excruciatingly bad choreography ever seen. But this is Groucho's daughter we're talking about here, so I just had to share it with you: The East Side of Town. Yes, there's more! Here we find Melinda in a very Phil Spector-ish production, in what appears to be another lip-synch, but pitch is kinda dodgy here and there, and she sounds terribly strained on the chorus: you have to wonder, if this was in fact a lip-synch of a commercially available recording, was someone trying to wreck her career? Well, anyway, What Can I Do? Then there's this folk-tinged number, Catch the Wind. Mercifully short! Yet another performance (again, a lip-sync) of the big hit, here announced simply as East. In all fairness to the young lady, it must be said that the material they gave her to sing was uniformly awful. Perhaps she could've gone on to some success with better songs. She was certainly very lovely, and as history has shown, mediocre singers can actually do rather well in the music biz, if everything else is played right. On the other hand, she didn't look too comfortable in these clips, and I imagine she might've just decided performing wasn't for her. Here's an IMDb page on Melinda, who also who did a couple of movies and TV spots. Finally, you can see her here as a little girl, on Groucho's famous TV show "You Bet Your Life", singing a little ditty with a very young Candace Bergen and her wisecracking daddy.

Hello. I must be going.

miss lynnster — Fri, 02 Nov 2007 00:59:19 -0800

Marx Brothers Filter:
Animal Crackers (1930), Monkey Business (1931), Horse Feathers (1932) and Duck Soup (1933). And while the full film itself wasn't on google, here's everything you ever needed to know about A Night at the Opera (1935). Previously.

Yesterday threatens to devour to-morrow.

thatwhichfalls — Fri, 12 Oct 2007 07:18:28 -0800

Karl Marx' 'Capital' in Lithographs by Hugo Gellert.
via The Early Days of a Better Nation.

Never work.

jason's_planet — Sun, 25 Jun 2006 21:08:06 -0800

Never wanna work/Always wanna play/Pleasure, pleasure every day. What happens when the jobs go away and don't return? Should we take the surpluses generated and pay people not to work? What happens to the assumption of scarcity when nanotechology allows us to generate potentially anything we want from grass clippings? Maybe Marx had it wrong all along. Maybe, instead of fetishizing work and the authoritarian mindset that it generates, we should have been reading Paul Lafargue instead. Just as a thought experiment, what would you do if your job category disappeared? How would you spend your time? Would you invest more time and energy in friendships and other relationships? Hobbies? If you were your employer, what technologies would you use to get rid of your position and save money?

"The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles."

mickeyz — Fri, 24 Feb 2006 03:57:36 -0800

On this date in 1848, The Communist Manifesto was published. Howard Zinn: "I don’t see much point in abstract theorizing or getting into arguments about Marxism, Leninism, etc. ... Theoretical analyses are useful but not crucial. There is a lot of wasted time in such endeavors, but not all is wasted. Marx’s Communist Manifesto was a theoretical analysis, immensely useful and inspiring. His first volume of Das Kapital was useful too. His second and third volumes, and his Grundrisse, were probably a waste of time!" Informal Poll: How many of you have actually read the entire Communist Manifesto? (I haven't.)

Care of Mr. Charles H. Hungadunga

yankeefog — Tue, 18 Oct 2005 13:26:17 -0800

The Society for the Prevention of Abuse towards Zeppo Marx is a grass-roots, international organization dedicated to ensuring that Zeppo Marx is remembered as the inventor, sex symbol, atomic bomb technician, dangerous street fighter, and mob-connected businessman that he was... not to mention the brilliantly subtle comedian he may have been . So, forget about that slanderous episode of Buffy, and raise a toast to the great man.

Giraffes on Horseback Salads

Joey Michaels — Thu, 16 Dec 2004 18:18:38 -0800

S. Dali + 3 Marxes. From Marx-Out-Of-Print, "a tribute to The Marx Brothers with full reproductions of books and articles from magazines and other publications that are now 'out of print' and hard to find." Dali was a huge fan of Harpo and once gave him a harp strung with barbed wire. He also wrote a script for the Marx Brothers, which was deemed "too surreal."

Chasing Karl

monju_bosatsu — Thu, 30 Oct 2003 10:16:56 -0800

Wonderful system of government. Fake democracy, fake elections, fake political system surrounded by humbug and greedy lawyers. This allows business to get on with its tasks, buying candidates, a bribe here, a bribe there. An interview with Karl Marx.