The domestic fruits of diplomacy…Monopoly Capitalism…Blind Democracy…Antitrust Laws…The China puzzle

Rewrite History…This and That…Resemblance or Difference?

Anti-globalization Movement…Intellectual Virtues…Sentimental Education…

What difference do differences make? Knowing that…knowing how…Living in paradox…

Sending messages to a time we will not see…Once upon a time when…

When the nature of philosophy meets Marxism…

In February 1848, Marx witnessed what he called the beautiful revolution when workers and bourgeois joined to remove from power the monarchy that had returned after Napoleon's defeat; in June, when the bourgeois used the army to violently oppress workers acting to universalize liberal ideals of equality and liberty, he predicted that this revolution would radicalize workers by exposing class power...As the market has become ever more dominant in defining power structures and social relationships, the challenge presents itself in an even more pointed way: how to make a responsible left alternative understood by majority opinion...Republicans and Democrats remain within jeremiads that do elicit loss, but they simply project a dead past as the horizon of politics.

A real alternative must engage the experiences that these tired stories of a revived entrepreneurial individualism or a reborn nationalism, draw on. But it must direct people to more productive ways to conceive and act on their feelings, perceptions, and aspirations. As Machiavelli asserted, the challenge is to transform crisis into possibility. The emergent, signaled perhaps by Occupy Wall Street, must be based on recognition of loss and metaphors and stories that make possibility newly thinkable. Marx made thinkable the idea of new possibilities...But what will finally be needed, as both the old and new Marxist theories of imperialism tell us, is the development of socialist political parties capable of bringing about a radical restructuring of states on all continents so as to make them substantively democratic in ways that capitalist states can never be...Yet it is quite remarkable how widely many of the old theory’s underlying premises have continued to guide analyses of imperialism in our time. Exports and capital flows from first, Germany, then Japan, and more recently China have repeatedly been read off as constituting challenges to American hegemony...

The rise of fascism in Europe in the 1920s and 1930s forced Marxists to further develop their analysis of the middle class. Even before the First World War, industrialization had undermined the traditional petty bourgeoisie and given rise to a new strata of corporate and state functionaries. The war and postwar economic crises further destabilized the old and new middle class, which looked for salvation from economic and social forces it saw as threatening...An abstract image of equality is therefore tied to practices of democratic association. As actors project inherited idioms of protest and democracy, into public spaces and new contexts, they show how resurrection can enable a future based on terms different from those of the past...Political freedom was the renovating principle of revolution itself. Relentless, overpowering revolution must coexist with freedom that protected opposition to power…

Marxist theorists failed to give enough weight to the continuing role of pre-capitalist ruling classes in driving territorial expansion and militarism...Many academics have come to use the concept of neoliberalism to reboot Marxism...While the Tea Party is a very long way from the far-right parties in Western Europe that successfully challenge traditional conservative parties, its emergence shows the relevance of the traditional Marxist view of the middle class as a vacillating social layer that is drawn to the left by a strong workers’ movement or to the right by capital and its political representatives. Given the weakness of organized labor and the left, the Tea Party was able to count on populist resistance, at least until the Occupy movement came along. But that was too late for the Democrats in the 2010 elections...

Neo-Marxists continue to see control of the economy as the real source of power in modern society...They expand the contours of class struggle to enlarge Marx’s proletariat to include oppressed racial and ethnic groups, women, the homeless, and the poor...

Reality is material...History is the record of class conflicts for economic control...The class that controls the economy also controls the superstructure of society-the state, education, the law, media, and so forth...In the final struggle, the proletariat will triumph over the capitalists...After the overthrow of capitalism, a fair and equitable society will be created...

“A future yet to come that will witness the rise of the proletariat, the industrial worker, in a new socialist era...”

For Marx, that gap between the messy reality of culture and politics, and the rational unfolding of the revolution's impersonal logic, was a merely temporary aberration. But is it not a recurring, if not permanent, feature of modern life?