Reviews for The U. S. economy

The average rating for The U. S. economy based on 2 reviews is 3.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2016-05-16 00:00:00 Terry Mort Harrington rethinks Marxism and Karl Marx in this book, published in the late 1970s at the end of the Cold War. In the first half of the book, he re-examines Marx and finds that pretty much no one, not even Marxists, not even Engels, correctly understood Marx. He then undertakes the task of undoing what he calls the "vulgar Marx," the Marx of stereotype and distortion. He does so quite ably, showing that Marxism is an "open" critique of all ideology, not an ideology itself; Marx did not reduce the world to the economic, and shows that economists who attack him for being a poor economist don't understand that he was never an economist but a philosopher exploring the deep presuppositions of capital. From there he goes to apply this new Marx to the economic crisis of the mid-1970s. This second half of the book contains some insights even while being rather dated, but it remains excellent on the whole. I highly recommend it for anyone actually interested in the real Marx, rather than the Marx of stereotype and breezy dismissal.

Review # 2 was written on 2012-08-22 00:00:00 Cynthia Leblanc Michael Harrington was a sharp, ecclectic and generous thinker and writer - a socialist who managed to be an activist but avoid many of the traps of a Leninist model of the vanguard party leading the struggle on behalf of the ignorant masses. This book has certainly aged, with its focus on the US crisis of the mid 1970s - but if step past those details there is a huge amount of good material here of the kind the Left needs to work with in the current time; there are, of course, nearly 40 years after the event, no answers but there are really good tools to think with in a way that avoids much of the intellectualism and sectarianism of acativist and academic Marxism. What's more, his 8 part outline of the 'Marxist Paradigm' in chapter 7 remains one of the clearest ways into understanding Marxism for newcomers.