Just Things: New issue
Just Things, Vol. 2 Issue 3, is now out. Contents include:
*"Rural and community-based tourism harvests greater yields" by Felicity Butler
*Interview: Tamara Stenn of KUSIKUY
*Interview: Colleen Coy of Just Coffee
*Interview: Malia Everette of Global Exchange
*Interview: Bill Bass of Fair Indigo"
*Marx and Smith: Brothers in nature" by Marc Reichhardt
*Interview: Tamara Stenn of KUSIKUY
*Interview: Colleen Coy of Just Coffee
*Interview: Malia Everette of Global Exchange
*Interview: Bill Bass of Fair Indigo"
*Marx and Smith: Brothers in nature" by Marc Reichhardt
posted by Kevin Carson | 2:54 PM
2 Comments:
Thanks again, Kevin. I'm curious to get your thoughts on the Marx-Smith piece.
I enjoyed the piece on Smith and Marx. I disagree with a lot of the specific analysis of both writers, but Reichhardt captures one central truth very well: the classical political economy of Smith was much more radical than today's official pro-capitalist apologetic, and was much closer to its common roots with classical socialism. The classical political economists still had a theory of distribution that did not take existing "factor ownership" as natural or given. That's why Smith saw the exchange of commodities at the ratio of their embodied labor as natural, and the deviation from it as something to be explained historically by the appropriation of land and the accumulation of capital. It's very easy, reading Smith and Ricardo, to put 2 and 2 together and come up with a radical theory of explitation. Of course, as Marx said, that's precisely the reason for the rise of "vulgar political economy": the need to obscure such insights.
--Kevin Carson
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