Thursday, November 29, 2007

Marx in America

I'm glad that Mark Thoma picked this up because I heard this on NPR in the car yesterday and wanted to add to it:

It's a conversation with Francis Wheen, who has just written a "biography" of Karl Marx's "Das Kapital" -- the book, not the author. One of the things Wheen notes about Kapital is that it is not just a dense economic text book, but also a comedy, a tragedy, and a horror story and a satire ...

One thing that you could add to that list is that Kapital is also a soap opera/trashy romance novel. There's a lot of "intercourse" that goes on in the book -- intercourse, of course, being one of the phrases Marx uses for commerce. This was his tongue-in-cheek way of suggesting that someone always gets screwed under in capitalism.

Maybe that also makes Kapital a gross-out teenage sex comedy too?

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