Hugh Hendry, 25 October 2012

Hugh Hendry at The Economist's Buttonwood Gathering on 25 October 2012:

via Naked Capitalism.

Hugh Hendry, Wikipedia.

Wolff, Capitalism Hits the Fan (2009)

Capitalism Hits the Fan - Richard Wolff


(video length: 1 hour, 45 minutes)

Note that during the Q&A session after his talk that Wolff states that he advises corporations. (I had previously observed that capitalists can learn much about how capitalism operates by listeding to marxists; this confirms that some do indeed listen.)

Orwell, Animal Farm (1945)

George Orwell.
Animal Farm: A Fairy Story.
New York: Signet Classics / The New American Library, Inc. / Times Mirror Company, no date (1970s).
First U.S. edition: New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Inc., 1946.
First edition: London: Secker & Warburg, 1945.

Some items related to Animal Farm:

While I usually provide links either for the edition of a book I've read or for the currently in-print edition, most of the books I read having only a few editions, in the case of Animal Farm there are so many editions so readily available that I will omit links to specific editions. Also, it is not clear to me which editions contain Orwell's prefaces (lacking in the Signet Classics edition).

Animal Farm, Wikipedia (many useful External links here)

Animal Farm in popular culture, Wikipedia

Orwell's Preface to Animal Farm

Animal Farm research guide, George Orwell Novels

Louis Menand, "Honest, Decent, Wrong: The Invention of George Orwell," The New Yorker, 27 January 2003. A copy of this essay is here (about three quarters of the way down the page).

Margaret Atwood, Orwell and me, The Guardian, 16 June 2003. A copy of this essay is also available here (about one third of the way down the page).

D.J. Taylor, "Another piece of the puzzle: Letters throw new light on Orwell's first wife," The Guardian, 10 December 2005. A copy of this essay is also available here. The recently found letters by Orwell's wife Eileen O'Shaughnessy indicate that her sensibility had great influence on Animal Farm.

Some George Orwell links:

George Orwell, Wikipedia

George Orwell bibliography, Wikipedia

The Orwell Prize

Orwell, George, Open Directory Project

Charles' George Orwell Links

George Orwell Novels, website subtitle: "The books, essays and letters of author George Orwell" (so, despite website name, not just about his novels; website has many of Orwell's texts)

George Orwell, The Guardian

Search for George Orwell at the London Review of Books

Terry Eagleton, Reach-Me-Down Romantic, London Review of Books, Vol. 25, No. 12, 19 June 2003. A copy of this essay is also available here (about one third of the way down the page).

A semi-organized collection of webpages with much material related to George Orwell collected by Arlindo Correia:

• George Orwell
• 10-11-2003
• 12-11-2003
• 14-11-2003
• 4=12-2003
• Sonia Orwell, 18-7-2002

Orwell Biographies and Criticism:

Tanya Agathocleous. George Orwell: Battling Big Brother. Oxford University Press USA, 2000.
http://www.amazon.com/George-Orwell-Battling-Brother-Portraits/dp/0195121856/

Gordon Bowker. George Orwell. Little, Brown Book Group, 2003.
http://www.amazon.com/George-Orwell-Gordon-Bowker/dp/0349115516/

Bernard Crick. George Orwell: A Life. Martin Secker & Warburg Ltd, 1981.
http://www.amazon.com/George-Orwell-Life-Bernard-Crick/dp/0436114518/

Christopher Hitchens. Why Orwell Matters. Basic Books, 2002.
http://www.amazon.com/Why-Orwell-Matters-Christopher-Hitchens/dp/0465030505/

Jeffrey Meyers. Orwell: Wintry Conscience of a Generation. W. W. Norton & Company, 2001
http://www.amazon.com/Orwell-Conscience-Generation-Jeffrey-Meyers/dp/0393322637/

Jeffrey Meyers. Orwell: Life and Art. University of Illinois Press, 2010.
http://www.amazon.com/Orwell-Life-Art-Jeffrey-Meyers/dp/0252077466/

John Rodden, editor. The Cambridge Companion to George Orwell. Cambridge University Press, 2007.
http://www.amazon.com/Cambridge-Companion-George-Companions-Literature/dp/0521675073/

John Rodden. The Unexamined Orwell. University of Texas Press, 2011.
http://www.amazon.com/Unexamined-Orwell-Literary-Modernism-Series/dp/0292725582/

John Rodden and John Rossi. The Cambridge Introduction to George Orwell. Cambridge University Press, 2012.
http://www.amazon.com/Cambridge-Introduction-George-Introductions-Literature/dp/052113255X/

D.J. Taylor. Orwell: The Life. Chatto & Windus, 2003.
http://www.amazon.com/Orwell-D-J-Taylor/dp/0701169192/

John Thompson. Orwell's London. Fourth Estate, 1984; Schocken, 1985.
http://www.amazon.com/Orwells-London-John-Thompson/dp/0805239650/

George Woodcock. The Crystal Spirit: A Study of George Orwell. Little, Brown, 1966; reprint Black Rose Books, 2005.
http://www.amazon.com/The-Crystal-Spirit-George-Orwell/dp/1551642689/

Several of the webpages by Arlindo Correia contain reviews of Orwell biographies.

Parramore, "An Inconvenient Truth about Lincoln," 22 Nov 2012

Lynn Parramore, "An Inconvenient Truth About Lincoln (That You Won’t Hear from Hollywood)," Naked Capitalism, 22 November 2012.

See some of the comments following the article too.

The "inconvenient truth" is that Loncoln was a lawyer for the railroads, the mega-corporations of his day. I think only people ignorant of history, or of the realities of U.S. politics then and now, would find this unexpected. I have to wonder what kind of myths and illusions the new film is promoting.

For Abraham Lincoln and Karl Marx, not an actual series of correspondence, see:
An Unfinished Revolution: Karl Marx and Abraham Lincoln. Robin Blackburn, editor. London: Verso, 2011.
[Publisher; Google Books; Amazon.com.]

Wolff, "Global Capitalism," November 2012

Global Capitalism - November 2012 - Professor Richard D. Wolff



(video length: 1 hour, 51 minutes)

Some Richard D. Wolff links:
Professor Richard D. Wolff | Economics Professor, his website
Richard D. Wolff, Wikipedia
Richard D Wolff, YouTube channel
Democracy at Work .info, website mentioned in Wolff's talk

Miscellaneous comments: Wolff presents the compelling case for keeping one's wealth/property in the form of stocks and bonds as those are the property forms least subject to taxation (as long as the powers that be can keep them from becoming a target for taxation). The Capitalist can learn much about how Capitalism operates by listening to Marxists! I often find that the Marxists' indifference to offending the sensibilities of capitalists makes Marxists clearer expositors of how a capitalist economy operates, especially in contrast to the obfuscatory work of apologists for capitalism whether economists, journalists, whoever. Wolff mentions that the suppression of criticism of the economic system in the USA contributes to weakening it, a very good point. Wolff also makes pertinent comments on the failure of the U.S. political system due to its domination by the Democratic and Republican Parties which collaborate in avoiding public discussion of economic issues.

Fusfeld, "The Rise of the Corporate State in America" (1972)

Daniel R. Fusfeld, "The Rise of the Corporate State in America," Journal of Economic Issues, Vol. 6, No. 1 (March 1972), pp. 1-22. JSTOR link.

Fusfeld's paper also appears as Chapter 8 in this collection of papers originally published in the Journal of Economic Issues:
The Economy as a System of Power, second edition, edited by Marc R. Tool and Warren J. Samuels, Transaction Publishers, 1989.
[Publisher; Google Books; Amazon.com]
(By carefully scrolling through the Preview on the Publisher's page or searching the book on Google Books one can read Fusfeld's article without an institutional JSTOR subscription.)

An earlier version of Fusfeld's paper was: "Fascist Democracy in the United States," Conference Papers, Union for Radical Political Economists, Philadelphia, December 1968; Reprint No. 2, URPE, Ann Arbor, Michigan.

My comments: I cannot recommend this article to others. The title promises far more than this short article can deliver and Fusfeld speaks in generalities, makes sweeping generalizations. I think this important topic of big business-government relations requires a more detailed historical and empirical approach, much like Fusfeld used in his longer essay "The Rise and Repression of Radical Labor in the United States 1877-1918" (my post on that essay is here, which also lists most of Fusfeld's books), an essay which I do recommend and which had motivated me to read the article currently under discussion. Further, in the 40 years since this article was published there has been a significant evolution of the big business-government relationship which deserves our attention. However, I think the lack of detail in Fusfeld's article detracts from its suitability as starting point from which the student can begin to explore and understand the subsequent evolution. I suggest one instead consider the work of Thomas Ferguson.

"Notes on the Decline of a Great Nation," 05 November 2012

Ullrich Fichtner, Hans Hoyng, Marc Hujer and Gregor Peter Schmitz, "Notes on the Decline of a Great Nation," Der Spiegel, 05 November 2012.

Hoggart, The Uses of Literacy: Aspects of Working-Class Life (1957; 2009)

Richard Hoggart.
The Uses of Literacy: Aspects of Working-Class Life.
London: Penguin Books, 2009.
Originally published by Chatto & Windus, 1957.

Book information: Publisher; Google Books; Amazon.com; Amazon.co.uk; Wikipedia.

Another edition is available from Transaction Publishers, 1998: Publisher; Google Books; Amazon.com.

Richard Hoggart (1918-2014), Wikipedia.

The Uses of Literacy is a description and discussion of English working-class culture, particularly in northern England during the 1920s through 1950s.

One can get a glimpse of the people and culture Hoggart discusses in the recent BBC series Melvyn Bragg on Class and Culture (2012) which surveys the English working class, middle class, and upper class during the 20th century.

Nicholas Wroe, Profile: Richard Hoggart, The Guardian, 06 February 2004.

Adam Curtis

His major film series:

Pandora’s Box (1992) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h3gwyHNo7MI (episode 1 of 6, page has links to following episodes)

The Living Dead: Three Films About the Power of the Past (1995) http://archive.org/details/AdamCurtis_TheLivingDead, http://thoughtmaybe.com/the-living-dead/

The Mayfair Set (1999) http://archive.org/details/AdamCurtis_TheMayfairSet

The Century of the Self (2002) http://archive.org/details/AdamCurtis-TheCenturyOfTheSelf

The Power of Nightmares: The Rise of the Politics of Fear (2003) http://topdocumentaryfilms.com/the-power-of-nightmares/

The Trap: What Happened to Our Dream of Freedom (2007) http://archive.org/details/AdamCurtis_TheTrap

All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace (2011) http://topdocumentaryfilms.com/all-watched-over-by-machines-of-loving-grace/


His blog: http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/adamcurtis/

Blustein, The Chastening: Inside the Crisis that Rocked the Global Financial System and Humbled the IMF (2001)

Paul Blustein.
The Chastening: Inside the Crisis that Rocked the Global Financial System and Humbled the IMF.
New York: PublicAffairs / Perseus Books Group, 2001; paperback reprint 2003.

Book information: Publisher, PublicAffairs; Publisher, Perseus Books Group; Google Books; Amazon.com; C-SPAN Video, 24 Sept 2001.

1997 Asian financial crisis, Wikipedia.
1998 Russian financial crisis, Wikipedia.
Long-Term Capital Management, Wikipedia.
Samba effect (Brazil 1999), Wikipedia.
International Monetary Fund, Wikipedia.
International Monetary Fund.

Blustein has also written a book on the role of the IMF in the Argentine economic crisis of 1999-2002:
And the Money Kept Rolling In (and Out): Wall Street, the IMF, and the Bankrupting of Argentina. New York: PublicAffairs / Perseus Books Group, 2005.
[Publisher; Google Books; Amazon.com.]

Argentine economic crisis (1999–2002). Wikipedia.