Saturday, August 15, 2020

MARX’S PAMPHLETIST: CHARLES WENTWORTH DILKE AND HIS TRACT ON THE SOURCE AND REMEDY OF THE NATIONAL DIFFICULTIES (1821)

Giancarlo de Vivo, Contributions to Political Economy, Volume 38, Issue 1, 2019, Pages 59–73,  LINK

Abstract

This paper considers a largely unknown pamphlet, originally published anonymously in 1821, and assesses its place in the history of classical and Marxian thinking about value, surplus value and profits. It identifies its author and outlines his career and background in the context of nineteenth-century British politics.

"The pamphletist is a neglected economist—he is even absent from Seligman’s famous 1903 article "On some neglected British economists," which deals with many of his contemporaries, with the intention of rescuing them from undeserved oblivion. All in all, we can say that the pamphletist, even though not completely forgotten, has not received the attention it [sic] deserves if one accepts Marx’s claims on his behalf."

...

"We may last briefly comment on the fact that, apart from his grandson’s statement, no other grounds have been provided for assuming that Dilke was the pamphletist, and indeed this seems to be often taken with a dubitative formula when the attribution is noticed." 56


4 comments:

Anonymous said...

The reference link does not work.

Sandwichman said...

Thanks anonymous. It should work now. Apparently the "upgrade" of Blogger automatically refers typed URLs back to the edit page of the post instead of the URL and it would let me change it! So now it says "LINK" instead of https://doi.org/10.1093/cpe/bzz016

Anonymous said...

Thank you for the posts and link. Now to study them.

Anonymous said...

Exceptionally important, related article:

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/14/us/adolph-reed-controversy.html

August 14, 2020

A Black Marxist Scholar Wanted to Talk About Race. It Ignited a Fury.
The cancellation of a speech reflects an intense debate on the left: Is racism the primary problem in America today, or the outgrowth of a system that oppresses all poor people?
By Michael Powell

Adolph Reed is a son of the segregated South, a native of New Orleans who organized poor Black people and antiwar soldiers in the late 1960s and became a leading Socialist scholar at a trio of top universities.

Along the way, he acquired the conviction, controversial today, that the left is too focused on race and not enough on class. Lasting victories were achieved, he believed, when working class and poor people of all races fought shoulder to shoulder for their rights.

In late May, Professor Reed, now 73 and a professor emeritus at the University of Pennsylvania, was invited to speak to the Democratic Socialists of America’s New York City chapter. The match seemed a natural. Possessed of a barbed wit, the man who campaigned for Senator Bernie Sanders and skewered President Barack Obama as a man of “vacuous to repressive neoliberal politics” would address the D.S.A.’s largest chapter, the crucible that gave rise to Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and a new generation of leftist activism.

His chosen topic was unsparing: He planned to argue that the left’s intense focus on the disproportionate impact of the coronavirus on Black people undermined multiracial organizing, which he sees as key to health and economic justice.

Notices went up. Anger built. How could we invite a man to speak, members asked, who downplays racism in a time of plague and protest? To let him talk, the organization’s Afrosocialists and Socialists of Color Caucus stated, was “reactionary, class reductionist and at best, tone deaf.”

“We cannot be afraid to discuss race and racism because it could get mishandled by racists,” the caucus stated. “That’s cowardly and cedes power to the racial capitalists.”

Amid murmurs that opponents might crash his Zoom talk, Professor Reed and D.S.A. leaders agreed to cancel it, a striking moment as perhaps the nation’s most powerful Socialist organization rejected a Black Marxist professor’s talk because of his views on race.

“God have mercy, Adolph is the greatest democratic theorist of his generation,” said Cornel West, a Harvard professor of philosophy and a Socialist. “He has taken some very unpopular stands on identity politics, but he has a track record of a half-century. If you give up discussion, your movement moves toward narrowness.” ...