(That being said, I LOVE Adorno, don’t get me wrong.)

Anyway, it’s discouraging to see how when people DO try to put change into action (e.g.: Trotsky, Che), it ends up getting co-opted and perverted by others. Today, even Fredric Jameson can only suggest “action” in the form of mapping the conditions to understand it better.

Where are there any intellectuals in the Marxian tradition who can advocate real changes?

-He’s heavily influenced by Hegel & Co’s dialectic theory. In Hegel, history is defined by the cyclic opposition and synthesis of opposing ideas. Several of Marx’s peers at the University of Berlin believed that history had effectively reached an end, and that the ideas of Reason and Freedom had won an ultimate and inevitable victory. Marx takes a different route, and says that ideas are secondary to material conditions, and that the thing to watch is the interaction between groups of people and the material conditions of their existence.

-At the time Capital was written, Adam Smith and David Ricardo were the standing economic champs.

-Marx differs from these two in (among other things) his emphasis on intertemporal focus–he’s concerned with the progress of History with a capital H. This also has implications for his de-emphasis on economic efficiency (best allocation of resources achieved through exchange–all of the pie gets eaten, pie is as large as possible) in favor of economic equity (fairest allocation of resources–who gets to eat the slices of pie, how big are these pieces, and why).

-Mercantilism, with its emphasis on high barriers to trade, is slowly giving way to free markets as the primary economic model. Technological change and scalable manufacturing techniques are laying the groundwork for the Industrial Revolution.

-Working conditions are extremely bad by modern standards. Heavy burden of economic uncertainty is borne at the bottom of the wealth pyramid. Marx is a philosopher who believes that if you are a philosopher who finds a problem, you’d darn sure better come up with a way to fix it. You can’t just think about it, you have to Do Something.