Tuesday, August 3, 2010

Marxian poetry

 Apparently this poem, entitled  which had been signed "-One of the Know-Nothings", is from The Poor Man's Guardian (London, 1831):

Wages should form the price of goods;
   Yes, wages should be all,
Then we who work to make the goods,
   Should justly have them all;
But if their price be made of rent,
   Tithes, taxes, profits all,
Then we who work to make the goods,
   Shall have--just none at all.

4 comments:

  1. marx himself wrote some poems, very early in his life.

    http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1837-pre/marx/1836-jen.htm

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  2. lovely! thank you... i thought this poem was particularly interesting though, because it was written well before das kapital, so I guess it really isn't "marxian"... more like "ricardian-socialist" or soemthing

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  3. right :) it is all very early-Marx. i guess engels wrote a novel, dickensenian in nature, but i've never even read it. nor do i know when he wrote it. i went to the rethinking marxism conference last year and there was a panel on "the poetics of marx" -- it's where i learned about this stuff.

    thanks for the econ conversation link, surprisingly i'd never seen that...

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  4. sorry, dickens-esque is probably better (?). a realist novel about industrialist britain written in the late nineteenth century.

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