A Marxist for the 21st century

Marx valued private property in the hands of truly private individuals, e.g. peasants or artisans. Capitalism inevitably wants to do away with this. I met Steven Colatrella some months ago when he commented on one of my posts here to mention that he had read Politics and War. He recognized our similarities. He is thirteen years my junior and has had a similarly checkered academic career. Born in the New York area to a working class family, he was trained as a sociologist but now seems to see himself as a political scientist. He teaches at the University of Padua in Italy. He also happens to be a baseball fan. He has done me the honor of reading several of my books, which we have corresponded about, and I decided to read one of his, a series of lectures that he gave about five years ago called Looking into the Abyss: The US and Europe Beyond Capitalism. It is a demanding, highly theoretical work, using classic Marxist texts, including Das Kapital, to try to understand what has happened…