From: Jurriaan Bendien (adsl675281@TISCALI.NL)
Date: Thu May 25 2006 - 13:27:22 EDT
Ha Jerry you sound like a businessman. There is at the moment IMO on the supply side very little that is creative happening in this area of publishing, and very little original empirical research is being done. It's mainly just writers using old books to compile new books. As Samuel Bowles suggested, "Marxism" is in reality a largely exhausted discourse, and as Jonathan Nitzan noted, "Marxism" is inimical to Marx's own lifework, though Marx himself continues to inspire (and exhaust) many people. On the demand side, I think many people are interested in the "big picture" but vague, abstract treatises about "the political economy of globalisation" are just not very informative. The language they use is often inpenetrable as well. You cannot use them for anything, so it's mainly academics talking to other academics. As a rule, what you do with this type of question is, you look at what actually does sell well, what people do want to read and what is relevant to them. Personally I did order a book today, Christian Girschner's work on the services economy (in German), a specialist area I am interested in, but apart from that, there would be few "Marxist" books I'd buy - they mainly just recycle the old stuff in one way or another (with a few honorable exceptions). They exhibit more the love of an ancient language, than real new insight into reality. Jurriaan
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