Mute Magazine / an Old Class at the New SPACE / Loren Goldner (Revisited)

Unbeknownst to me (since I hadn’t checked their site lately), as I was typing my post the other day on the Economic Doom Watch, Mute Magazine was putting together a party to celebrate the launch of their new issue, Vol 2 #6 - Living in a Bubble: Credit, debt and crisis.  I have just begun to look at the issue online, but so far it looks superbly pertinent to the E.D.W.  I’ve been reading this fine journal for a while, although I have tended to wait until I could find the hard copy at my favorite Hudson News store in Grand Central Station, so that I could read it on the 7 train or the 4 train.  But sometimes the journal isn’t always available when I’m looking for it, and I wish they were able to get better, more even distribution, even if it is accessable on the Internet.

One thing I noticed right away about this issue is that it includes an article on Fictitious Capital for Beginners by Loren Goldner.  I should mention that much of my rudimentary knowledge about the present economic crises and the dynamics related to the U.S. ownership of the world currency is informed by a class that I took a couple of years ago, taught by Loren at the New SPACE. 

I parted ways with the New SPACE at some point because I had joined their organizing committee and decided that I had neither time nor energy to deal with some of the internal politics involved, especially stuff pertaining to their disputes with other people in the NYC radical-leftist “community.”  (One big lesson I learned from that experience:  If you enjoy taking classes at an “alternative school” and want to continue doing so, you probably should avoid doing political work with them.)  But I shouldn’t digress by going any further into that stuff…

I did learn quite a bit in the classes that I took at the New SPACE, and Loren’s class was the most outstanding one.  The class actually centered on a book by Michael Hudson, Super Imperialism - The Origin and Fundamentals of U.S. World Dominance.  But it also showed connections to Marx’s Capital, especially the second and third volumes, as well as the theories of Rosa Luxemburg.  I had already read a bunch of Loren’s work and had been able to connect a lot with his interest in Luxemburg’s ideas.  So, I had approached that class with somewhat high expectations, and it did not disappoint.

In fact, that was one of the true high points in my generally scattered political education.  I only wish that I’d been able to study the stuff more thoroughly and attend all the classes (rather than rushing through some of the reading and skipping a couple of sessions for admittedly inadequate reasons).  It would be nice to have another experience like that sometime, though I see nothing similar happening right now, especially nothing that I could go to regularly with my currently even-more-bizarre schedule.  But I am looking forward to reading more of this issue of Mute Magazine.