Friday 25 April 2014

"There’s more to neoliberal hegemony than loss-leader pricing, but as ideological combatants those people know what they’re doing."

Scott McLemee at Crooked Timber tells us that Lawrence & Wishart, publishers of the Marx-Engels Collected Works, are issuing take-down notices to the Marxist Internet Archive for their translations of Marx and Engels; other translations will stay there. Writes McLemee:
Chances are the archive volunteers never contacted the press before putting the material up because they assumed, reasonably enough, that an edition prepared largely if not entirely with the support of old-fashioned, Soviet-era Moscow gold was not anybody’s private intellectual property—that the works of Marx and Engels now belong to the commons. They just want people to be able to read Marx and Engels.
...
About the time the Marxist Internet Archive announced that it would be taking down all theMECW material, Corey and I both, by coincidence, were ourselves of radically under-priced materials from the enemy’s publishing apparatus. He’d received an order containing dirt-cheap copies of Bastiat from the Liberty Fund, while a day earlier I had downloaded free digital editions of the major Austrian School books on theory of value and the socialist-calculation debate from the Mises Institute website. There’s more to neoliberal hegemony than loss-leader pricing, but as ideological combatants those people know what they’re doing.
One side of the war of ideas recognizes the value of supplying free ammunition to its allies. The other side will charge its own side for each bullet. Interesting which side's chosen which strategy. The interested reader can also find all three volumes of Das Kapital at Liberty Fund.

If you've not perused the Online Library of Liberty, or Mises.org's extensive selection, they're both well work a browse. All it will cost you is your time. 

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