We Used to Read Things in This Country | Noah McCormack

MARXIST BROS HAVE LONG BEEN INTERESTED in the financial press. Karl Marx first turned to The Economist to help understand the failure of the revolutions of 1848, and in The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, he directed readers to that “organ” of the “aristocracy of finance” to understand what liberalism was up to. The mid-century American cartoonist Don Wright featured in one sketch a supposed Moscow newsstand selling three papers: Pravda, Izvestia, and the Wall Street Journal. This tendency went into something of an eclipse in America as the Red Scare suppressed Marxism and the New Left and the cultural turn pointed attention elsewhere. But as interest in historical materialism surged after the global financial crisis of 2008, the left rediscovered the financial press as they searched for the rational kernel within the mystical shell. At first, the Financial Times was the center of attention. As Amber A’Lee Frost wrote in the Columbia Journalism Review, the FT “covers the world

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