The Marxists' Achievement

I recently caught up with an old friend of mine over Skype. As is my wont, I launched on an excruciatingly long monologue about my anti-Marxist perspective on capitalism. He suggested that I read Ellen Meiksins Wood’s Origin of Capitalism. It is a definitive restatement of the new orthodoxy that began with Robert Brenner’s seminal article from 1976, “Ag…