THE GREAT UNRAVELING: Losing Our Way in the New Century, by Paul Krugman. Norton, 426 pp. 

It has become almost impossible to discuss contemporary American politics in Marxist terms that are simpleminded enough to describe the reality at hand. We prefer to think that, to understand the world around us, subtle concepts are required. Yet it seems that we are, in fact, living in a crude and fairly stupid Daily Worker cartoon, circa 1930.

The state really is the executive committee of the ruling class. What the big capitalists want, the big capitalists get-seldom having to ask twice. The mass media consist of hired lackeys who churn out propaganda, advertisements and the occasional wrenching spectacle involving scandal and mayhem -orchestrated to distract the public from naked displays of imperialist aggression. On vacation, the bourgeoisie retire to their country houses, where, dressed in top hats, they hunt and kill peasants for sport.

Okay, so I exaggerate. Nobody wears a top hat anymore. Be that as it may, the agenda for public discussion has come fully under the control of unreconstructed and unapologetic partisans of social Darwinism, to a degree that the robber barons of a hundred years ago might have envied. The political culture has, over the past quarter century, moved decisively to the right. (If you doubt this, watch Ann Coulter ontelevision and ponder how it is she gets airtime rather than electroconvulsive therapy.) Which means, in turn, that what was once the middle of the road now looks like Bolshevism -- and even begins to sound a little like it.

Take Paul Krugman, for instance: an economics professor for whom the proper role of the state in market society is to serve as "a big insurance company that also happens to have an army." He is, at heart, a centrist. If I ever get around to printing up some bumper stickers that say "Tax the Rich to Death," Krugman isn't going to buy one.

And yet Krugman's columns for The New York Times from the past three years -- spanning Bush's campaign for presidency, his failure to win that election and his early years in office -- have, at times, that tone of choking bitterness and shaking rage one associates with communiques from the Symbionese Liberation Army. "Was the presidential candidate of a major political party really lying, blatantly, about the contents of his own program?" he asks. "Were the media really letting him get away with it? He was, and they were."

Such is, of course, the gist of many a citizen's grumblings while watching the evening news. If you concur, "The Great Unraveling" will provide the vicarious thrill of taunting the shaved-ape pundits who run the Fox News Channel. And if not, you will mutter back that Krugman is a hard-core leftist demagogue. Which is just not true. Krugman possesses a touching faith in capitalism's ability to foster the pursuit of happiness, provided its rough edges are polished a bit by the state.

But the columns gathered in this volume are decidedly more jagged than anything in Krugman's previous books. For most of the 1990s, Krugman wrote longish "think pieces" for magazines and online publications, later collected in books such as The Accidental Theorist and The Return of Depression Economics. His forte was using current affairs as a way to discuss, in popularized terms, the concepts used by professional economists.

The pieces could be acerbic: Krugman assumed that politicians, journalists and the punditocracy were economically illiterate until proven otherwise. But such raps to the knuckles were in the interest of pedagogy. Krugman believes in what he likes to call "textbook economics." He might jokingly cite Thomas Carlyle's description of his field as "the dismal science," but his basic assumption is that economists have established a body of knowledge about how markets (and public policies) operate. Hence, certain schools of thought are the equivalent of pseudoscience.

"Supply-side" economics would be a prime example. That massive tax cuts favoring the wealthy will spur investment seems perfectly obvious. So is the fact that the Earth is flat and orbited by the sun, which is the size of a grapefruit. (And yet, curiously enough, it is not so.)

Debunking such nostrums formed only one part of Krugman's essayistic beat in the late '90s. Mostly, he focused on the collapse of the once-robust Japanese economy, as well as the dubious "new economy" theories that predicted the Dow would continue on an uninterrupted march to 36,000 and beyond.

While a few articles from that period are included in The Great Unraveling, the bulk of it is drawn from his op-ed columns for the Times, which began appearing in January 2000. That was just after the predicted Y2K meltdown failed to materialize, and just before various other catastrophes did.

By contrast with Krugman's earlier essays, the Times pieces are shorter, more frequent and more topical. With a newspaper column, making a point often means hitting a target. Krugman says he began with the expectation of writing about "the vagaries of the new economy, the impacts of globalization and bad policies in other countries." But the emphasis soon came to be the corporate practice of " 'aggressive accounting,' the art form formerly known as fraud" -- and its less manifestly criminal and more overtly ideological variants, as practiced by politicians.

"These days I often find myself accused of being a knee-jerk liberal, even a socialist," he writes in the preface (clearly unhappy at this). "If I have ended up more often than not writing pieces that attack the right wing, it's because the right wing now rules-and rules badly. It's not just that the policies are bad and irresponsible; our leaders lie about what they are up to."

The right practices "a form of class warfare," Krugman says, "driven not by attempts of the poor to soak the rich, but by the efforts of an economic elite to expand its privileges." Despite "flirting with moderation in the weeks following the terrorist attack," the administration is in thrall to a fanatical agenda.

The goal is "a country that basically has no social safety net at home, which relies mainly on military force to enforce its will abroad, in which schools don't teach evolution but do teach religion and -- possibly -- in which elections are only a formality."

Well, sure. But this is not a late-breaking development. In fact, the case can be made that the right has risen to power not as an anomaly within an otherwise fundamentally OK system, but as the most logical consequence of capitalism's own inner logic. Such an argument is not going to be made on a regular basis in the op-ed columns of the Times. But that's how things look from this corner of the Daily Worker cartoon.