Writing at the precise moment of the stock market “crash” of 1929, and the onset of the Great Depression, the philosopher and public intellectual, John Dewey declared flatly: “Economic determinism is now a fact, not a theory.” Ours is a “money culture,” he said (Dewey 119, 9), simply stating as anthropological fact what is our cultural experience. After the crash, economic determinism and therefore economic reform, if not revolution, seemed more than ever the key to the vicissitudes of modernity. It was the crash, critic Edmund Wilson noted, which made him turn to Das Kapital (Wilson 495). Kenneth Burke, at the same time, for the same reasons, found himself taking “avid notes on corporate devices whereby business enterprisers had contrived to build up empires by purely financial manipulations” (Burke 214). On the Left, Louis Zukofsky’s “Song 27” (1934) explicitly directed readers to Capital, Chapter 3, “Money or the Circulation of Commodities,” and other passages from Marx (Zukofsky 58–61). On the Right, Ezra Pound included two pages of quotes from Capital, Chapter 10, “The Working Day,” in Canto XXXIII (33/162–163).

In the summer of 1952, Ezra Pound told Guy Davenport that ‘the poet looks forward to what’s coming next in the poem’, as though the poem, not the poet, dictated the work. One way of interpreting this Delphic remark is to suppose that Pound meant pending events, whether in the poet’s head or out in the world, would determine the content of the later Cantos. Noel Stock called the late cantos ‘the diary of a mind’; therefore they inevitably comment on current events.

Ezra Pound's politics are a unique alloy of Jeffersonian populism, Chinese Confucianism, and his heterodox interpretation of fascism. Pound saw himself as a “left-wing fascist” because he was an economic determinist, but as a firm believer in the Jewish–Bolshevik conspiracy, Pound was also to the right of most Italian fascists, closer to their Nazi cousins. During his incarceration at St. Elizabeths, 1945–58, Pound reappeared as an American-style right-wing extremist. Convinced that the Supreme Court justices were communists, Pound worked through surrogates to attempt to prevent the integration of American schools and roll back the liberal judicial activism that threatened his strict constructionist and thoroughly Jeffersonian view of the US Constitution. Pound believed that a corrupt economic system meant a corrupt politics; inevitably, war, famines, and general devastation must follow; therefore economic change must precede political change.

Pound's politics evolved because his imagination was syncretic; he found meeting points between poetical, political, and economic programs that others found completely incompatible. The ideogrammic method of heaping like things together that became Pound's main poetic tactic in The Cantos is syncretic. The Cantos “rhyme” ancient Greece with ancient China, John Adams with Chinese history, Mussolini with Confucius. He thought analogically: “Mencius has gone into [Confucian] detail as…Van Buren has gone into detail from a Jeffersonian basis” (SPR, 96). His distinctive “Volitionist” economics was a marriage of Social Credit thinking with the stamp scrip mechanism of Sylvio Gesell – never mind that neither Major Douglas nor Pound's Gesellite correspondents could see any point of agreement.