OK – maybe not quite. Alright – definitely not.
Still, as I mentioned back in October, Marx appears to be making a bit of a comeback. Marx and Engels began the Communist Manifesto with the claim that “A specter is haunting Europe – the specter of Communism.” The powers that be, they claimed, had entered into a “holy alliance to exorcise this specter.” Well, it isn’t 1848 anymore. And the establishment isn’t exactly trembling over the possibility of communist uprisings. But Marx’s analysis of capitalism won’t go away. Because it shouldn’t. It haunts us still.
And as more time passes, eventually the real words and ideas of Marx and Engels will be further liberated from the horrors of the phony Marxism of monsters like Stalin, Mao, and Pol Pot. We might then be able to take seriously the critiques of capitalism that Marx produced, without having to entertain an irrelevant debate about Stalinism (which was a murderous disaster that had nothing to do with what Marx actually wrote).
John Cassidy’s 1997 New Yorker essay “The Return of Karl Marx” was quite prescient and is well worth a read. The abstract is here. And Christopher Hitchens has a piece in the April issue of The Atlantic that mentions and develops themes introduced in Cassidy’s essay. Hitch:
As I write this, every newspaper informs me of frantic efforts by merchants to unload onto the consumer, at almost any price, the vast surplus of unsold commodities that have accumulated since the credit crisis began to take hold. The phrase crisis of over-production, which I learned so many long winters ago in “agitational” meetings, recurs to my mind. On other pages, I learn that the pride of American capitalism has seized up and begun to rust, and that automobiles may cease even to be made in Detroit as a consequence of insane speculation in worthless paper “derivatives.” Did I not once read somewhere about the bitter struggle between finance capital and industrial capital? The lines of jobless and hungry begin to lengthen, and what more potent image of those lines do we possess than that of the “reserve army” of the unemployed—capital’s finest weapon in beating down the minimum wage and increasing the hours of the working week? A disturbance in a remote corner of the world market leads to chaos and panic at the very center of the system (and these symptoms are given a multiplier effect when the pangs begin at the center itself), and John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge, doughty champions of capitalism at The Economist, admit straightforwardly in their book on the advantages of globalization that Marx, “as a prophet of the ‘universal interdependence of nations,’ as he called globalization … can still seem startlingly relevant … His description of globalization remains as sharp today as it was 150 years ago.”
I think it is safe to say that if we want to get some perspective on our current economic situation, Marx has a little more to offer than, say, CNBC. But I think we’re stuck with CNBC for now; because, as Marx himself put it, “the ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas.” Damn.